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It’s dead and they’re replacing it with an AI-first browser. Gross.
If you want the main things Arc gives you (vertical tabs, tab groups), you can get them with Firefox or a Firefox spinoff like Librewolf.
Zen browser is basically FireFox made to look like Arc
Zen made sense until Firefox rolled out vertical tabs, but there’s little reason to endure all the growing pains and bugs now you can set up basically the exact same thing directly on FF.
I… Think Zen offers a bit more than just vertical tabs over Firefox.
Plus, the vertical bar looks really fat compared to the top bar on Firefox, for no reason.
Yes, I am fat-shaming the vertical bar. It has no right to be that fat compared to the rest of the UI.
Hah. Well, that and a good fullscreen browser for OLED displays were my main motivations. Both of those are addressed by FF now.
Also, the vertical bar can be set to whatever width you want on both, I think. On FF (which is what I’m typing this in, so I can check) you can shrink it down so it only displays a single row of icons.
The idea is to hide it altogether when you’re not using it, in any case, but you can definitely make it as skinny or skinnier than tthe top bar.
you can shrink it down so it only displays a single row of icons.
I’m aware of this, but even that single row of icons is very fat compared to the rest of the bars that exist on the browser (e.g. the window bar, the bookmarks bar, the search bar, etc). It just looks out of place.
You made me count, because I could have sworn it was thinner than the top bar, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. On a 4K display the single-icon vertical tabs on Firefox are 75 pixels wide. The horizontal tabs bar is a sliver narrower, at 65 pixels tall. Of course that stacks on top of the address bar, which itself is 60 pixels tall, so you end up with 125 pixels of top bar.
I don’t know if I could notice the 10 px difference between the two, given that they’re in different orientations and 10 pixels is 0.5% of the horizontal pixel count and 0.3% of the vertical, but human perception is weird. Like I said, I keep the bar much wider to read the titles and just… hide it when I’m not tabbing, so it’s not an issue at all for me. Although I’ll say that even with the wide sidebar deployed you get a pretty comfy square-ish space to work with that turns a 16:9 display to 16:10 in a satisfying way. And on ultrawide 21:9 it’s a no-brainer, just like having a side-aligned taskbar (hear that, Windows 11?).
I should add that none of that changes that Firefox is… quite ugly in general. Zen is definitely sleeker at a glance, regardless of your setup.
Haha, it’s funny that you went that far. I think the reason why I notice it and you don’t, is the 4k factor. My screen is 1920x1200 iirc.
Zen also attempts to remove the telemetry that firefox has baked in.
But Zen also has features other than just vertical tabs that are really useful, like Glance.
I really like the split view in Zen. I wish it supported drag and dropping links across pages but it’s still handy.
Firefox vertical tabs are lackluster though, you don’t have pinned and essential tabs on FF, and you also miss out on Glance (the pop out link feature), basically the main features it copied from Arc. Honestly it’s been very stable for me, and it’s matured enough that I’d recommend giving it another shot.
You absolutely do have pinned tabs on FF. They go double column when you shrink down the sidebar, too, which I like. And they work with tab groups. Can’t believe those took so long to steal from Chrome. Did support for groups get integrated into Zen as well? That’s probably my line in the sand these days.
I was interested in the Glance concept, but I did not love the implementation. It was hard to tell when you were inside a Glance tab and I ended up struggling to deploy those into a persistent tab if I wanted to keep them for later. The idea was intriguing, but I never clicked with the details of the UX. It always took a little bit more thinking to work around than just… right clicking into new tab, I guess.
The pinned tabs are closer to the essentials though that’s the thing, it lacks that 2 layer separation based on purpose.
Wdym hard to tell you’re in a glance tab? It’s an overlayed smaller box, and the tab that has it open also gets an icon. Plus you never go into it accidentally, unless you’re clicking on a link in an essential tab it’s going to be manually entered.
It’s been a while and I forget the details of exactly what flow or set of steps led to me impotently clicking on things that were unresponsive because a Glance popup was on. I remember being annoyed by it relatively frequently. The memory I have of it was that Glance was cool to have going into it, but almost always frustrating to have to close again.
To be clear, I have no horse in this race. I encourage people to try Zen and Firefox and pick either of them over any of the Chromium hordes. I’m just explaining why I went into Zen, used it primarily for a while, side-by-side with Firefox when vertical tabs came in and then phased it out because FF was a better fit for me. There is no us vs them here at all.
Zen is a lot more than just vertical tabs. And I have never run into any “pains and bugs”.
Same. I’ve been using it daily for the best part of a year and it’s been pretty pleasant to use throughout.
Really? Huh. I only stuck with it as a daily driver for maybe a couple of months just before FF rolled out vertical tabs, but it was quite rough for me.
Why do people want vertical tabs? It feels as if it just takes up more space, and my muscle memory after all these years makes me move to the top. I always go back to horizontal tabs after using vertical tabs for a day.
Because web content is increasingly mobile and vertical-oriented. So the horizontal space is usually empty anyway.
Sometimes new things take time to get used to but if you try it for more than a single day you may find that you like it.
Makes sense. The sites I am using most probably have not adopted the new style yet. And like I said, the hardest part is the muscle memory of looking at the top for my tabs and moving my mouse to the top to select a tab.
because when you have more than 8 tabs open on a horizontal tab row, the tab handles start to become narrower and tab titles become unreadable and almost useless. with vertical tabs tab titles can be as long as you see fit, and the tab title does not take away space from other tab handles so more can fit. essentially its more space efficient I think.
but I don’t use it because my firefox theme breaks down when I set up vertical tabs, and everything will be white, even though I don’t even use userchrome customizations
I prefer the overview I get with them. I’m on an ultrawide monitor so it’s not like I’m sacrificing horizontal space either.
Yeah, on a widescreen or 4K, I can see the appeal.
i would like to move from zen to firefox, but as of right now i’m somewhat unhappy with the vertical tabs in firefox. i’ll keep an eye on them though and make the switch once they got some more features (like only appearing when mousing to the left edge of the window and staying entirely hidden otherwise)
You should try the Shimmer userchrome tweaks along with the Sideberry extension. With both of them it’s even better than Zen IMO.
thanks a lot, i’ll check them out!
You can set them up so they only deploy when tapping the sidebar icon and stay hidden otherwise, which is my compromise for that. I thought it’d take me longer to adapt to that when moving back from Zen, but since the top bar does deploy on proximity when using fullscreen I find it’s pretty intuitive to deploy and hide them both on mouse and touch, and I have to admit that not having them deploy accidentally when hidden is actually nice.
I do like the vertical tab pins better on Firefox, and with the new tab grouping being supported on vertical tabs I am quite happy with the setup. It takes longer to set up the way I want it compared to Zen, but honestly, I’m quite happy with it now. I’d have considered going back because more alternatives is better, but frankly Zen just had too many significant bugs in my time with it, and since it doesn’t just use the engine, but it’s also hooked up to Firefox’s account system for a bunch of stuff it just didn’t seem worth the hassle. Have they polished it up any in the past few months?
well, i don’t know the last state you know, but they added a floating search bar, which is pretty, but not beneficial beyond that i think. they added a default shortcut for copying the current webaddress which i sorely miss on mullvad. besides i dont think they added any major features i would’ve noticed, but it feels like a very stable experience atm, both on linux and macos.
Zen makes something like 84 external connections, which is around double what even Edge makes (and Microsoft has basically become a malware company).
Number of external connections means little without context of the content and what they are for.
This was patched, and the vast majority were just fetching thumbnails.
tab groups in firefox are surprisingly good! even alongside a tab group management addon. they complement each other, like when you don’t want to create a bunch of subgroups for an exclusive view but just collapse them
They’re obviously going for a zero adoption policy and trying to think of the most repulsive options
Does any other browser let me open 2 windows with the same synced tabs? Also, permanent per-space tabs, please.
Zen does
Ok, thanks! Good to know there’s a backup plan. For now Arc still works fine, just no updates anymore.
No shit it died. They stopped supporting it and on top of it it’s a browser that requires you to be logged into an account to use, which is a turnoff to techie people who are the most likely to adopt nee things early.
Oh and Microsoft Edge can do most of the things Arc does.
Yep. Save reason I won’t use Kagi and I don’t use AI much. Surveillance capitalism will only ever lead to authoritarianism and dystopia. I don’t want anything to do with it.
You can’t trust any company to not sell you out and pick your carcass clean.
Isn’t kagi’s point that they store very little about you to the point there no search history and you have to pay for the service provided?
According to them.
If their code isn’t open source, and your searches aren’t encrypted in such a way that their logging of them isn’t an option, why should you believe them? It’s not like there’s some precedence that corporations face any legitimate consequences for their crimes. Unless they steal from the wealthy, any consequences will be less than the profits from their crimes.
Can you cite me some instances of surveillance from Kagi? Genuinely asking.
What do you use instead of Kagi?
Also you can search without tying your searches to your account with Kagi.
When i left Chrome, one of the things I was looking for was vertical tabs and was willing to try anything. I wasn’t fond of a mac first option, but I decided to try it. Installed it and the first thing it did was to force me to make an account, uninstalled it instantly.
I’m not against the option of having an account, but forcing it makes me distrust them. Was not long after that there were also some major security flaws found as well. They really didn’t make it easy for people to change, almost like they thought the apple form over function would appeal more broadly.
Never heard of that thing, but apparently it was Apple exclusives? Deserved death then.
I’m hoping ladybug will be operational for mainstream use, before the enshittification of Firefox progresses too far.
Right, thanks!
It wasn’t supposed to stay Apple exclusive. In fact, when I last used Windows there was a beta build out for Arc. However, there were also multiple Firefox styles in the CSS Store that made Firefox into Arc.
Then Zen Browser came out, and I’m currently watching it get very popular. I don’t doubt that Zen Browser is one of the reasons Arc is shutting down. It’s nearly an exact copy, but now with more features (and is constantly coming out with even more faster than Arc can think of them).
I’m excited for Ladybird as well, but I’m not expecting anything crazy when it comes out of alpha and beta. I fully expect to wait a bit, maybe download to contribute some troubleshooting, but it may not be viable as a main use browser for a long time yet.
It’ll be a great browser by 2029 IMO, and honestly that’s not that long compared to the development time all other browsers have had.
We shall see, I’m excited to start testing it out next year when it’s in Alpha
You can already test it out in very early alpha, but I can tell you now that it’s just a portal with very basic browser controls. You’ll have to build it through the Python script.
I built it through Arch already and its a working browser is about all I can really say about it. The little I tried of it works.
The instructions to build the early alpha are on the github page here.
I built it through arch
Just had to sneak that in, didn’t you?
Lol, I just mention it because I have no other experience with Ladybird. There’s an Ubuntu/Debian section and a Choco for Windows. I would assume macOS uses homebrew, but I didn’t read that far into it. I can only confirm that I got the Arch version working after a bit of compiling.
Its not apple exclusive. I have it on both my macbook and windows computer
Well that’s shooting yourself in the damn foot.
Apple users are a tiny percentage, and most of the sort that happily uses whatever Apple gives them without question or concern for other options. I have no idea what this thing did, but if it did something different than every other browser should start targeting Windows and Linux.
This was the browser that required an account to even start using, it was just ridiculous.
When I eventually managed to test Arc, I felt it was a very overhyped browser. I couldn’t see what the fuss was about.
Yeah, I just don’t trust people’s recommendations of browsers.
Most of them are too stupid to realize what’s going on and how they’re being herded like sheep.
What’s your recommendation then?
Firefox.
You mean the one from the company that pays out their CEO a fat $6m salary, paid for by Google bribing Mozilla to be the default search engine?
I don’t trust your recommendation. Do you even realise you’re being herded like sheep?
(I actually use it too, but I won’t pretend they’re saints. It also occasionally has trouble with some websites, but I haven’t done any comprehensive testing to confirm whether it’s browser-specific.)
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Clearly if you arnt building your own web browser from the ground up, your a sheep. This is the only logical conclusion!!1!1!
Obviously. It’s the only way to be sure it has exactly the features I want and nothing else. Anyone recommending anything else has clearly been deluded to accept mediocrity. How else could they think something other than my exact tastes is decent?
Lol, but seriously every modern browser is basically crap ran or controlled by a large company that does fucked up or less then ideal things.
Yeah, it’s fucked that we basically have to pick what flavour of shit we’d hate least. And once we’re all settled in with our least disgusting brand, we obviously don’t want to move anymore. I’m sticking with Firefox and probably will for some time to come. Adjusting to a different UI, migrating all my bookmarks and finding equivalents for my extensions is an effort.
Maybe some alternative will eventually entice me enough to overcome my reluctance to mix up my digital environment. I just hope it’ll be by actually being good, rather than just “not as bad”.
Don’t trust it, whatever he says
That was the joke I was setting up for :D
The Devs at the browser company said themselves that they aren’t killing Arc, it’s just on maintenance mode as they are working on another browser, an AI first one, which I have mixed feelings about personally.
Zen Browser is open source and in active development!
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Also Zen exists, which is a Firefox fork that implements the concept of Arc
No Linux build, not git link, why would anyone care?
Because 96% of people aren’t using Linux to browse the web.
That figure is entirely irrelevant when you need to target users who are willing to try a new unknown third party browser in the first place.
And you’ll find orders of magnitude more of those among Linux users than you do on Mac, which is where Arc launched on.LOL no. 96% is not irrelevant. 4% is irrelevant.
it couldn’t be too popular as a windows only project. I assume it was too lite known, like I never even heard about it here or other places
Never even heard of it until now.
what a fucking joke, the best thing it did was create the zen browser project, and before that Vivaldi existed that took the spot of zen without the hype
It probably has something to do with being only available on Macs for so long.
Or them completely shifting development to their AI browser
The Browser Company, the developer behind the Arc Browser, has announced that Arc is going away
Where? Where did they do this? Why is there no link? They said several times, very recently, that it was not going away. They were just basically going into maintenance mode.
please know this: we’re not trying to shut Arc down.
That’s very sad to hear. I am currently using Arc as my main browser for work (I am a web developer) since its launch on MacOS. Guess I need to switch browsers soon then…
It’s not dead. As far as I can tell the author just made that up, because they didn’t cite any sources, and the actual official sources indicate otherwise. But I can recommend switching to Zen nonetheless.
So, no Windows, no Linux, no head?
There is a windows and mobile tab on their website
