Arc Browser Company: Chrome and Safari face a new challenger
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Good luck with that. The majority of browsers that were commercially closed software didn’t make it. If it’s open source then it will be ridiculed for not having an open license. If there’s an open license then it’s no longer yours to control and monetize.
Chrome gets away with this because of chromium is the core, Chrome is the added “management” of your browser “experience”. Safari gets away with this because WebKit is core, Safari is the added “management”. Both are free from a monetary cost perspective on the user. Both position themselves as the keeper of secrets for their platform.
I’m all for an open/free/libre browser that isn’t WebKit. I believe it’s naive to think you can change the existing web experience with a browser alone.
Keep in mind that the last time this was tried, free/open-source alternatives were on-par if not better and the web was much less hostile.
Nowadays, not only is the web teeming with hostility that can best be addressed by a browser, but the closest free/open-source solution (Firefox) is half-baked and doesn't actually solve many of these issues nor is it incentivized to due to murky funding (most of it comes from Google, a big advertising provider) and a dysfunctional company.
A browser whose funding comes directly from its users wouldn't have these misaligned incentives and wouldn't be afraid of doing bold moves that piss off adtech.
The Enterprise™ spends a lot of money on (often dubious) security products and given that the browser is often on the front-line for various threats, a browser with built-in security features (both against malware and other features such as DLP, blocking/filtering/monitoring without middleboxes) with a paid enterprise plan subsidizing a free version for personal use could become a sustainable business.
i'm using it every day along with Safari and don't see any significant differences
For me Firefox is about as good as any. Upsides here, downsides there, and nothing truly outstanding overall. It seems severely far behind in modern color (e.g. HDR videos or all of the wide gamut CSS specifications coming out), ahead in terms of single profile compartmentalization (containers), but behind in profile management (the profile manager sucks if you even know how to get to it). For as much as it champions being the last bastion of the free web it comes default with a decent amount of crapware (pocket, vpn) and has lost its way in terms of power user flexibility (UI customization, mobile extension limits, removal of power user flags). That said it's still better than the alternatives in those spaces, just not as good as it used to be.
For another none of these might matter but a lot of other reasons I don't even think about might. In the end even Firefox's own usage statistic point to the vast majority seeming to agree it doesn't have anything compelling enough to be worth switching to/evangelizing for anymore though.
Firedox on android has a lot of issues.
For example scaling up the page 120% to be able to more easily read text that the designer made too small doesn't turn all the images on the page into a blurry mess like it does on Chrome.
I've tried reporting bug reports to the Chromium project, but they can't seem to understand the concept and keep misfiling the reports as duplicates of irrelevant bugs and closing them as fixed without having fixed the problem.
You'd think that this would have me stop using it, but I really don't want to use Chrome/Brave/DDG so have just been putting up with it.
Only use ff mobile and never have any issues
Hehe, we are on the same boat about not using other browsers. I have been use firefox for the last 18 years, I will continue to do so.
I.e. it's basically "an interesting Chromium clone maintained by a couple of folks out of Estonia". If you're cool with that it can be a nifty browser, for many that just makes it to unproven to dump access to their entire online world into.
From the comments some people's idea of a fully baked Firefox is a browser that generally works exactly like Chrome and Safari on the surface but is somehow better, e.g., because it does not overtly sell advertising services. An enormously complex program with a gazillion knobs and dials that no average web user would ever touch. Sending all search queries of these users to Google by default. Perfect.
Another idea of a fully-baked "Firefox" is one that has options to allow mere mortals to compile it from source on modest hardware in a reasonable amount of time. There could be multiple versions of Firefox, that could all be built from the same source tree, each a different compile time option, or a set of compile-time options. Some of these might exclude support for features that make the web optimal for advertising or commerce, i.e., essential features of Chrome or other "modern" web browsers. Scaled-down versions might be optimised for different experiences. Not all them driven by Javascript. For example, fast consumption of noncommercial content with minimal surveillance, and no advertising. Essentially "Reader Mode" as the default.
What is the point of having Firefox be open source if almost no one can download the source and start creating new and different web clients with it. Instead it is a project that only tries to keep pace with Chrome, getting larger and larger, more and more complex. It appears to have no other purpose. Tunnel vision. Follow the leader.
Make no mistake, I am not suggesting there should be no Firefox version that does almost everything that Chrome does, as there is now. Mozilla has supported use of the web for advertising and commerce. They have supported Yahoo, Inc. and Google, LLC. That's wonderful. Great job.
What I am suggesting is that Firefox should also have smaller, simpler versions that deliberately do not do all the things that Chrome does. Mozilla should also work to support noncommercial web use. Compile-time options to remove Javascript, telemetry and a host of other things some users may prefer to do without. Give people choice.
Then they fired a bunch of people so…welp.
> a browser with built-in security features (both against malware and other features such as DLP, blocking/filtering/monitoring without middleboxes)
It'll be hard to outdo Google at security research and hardening
They might be doing a great job at hardening, but they don’t have a great reputation.
It's the most popular browser by far, and they actually do have a very publicized team that reports bugs to not just Chrome, but Apple and Mozilla as well. In my circles this is well respected, and personally, it inspires more confidence in the infrastructure around Chrome to me. I'd be wary of any "new" browser engines in unsafe languages.
Just that people don’t consider chrome extremely secure, it may be acceptable 99% of the time, but it doesn’t get a free pass in extreme security environments.
This doesn't mean chrome is less secure than other options, it means people are heavily incentivized to find and report security problems and google is open about issues that are found.
This makes me feel better about chrome's security, not worse, and I say this as someone who is overall kind of iffy on google these days.
The problem is that my bank's website was made by a bank, but as a Firefox user this impacts me in my daily life.
Edit: I see there is a LibreWolf and a LibreFox
it's not like they did this maliciously to worsen your experience as Firefox user?
Firefox is the most user-hostile free & open-source software that I know of, and more hostile than a lot of paid, proprietary software.
(Probably today you mean Blink?)
This browser, like most "new" and "shiny" browsers today are just using embedded chrome and then put their own UX on top, calling it a new browser. Before, we'd call it a "browser shell" or something like that, but seemingly companies like this can launch with misleading wording and no one seems to notice it.
No, Safari gets away with it on iOS because Apple literally allows no other option. On desktop, Safari doesn't "get away" with anything, because people have choice.
embedding third-party services is a feature that is prone to break often
Chrome became the #1 because it was technically advanced (faster) but more importantly - endorsed by a search giant
nothing in the interface looks “radically different” to me
edit: apparently it does
Writing a new rendering engine and browser on top is totally different effort as you may guess.
[1] https://www.prdaily.com/report-pr-pros-outnumber-journalists...
Their proposed UI would be familiar to many FF vertical tab/tree tab users.
…Sometimes though, you might not have enough dough for the disguise.
Just remove them completely and let you window manager manage your windows.
(And yes, Firefox still supports browsing without tabs, so we got what we need right there ;)
It sort of does. I can't open settings in a new window without opening settings in a new tab first and then moving the tab to a new window. Or, create a new window and paste about:preferences into the url bar. Maybe there's some userChrome.css to do it.
I can create userChrome.css, which is discouraged, in order to hide the redundant tab bar with the single tab in it. Yes, it sort of works, it's kludgy and has issues.
+ hoard tabs in these groups (on safari),
+ close my browser session,
+ go and do something else with my life for a while,
+ come back (even on a different device) and open safari, select that saved tab group
+ the old ‘session’ is loaded and all my old tabs are back.
There’s no longer any need to keep a 100-tab browser session open any more. Sometimes the syncing is horrible with this feature across devices though. I find myself opening a new tab and the sync process immediately deleting it… more often than I’d like.
how long until this feature breaks, because they rely on third-party APIs like Google's that change all the time?
it's already implemented in system-level ui (at least on macOS and Gnome)
P2P networks inherently are not private: everyone on the network knows who else is on the network and what they are doing. Thus one bad node could collect data on others' browsing habits and track people quite easily.
I have the beta. It has some interesting ideas.
Unless you meant a ROM manager.
It is not up to developers to determine how users use their tools. The best you can do is hint and nudge, but it is not your decision at the end of the day.
The closest I can think of is to have sortable list views of open pages that you can sort by open date, last updated, possibly content type (e.g. has video), and/or group by site or by “opened from” (navigation history graph). Again, this is moving into power user territory.
Vivaldi, Edge and Firefox already do this with vertical tabs.
Vivaldi also has the excellent tab search.
But it doesn't really save you from "browser tab hell", it just makes it easier to manage. If anything, I have more tabs open now, across multiple reboots just because it's so much easier to find tabs that I might as well have all of them open.
Here is how it looks right now for me: https://imgur.com/a/EHr8JEe
And that's the list scrolled all the way to the bottom. Easily three-four pages more if you scroll upwards.
That's not "gibberish", in my opinion understanding what URLs mean (or even reading them at all!) is one of the most overlooked computer skills nowadays. If they look like gibberish that's because of: 1. Tracking parameters spam (?fbclid=qwerty) 2. Lack of knowledge that many parts of the URL can (and even should) be skipped when sharing it. So many times my non-programmer friends were astonished that you don't have to paste that ugly part!
Hiding the details instead of explaining them is a way leading to disaster! Many banking scams rely on users not paying attention to URLs.
I think that a better "innovation" would be to have the browser clean URLs from tracking bits without extensions.
there's room to innovate here.
what do they answer when investors ask a typical: "What makes you different from competition?"
their answer is: "We don't waste valuable space across the top of the screen to display URL gibberish"
the article is for business people, who could potentially invest into their Series A round, not for us tech people
I really wish that articles about "new browsers" should state up front what (if anything) they are built on top of.
Each time I am hopeful that someone has taken on the monumental task of creating a new, better, or at least different web engine/ browser. The competition would be good.
The near impossible complexity in writing a new web browser from scratch seems indicative as to how broken the system has gotten.
What would be the benefit of having a browser with a new web engine?
This is the right question. The answer is probably what you're thinking: Absolutely nothing. It'd be a giant waste of time to spend 5 years rebuilding plumbing instead of focusing on where one can actually differentiate.
It would be beneficial if it can be more easily modified and customized and the pieces can be taken apart and used independently or combined differently. Furthermore, some parts might be able to be made more efficient in some ways.
And then, actual progress and actual improvements can be made; to be improved would mean some things might need deliberately differently, etc. This way it can be one design mainly or only for advanced users who are assumed to know what they are doing, etc.
I say competition and innovation as well as selection. For browsers security. How can I mmention security?
Well, if Chromium has a serious bug, it impacts millions and millions.
Having different engines should hopefully mean some are immune to that particular one so you cant win the grand prize with a hack for one engine.
If someoone had asked the same question before chrome would you have agreed with them?
Being forthcoming about the engine of choice will help people set reasonable expectations… it's not a revolution, it's Chrome with a new coat of paint.
See https://mobile.twitter.com/awesomekling/status/1508953394836...
This is just yet another tech bro trying to "reinvent" the browser by giving certain web applications a more first class experience and shuffling around(and hiding) UI elements. Opera has been doing a lot of neat stuff in this space for years, and we all know how well it's going for them and their market share.
It will never cease to baffle me how easily some people manage to get other people to throw money at them. I'm sure you can sell some $12 subscription to a macOS hipster productivity addict who is already subbing to 15 other shiny-looking macOS-only apps, but otherwise I hope your investors are ready for you to capture a whopping 1-2% of the browser market share like opera.
chrome proved that people give no shit about browsers
the UI/UX haven't changed since day 1, still minimalist AF
firefox usage dropped massively, as they kept iterating on their UI/UX, forgetting the reason why people needed a browser in the fist place, instead they kept raising the salary of their CEO, as if he/she/it was the reason why people wanted to use firefox :')
the focus is on the websites
people literally only want an address bar and sync-able bookmarks/history with their phone, that's exactly what chrome/safari provide
firefox can't even provide this, and they keep push their AD/sponsored articles about how sweet firefox is, nobody cares
every other browsers from shady companies like this one are just cash grab (including firefox)
the only logical evolution of browsers is literally ChromeOS, you boot to browse people's places (websites)
This is mainly because people who are tech-savvy already have a good set up (Firefox with uBlock Origin and all bullshit disabled), and those who aren't don't know what they're missing out on because a browser by itself (even Firefox) doesn't actually fix any of their problems.
A user-focused browser bundled with functionality that fixes today's user-hostile web (whether built-in or as preinstalled uBlock/etc) would convince anyone who tries it.
I don't disagree that there's new interesting features that can go into browsers (like Safari's OCR), but a browsers are kind of an important type of software, we gotta be a bit more careful with bloat.
> he jokes about his company’s 0% market share
investors: give this man $25m