Arc Browser for Windows, now generally available
resources.arc.net
resources.arc.net
To summarize the Arc Tab Management Philosophy:
- 3 Groups: Pinned Tabs, Favorites Tabs, "Regular" Tabs
- Pinned tabs never go away
- Favorites are "sticky" to the original URL you saved them under. So you can navigate within that tab, but you can always click to get back to the original favorited URL.
- Regular tabs are auto-archived if not used in 24 hours.
And some other features:
- Vertical tab bar
- Command palette for searching/opening new tabs
- Folder structure for organizing favorite tabs.
- "Spaces" (like virtual desktops) which tbh I don't see much use from.
- Split tabs
- Some AI features they are pushing now. Don't really use these much either.
- Lots of integrations, eg, hover to see your GCal. They just pushed a new "live folder" feature that auto organizes all your open GH PRs. This is super useful.
All in all, I might actually pay for this if they make it subscription only. For me it's the difference between having 150 tabs open in Edge (many of them duplicates or one-offs) or 20-30 tabs open in Arc, and never thinking too much about tab management. All in all I think it points to the fact that the browser space is sorely under-optimized for power users. The #1 tool everyone uses day in and day out and most people just accept having 200 unmanageable chrome tabs open as the cost of doing business?
Brave has <1% market share.
I've been daily driving Brave on every machine and device I have for a year or so now... and I really wish they would have just stuck with the "Privacy Focused Chromium" thing. They've wandered far down this path of "lets just add every feature that comes to mind" and it's really not helping it's usefulness.
You may as well say that moviegoers don't care about art because studios only finance superhero franchise films.
Do they? Do you think the audience drives the genre of movies that are popular or vice versa?
Thanks that email mask services like Firefox Relay exists, I'm using it for everything lately, with the push of surveillance from tech companies and data breaches I feel a bit safer at least.
https://github.com/thebrowsercompany/swift-winrt
But why is the Arc Browser package size >700 MB? It’s double the size of Chromium! Where is all that bloat coming from?
Arc on Windows still feels like the early versions of Arc on macOS, but I’ve genuinely enjoyed my beta access anyway. I also love how transparent the browser company is.
I hope the company can find some way to stay alive, but I’m not sure what a path to profitability would look like for them. Subscription fees?
Anyone else have the same issue?
Technically you can force your way to install Arc on Windows 10[1], but it was a rough experience when I tried few months ago during beta.
[1]: Guide to installing Arc Browser on Windows 10 - https://gist.github.com/TrevTV/2044e43666a8fa4bb581d4b0c8316...
Much like Windows 8, most people on Windows 11 tend to be the technically-disinclined, which generally are not the userbase of an experimental alternative browser. Thus I too, am understandably baffled at the lack of Windows 10 support.
Unlike Vista and 8, nothing broke and everything is where I expect, so I've stuck with it.
Who is running 2GB of ram these days? Win 11 recommends 4GB, and imo that's very little on a modern computer. 8GB for casual use, 16 for anything more intensive.
* First launch is a full screen, loud ass, unskippable video. I literally Cmd+Q'd the browser right there and then. If it wasn't for my friends insistence I try it, that would have been the end of my Arc experiment right there.
* The "Login before you start" is stupid, I get it, but stupid. As a techy who uses lots of devices, something that has built in sync is actually appealing to me.
* The settings is a strange mix of UI/UX's. There is clearly some quasi-chrome settings in browser, but then a settings screen that is more traditional Mac pop-out style. Sometimes one links to the other and it's...disjointed.
* "Max" the AI tooling has potential. While I love ChatGPT, I don't need AI in everything and it really annoys me when AI is shoved into products unnecessarily... so far so good on Max. The "ask on page" feature works surprisingly well and the 5 second previews is cool on a site like HN.
* ChatGPT in the command bar. Cool, I guess. It's just a quick way to get to your existing chatgpt account. I'm glad it's my account and not yours - so win for that. Too bad Cmd+Opt+G is taken by Google Drive.
* It's tab management is ... fine? That's something that will clearly take some getting use to.
* Spaces & Profiles. I don't like that a new profile needs to have a new space create first. It's unintuitive for those of us who are used to profiles from Chrome. I get that Arc is trying to allow us to organize. But I want two VERY separate worlds. One work, one personal. Just allow me to create a new profile directly from the Profiles settings, and open that into a new window. Like every other chrome-clone
* The tiny stupid URL in the left bar is... tiny and useless and stupid. But you can View > Show Toolbar easily - so that's good. In a world in which the web is an ever more dangerous place, obfuscating the URL to the point in which I can't even read the domain... is poorly thought through.
* The import system seems to work extremely well. It imported all my plugins (which all work, awesome) and even my session cookies... so getting "up and running" is much easier.
* Sync only sync's open tabs. So it's effectively useless.
The submission was earlier titled: Arc Browser for Windows 1.0, now generally available which is confusing as you can see in the comment thread.
It's the 1.0 release of Arc Browser for Windows.
Try Stack Browser or Ferdium if you don't like tabs.
And to anyone bemoaning the “must have account” thing - this is HN, I’m sure you’ve all got the technical nouse to set up a burner account if you’re that uncomfortable. Or SimpleLogin.io - another HN favourite ;-)
Mozilla wants me to sign up for a Firefox account too. The difference is that it's entirely optional and the browser works just fine without it.
Besides giving them an open invitation to spam your email, login based access tells me that they're doing what Chrome is, attaching your browser history to your identity. Google does this because they need a way to fuel their behavioural ad machine without cookies. I imagine Arc is doing it for the same reason - monetization.
Not only does it seem unnecessary to require this even just for curious new users to quickly try it out, but it sends me a strong signal about their priorities and tells me that they probably don’t align with mine.
"Enshittification is the pattern of decreasing quality observed in online services and products such as Amazon, Facebook, Google Search, Twitter, Bandcamp, Reddit, Uber, and Unity. The term was used by writer Cory Doctorow in November 2022, and the American Dialect Society selected it as its 2023 Word of the Year. Doctorow has also used the term platform decay to describe the same concept." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
[1] https://americandialect.org/2023-word-of-the-year-is-enshitt...
What's an unofficial word?
From their FAQ[1]:
> To do that, we’re excited about business models that align our incentives with the people who we serve: from charging companies that want to increase the productivity of their teams across the many tools they use for work, to making it easier and safer to pay for things online.
So far they have been doing various small QoL for popular websites[2]. My favorite one is GitHub Live Folders[3], which is kinda like automatic bookmark/pinned tabs for your own GH PRs. I can see people paying for these collections of small nice things if they keep adding more.
Of course they also AI-powered features, dubbed Arc Max[4]. Personally I often use the page summarizer, which feels like lite version of Kagi Summarizer. Right now seems like they're burning money by running it for free. But they could opt to charge money, e.g. for more powerful model.
Disclaimer: I'm just a happy Arc user, it's not perfect, but I use it daily side by side with Firefox.
[1]: https://arc.net/faq
[2]: https://arc.net/integrations
[3]: https://resources.arc.net/hc/en-us/articles/22731612065815-A...
[4]: https://arc.net/max
Last time i checked they had something like 60 employees (in New York?). Burning money indeed.
We have Firefox and Safari still though so it is not quite that dark yet but we are getting there.
Making a browser these days from scratch, or even keeping up with the rest is incredibly time consuming and expensive.
And apparently it's based on Chromium. Porting a brand-new browser engine to long-obsolete Windows is probably plausible. Porting Chromium, a very large beast with a lot of baggage, is much less likely.
that's why arc supports split browser tabs hahaha
It's a desktop environment for DOS that was released in 1985 :)
My initial reaction was “oh that’s seriously cool. I wonder what TCP/IP stack they’re using and if they got CSS working or just HTML”
From what I can tell, the 80286 was still a server-grade CPU in 1985, and most PCs were still running an 8086 or 8088, which maxed out at 1 MB of RAM. Just the HTML for the Wikipedia article on the 8086 [0] is nearly 224 kilobytes, nearly 1/4 of the RAM available.
It definitely wouldn’t be powerful enough to do TLS encryption either.
I'd think it could do TLS encryption, it just wouldn't do it FAST. It would also probably be limited in the ciphers and key exchange algorithms it would support.
Modern (in comparison) CPUs contain instructions to aid with performance, such as AES extensions. If you’re doing everything in software then you’ll be limited to the older ciphers, most of which might not even be supported by modern sites given TLS1.3 is the recommendation. For example OpenSSL doesn’t support RC and AES will benchmark much slower on CPUs (when compared with RC) without AES instructions and smaller L1 cache.
Sure you could workaround that by supplementing cache with writing to persistent storage and just throwing more time at the problem. But then you’re looking at days or even weeks just to complete the handshake, let alone pulling an HTML content. By which point the novelty of getting an 8088 online would long since have worn off.
So to say TLS wouldn’t be fast is an understatement. Calling it an understatement is itself an understatement :)
If you remove TLS from the equation things get dramatically simpler. I’ve got a 64k 8bit micro (Amstrad CPC 464) with a WiFi adapter. The adapter handles the wireless protocols but beyond that I wrote a very simple HTML browser. Though most other similar projects I’ve seen have used a Raspberry Pi hooked up via serial to provide offloading. But that’s basically turning your 8bit Micro into a dumb terminal and thus feels somewhat like cheating.
> Sure you could workaround that by supplementing cache with writing to persistent storage and just throwing more time at the problem.
I think my question is...if you only supported a single key exchange algorithm and AES-128, and didn't verify server certificates, how much code would a TLS negotiation take? My understanding is that TLS libraries get large because they support dozens of key exchanges and ciphers, plus support previous versions of TLS, and a huge suite of features that most people probably don't even use. I would THINK you could achieve a bare minimum that an 8088 could run in under 100K of code.
Damn, now I'm tempted to actually try this. Know any way to emulate an 8088 at an accurate speed? ;-)
The problem is purely the computational overhead of the encryption itself. This is why modern CPUs have instructions to offload some of that overhead to hardware.
You can think of this as the same kind of problem of MPEG encoding and decoding in software vs hardware. The difference in performance is massive. Then try to do that on a 40 year old 16 bit CPU with virtually no cache and only 1 MB of RAM to play with