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Comment by tiltowait | Hacker News Reader

Arc isn’t unique for it, but vertical tabs would be a boon for most “ordinary” people I know. When I look at others’ browser windows, they usually have so many tabs open, they can only see favicons, and sometimes not even that. Vertical tabs fixes that—but it’s a feature, not a product. If that kind of feature caught on, absolutely nothing would stop Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc. from implementing it.

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"it's a feature not a product" – this is the perfect summation of Arc for me. I use it at home and enjoy it for a small set of its features, but it's barely a product, and I don't think it's a (viable) company.

What's the business model? Sell subscriptions to their AI stuff? No thanks. Sell me a browser for $40 per version with yearly releases? I'd probably buy that, but that's a 5 person indie software company not a 100+ person VC backed company.

This is probably why they're going back to the drawing board and putting Arc in maintenance mode.

Chrome has groups. You can expand collapse them. It somewhat helps.

A decent fzf style history search runnable from the top bar might encourage me to close more tabs.

I've been on Brave with vertical tabs since the beginning of the year now. It doesn't seems like most people know about it, but it's more compact and faster than Arc and I couldn't imagine going back to Chrome now.

There is no shortage of extensions for existing browsers that give you vertical tabs down the left side.

AFAIK there aren't any good ones for Chrome — you can't disable the tabs on the top of the browser, so you have this giant waste of space. Ditto for Safari. Firefox requires user CSS to disable the tabs on top, and the extensions don't do it for you AFAIK. It's pretty bizarre how the existing browsers have such bad vertical tabs options — only Edge has a decent implementation, and even theirs isn't perfect: if you have enough tabs that they overflow offscreen, there's no visual indication in the UI when you open a new tab, because the new tab appears at the end of the list offscreen and there's no animation or other indication that it was added.

Arc seemed pretty nice from a UI perspective, but crash-y in my experience, with no support for Linux or Android, and their iOS app wasn't even much of a browser. Now it sounds like they're putting Arc into maintenance mode and trying to build a conventional looking browser with AI features, so I think there's not much hope for it.

Kinda sad that browser UIs are frozen in 2008.

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