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Comment by taurknaut | Hacker News Reader

> using Arc on a M1 MBP; normal browsing habits.

Well i've certainly never heard of this browser before and it still seems pretty young. I'd guess it's the same issue.

Arc is almost 3 (4?) years old and was the darling child of dev influencers for the better part of 2 years. It's not a niche browser, especially amongst devs that are likely to work at Cloudflare.

It's definitely a niche browser. I think I heard of it once on HN over the past few years, and I'd be surprised if there was actually more than a few thousands of people using it.

Its subreddit has 52k members. There are probably hundreds of thousands of users. Still a niche browser, but it's pretty commonly used on Macs.

> Its subreddit has 52k members. There are probably hundreds of thousands of users.

I don't get your reasoning here, you shouldn't even expect more than a fraction of the reddit users to have even installed and tried the browser, let alone using it regularly.

Why would you join a subreddit for an obscure browser if you never even bothered to run it?

You vastly underestimate how many “just curious” lurkers there are on any subreddits !

You're asserting that they are curious enough about a free browser to join a subreddit, but not curious enough to download it?

I would be surprised if it were that low; the arcbrowser sub Reddit has 50 thousand members. Still, regardless of the actual figure, I think there's a broader point which avoids the need to agree on an absolute threshold: should cloudflare block access to websites using a blacklist or should it grant access using a whitelist? Especially since it's trivial to spoof your user agent.

I'm not defending Cloudflare on any way, blocking niche browsers is sad. I'm just saying that it doesn't make sense to say it's not a niche browser.

That's fair. I'm sure it's not as well-used/known as Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Safari. Probably not even Opera, although I'd be interested to see their respective "new users" numbers. I think it's in the same ballpark as Brave — definitely known, just not one of the big 5.

It is a niche browser with no hype going for it.

I'm still not sure how some random browser should result in a block by the provider. I don't think there's any security risk for the provider of the site by using an outdated browser. Blocking malicious IPs yes/maybe, blocking suspicious acitivity maybe. But because you have browser X - please not.

This is going to lead two a two-class internet where new technologies will not emerge and big players will win because the gate the high is so absurdly high and random that people stop to invent.

I presume this was not intentional.

One cannot assume a problem is minor, rare, unimportant, or easy to fix purely on the basis of it being unintentional.

Consider automobile accidents.

It's a chromium derivative.

I think it's also EOL/not getting updates now?

I mean I never used it, their only selling point seem to have been hype.

Definitely not EOL; https://resources.arc.net/hc/en-us/articles/20498293324823-A...

I assume they are talking about the company moving on to develop a new browser: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/24/24279020/browser-company...

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