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Comment by atraac | Hacker News Reader

Also been using Brave for a while. All the crypto stuff needs to be turned off but besides that for me, it's just better Chrome. Firefox always felt slower to me, Safari is just a weird kid from the neighborhood I could never get to like. I LOVED Arc. I think its a near perfect browser, but lack of proper mobile browser and Browser Company dropping Arc in favor of the new rebranded Arc with AI just left me with distrust. Brave just works, I can use it on all my devices, OSes, I can have uBlock Origin on it and vertical tabs. I don't really need anything else at this point.

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> I LOVED Arc.

I assume you've heard of it, but just in case you haven't: you should try Zen! It's basically Arc, but based on Firefox, open source and, more importantly, actively maintained.

https://zen-browser.app

Does Zen have multi-account container tabs? Edit: Yes, it does! [1]

(I need them partly because of Google, as Google has a broken login system. I use GGP at work plus a bunch of work apps that use Google for SSO. But for some products like Maps and YouTube, I use my personal account. Doing that on e.g. Chrome is painful, because every URL opens with whatever is your default login, and whatever I set as the default, it's usually wrong.)

[1] https://docs.zen-browser.app/user-manual/workspaces

And for those of us unfortunate enough to use Windows it is much more reliable and complete than Arc.

I tried Zen in the past, I actually didn't like it. Had quite a bit of bugs, some settings even had typos, some missing things, literally crashed every now and then on MacOs. Might give it a go someday again, I'm trying out Helium for now out of curiosity and I'm liking it so far

I don't use it myself (wasn't an Arc user either), but apparently it's moving really fast, so definitely worth trying again.

(See also this almost identical conversation: https://phanpy.social/#/fosstodon.org/s/117281195620828803)

Agreed. I went from 20+ years of Firefox (back to the earliest days with the .zip files and just dumping binaries into a folder) to Brave a couple years ago.

I'm the same way. Turn off crypto by default (is it these days?) and that's pretty much it.

I like how they host selected Manifest v2 extensions themselves so uBlock Origin latest continues to work and is actively maintained.

Speed of Chromium with privacy focus. Works for me.

> Firefox always felt slower to me

Since Google has proven willing to stoop to bad behavior to lend Chromium the impression of superior performance[0] I don't consider subjective performance to be a meaningful benchmark.

As metrics go, I am more concerned with "demonstrable respect for user-agency", a competition in which a browser from the world's largest advertising conglomerate is forbidden entry.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/07/why-google-took-year...

Arc is still usable and gets chromium updates. It's still my daily driver since as you said, it's great.

Edit: I also use it as my mobile browser. I really don't see any problems on their mobile app (iOS)

See also Brave Origin: https://brave.com/origin/

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