Arc Browser Company: Chrome and Safari face a new challenger

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-05-27/google-chrome-and-apple-safari-challenged-by-browser-upstart

by cpeterso • 4 years ago

91 124 4 years ago

gabereiser• 4 years ago

“It will be free upfront; the team is looking at developing premium subscription features for enterprise users, perhaps somewhere around $12 a month, echoing the freemium model of Slack Technologies Inc., Dropbox Inc., and other productivity services.”

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.

Nextgrid6• 4 years ago

The majority of browsers that were commercially closed software didn’t make it

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.

ushakov11• 4 years ago

how is Firefox half-baked?

i'm using it every day along with Safari and don't see any significant differences

Taywee• 4 years ago

Which issues do Firefox fail to solve?

brundolf• 4 years ago

The Enterprise™ spends a lot of money on (often dubious) security products
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

irrational• 4 years ago

Firefox is half baked? What does that mean? I’ve used Firefox as my primary browser for many years, including for my full time job as a web developer, and have never had any issues. The only time I ever use Chrome is when I need to put in my PTO at work since their time-off web app doesn’t work with Firefox.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 4 years ago

"Half-baked" means Firefox adopts slogans like "protecting the open web" and it purports to represent the interests of web users, however its true goals are to generally to match Chrome feature-for-feature and preserve the status quo on the web which is that it provides an optimal medium for advertising. It gets over 90% of its financial support from Google, not web users.

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.

capableweb4• 4 years ago

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.

(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.

perryizgr8• 4 years ago

Safari gets away with this because...

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.

nwienert• 4 years ago

It's hard to read articles with this unabashed of a tone, feels like much of the company's own claims are uncritically re-printed.

vegetablepotpie• 4 years ago

A lot of news media is lightly edited press releases. PR pros outnumber journalists 6-1 [1] and they do a lot of the work for journalists upfront that make it easier for them to publish.

[1] https://www.prdaily.com/report-pr-pros-outnumber-journalists...

WesolyKubeczek• 4 years ago

You’d be amazed how many such articles and reviews are ads in disguise.

…Sometimes though, you might not have enough dough for the disguise.

stevenhuang• 4 years ago

Their characterisation of power users' bad tab management is certainly contrived, but it's cool to see their take on a new browser ui.

Their proposed UI would be familiar to many FF vertical tab/tree tab users.

omosubi• 4 years ago

As they say, if no one in the article is mad that it's printed, it's PR, not news

inlined• 4 years ago

Google might be mad given the accusations that Chrome features are killed if they lower Google searches.

john-titor• 4 years ago

firefox <3

geogra42• 4 years ago

Is there any reason that they couldn't build this ui on top of chrome? I've seen quite a lot of chrome based browsers with interesting uis

ushakov11• 4 years ago

a ui on top of chrome doesn't get you $25 million in funding and a dedicated Bloomberg article

edit: apparently it does

charcircuit• 4 years ago

I'd expect the opposite. It's likely not worth funding someone to reimplement a whole browser engine instead of reusing an existing one. It would take a lot of time and money to build and maintain and you don't gain too much by having your own entirely custom engine.

225beef2• 4 years ago

Im a beta tester for this product and it does use Chromium under the hood, pre-bundled with uBlock no less.

geogra42• 4 years ago

Well then it doesn't seem so groundbreaking then

cutler2• 4 years ago

So it's just another Chrome skin with rearranged tabs. Jeezus.

_nalply• 4 years ago

I would like to read more about this. Do you have links?

ushakov11• 4 years ago

https://archive.ph/4MuhM

ushakov11• 4 years ago

Hovering the mouse over a Google Calendar button will surface a tiny panel of upcoming appointments. Spotify comes with an embedded player to shuffle through songs

how long until this feature breaks, because they rely on third-party APIs like Google's that change all the time?

ushakov11• 4 years ago

also why does a music player and calendar widget needs to be in a browser?

it's already implemented in system-level ui (at least on macOS and Gnome)

IceDane• 4 years ago

Wow, is this a serious article? I honestly felt like I was reading the onion for a bit.

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.

behnamoh• 4 years ago

so just bloatware bells and whistles

ratww• 4 years ago

From the description, it actually reminds me of Internet Explorer toolbars in terms of functionality, which were quite common bloatware.

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.

brimstedt• 4 years ago

In my opinion, they don't seem to solve the browser tab problem, just iterate on it.

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 ;)

mmphosis• 4 years ago

Firefox still supports browsing without tabs

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.

rascul• 4 years ago

Is this just another Chrome skin or is it actually a new browser?

coffeefirst• 4 years ago

It's Chromium, but more of a "rework the UI from scratch" than just a skin.

I have the beta. It has some interesting ideas.

debdut• 4 years ago

can i get an invite?

agluszak• 4 years ago

wide address bars wasting valuable space across the top of the screen to display what he calls “URL gibberish.”

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.

admax88qqq• 4 years ago

There has to be some solution to the phishing problem that doesn't require teaching the general population how to parse URLs.

there's room to innovate here.

ushakov11• 4 years ago

the issue is they have to sell this to the investors

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

gman83• 4 years ago

At the same time, I think that more than 90% of people that I know have absolutely no idea how to read a URL, and are not going to learn. I think that just showing the domain for them wouldn't be so bad. I don't think I'm the target audience for this browser.

echan00• 4 years ago

How is this unknown company a challenger? How is this even worthy of Bloomberg to report on

readthenotes1• 4 years ago

Paid for advertising maybe?

capableweb4• 4 years ago

A lot of stuff you see in Bloomberg (and elsewhere) either gets paid to be put there (some via agencies that specializes in things like that), or put on there via connections. They are not reporting on underdogs for the fun of it.

sealeck• 4 years ago

Do you have a source for this? Not in any way saying it's not true but would be interesting if there was some analysis somewhere.

Terretta• 4 years ago

See "earned media":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_media

https://sproutsocial.com/insights/earned-media-strategy/

nskvortsov• 4 years ago

Browser tab problem is not about the web or the browser, it is about users' habits and discipline. If you suffer from this "problem" invest time in learning shortcuts for bookmark, typing to search history in the address bar, saving things in proper place for later reading and, above all, concentrate on one thing for more than 5 minutes.

pvg2• 4 years ago

At the end of the day, it's a browser, not a boot camp. If user re-education worked designing software (and most other things) would be a lot easier.

Karunamon• 4 years ago

This mindset/rant does not work in the real world. When a large enterprise company tried it, (Apple), they were widely mocked for blaming users for “holding it wrong”.

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.

layer82• 4 years ago

I don’t think it’s solvable if users don’t themselves close or group/categorize the stuff they’re opening. Any automation/heuristic is prone to not do what the user wants, because the tool can’t really judge why the user opened any given page, and thus can’t make an informed decision in how to handle it. I can think of new (mostly power-)user features to support the user in organizing opened pages, but I have a hard time imagining an I-don’t-want-to-deal-with-this user feature that would universally “just work”. (Of course, I may be wrong.)

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.

cutler2• 4 years ago

What kind of dev tools and extensions will Arc offer? If it's just a consumer browser it's doomed to fail.

kbyatnal• 4 years ago

why are all these comments so negative? I, for one, am very excited that talented developers and designers are reimagining such a core part of everyone's daily workflow. The embedded calendar / music player (along with auto archived tabs) is very cool - not sure how well it'll work in practice, but it's clear the team has put their heart into this. And more competition for Google/Apple is always good.

ushakov11• 4 years ago

beyond a slightly different UI, there's nothing you can "reimagine" in a web browser

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

zagrebian5• 4 years ago

The UI shown in the screenshot is radically different.

machinerychorus• 4 years ago

Darn, I was hoping this would be about https://arc.io. I know it's not very popular on hn because "how dare they use my bandwidth and cpu" but I think it's really cool. A viable business model for websites that doesn't require cramming things full of ads.

ehhthing• 4 years ago

Thank you for introducing me to a wonderful privacy nightmare.

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.

theyak• 4 years ago

So it's Microsoft Edge? https://www.howtogeek.com/697986/how-to-enable-and-use-verti...

netsharc• 4 years ago

Vertical tabs was in Opera when it was good, it was probably there a decade ago. Its spiritual successor Vivaldi also has this.

ushakov11• 4 years ago

Even Miller realizes his ambitions sound absurd
he jokes about his company’s 0% market share

investors: give this man $25m

rejectfinite• 4 years ago

A Startup Wants to Rescue You From Browser Tab Hell

Vivaldi, Edge and Firefox already do this with vertical tabs.

Vivaldi also has the excellent tab search.

capableweb4• 4 years ago

Thank god for TreeStyleTabs, couldn't live without it (and main reason I'm not switching away from Firefox).

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.

ajvs• 4 years ago

I honestly don't know how people manage any serious web browsing without Tree Style Tabs. It's hell on Chromium-based browsers with their constantly shrinking tab width, and the workarounds aren't much better.

sam345• 4 years ago

Checkout Fast Tab Switcher in firefox. Far preferable to vertical tabs. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fast-tab-swit...

cpeterso• 4 years ago

You can also search your open tabs in Firefox's address bar by first typing % in the address bar: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-open-tabs-firefo...

DarthNebo• 4 years ago

Anyone remember Refresh concept from a while back, https://phase.com/magazine/refresh-rethinking-the-browser/

chrisfrantz• 4 years ago

This looks great, did it ever launch?

workona• 4 years ago

Our iPad app provides a pretty similar user experience as their concept video: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/workona-project-organizer/id15...

Shadonototra• 4 years ago

dead on arrival, nobody is looking for a new browser

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)

Nextgrid6• 4 years ago

people give no shit about browsers

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.

ThinkBeat2• 4 years ago

"Arc Browser" is just Chromium + uBlock + some GUI enhancements

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.

kitsunesoba• 4 years ago

I agree. Yet Another Chromium Clone is not all that interesting, regardless of how its UI is dressed up, because realistically the browser's most core qualities are not going to differ significantly from those of any other Chrome-based browser.

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.

zagrebian5• 4 years ago

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.

What would be the benefit of having a browser with a new web engine?

LegitShady• 4 years ago

Competition and funding for non chromium initiatives.

If someoone had asked the same question before chrome would you have agreed with them?

CharlesW• 4 years ago

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.

zzo38computer• 4 years ago

What would be the benefit of having a browser with a new web engine?

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.

ThinkBeat2• 4 years ago

What would be the benefit of having more than one word processor, compiler, database, operating system or photo manipulation system?

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.

ducaale• 4 years ago

Maybe serenityOS browser will be the new engine/browser that rivals existing browser engines

See https://mobile.twitter.com/awesomekling/status/1508953394836...

zagrebian5• 4 years ago

They need to come up with a different name. ARC Browser https://www.arcbrowser.com is already taken.

joeman1000• 4 years ago

Tab-groups has fixed this clutter for me. I can:

+ 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.

nyanpasu64• 4 years ago

I thought this was going to be about the Flow browser. I'm interested in Ekioh Flow as a faster browser engine. Unfortunately it seems to be shaping up to be not only closed-source, but only available to proprietary licensees rather than as a downloadable product to run on desktops.

time4tea• 4 years ago

Lmgtfy - oh no you can't!

Unless you meant a ROM manager.

hexage18143• 4 years ago

I will tell you what: I like they are trying something new. I'm not sure if it is gonna work, but if we stop to think, the last invention on web browsing user interface was the tabs, and maybe tab grouping more recently, but like they were invented in the 90s, so it's nice to see some someone trying something new, some new approach.

pHollda• 4 years ago

Why aren't they doing this on mobile?

notananthem• 4 years ago

Closed source, pass

hexage18143• 4 years ago

For those interested, here is a preview: https://www.loom.com/share/e540f28366ff4703a7c882291875166f

Arc Browser Company: Chrome and Safari face a new challenger

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