Yep, I'm an Arc user now. Sue me. Doesn't mean I don't still love Google Chrome and everything it's done for the web. Nor does it mean Arc is perfect. Check out my Twitch, Twitter, Discord more at t3.gg S/O Ph4se0n3 for the awesome edit 🙏
It helps to be precise in your language when describing perceived issues. When you switch the context by clicking the icons at the bottom, you are switching "spaces" not "profile layers". If you want the behavior where your favorites do not persist across spaces, create a new profile and assign it to that space. Each space has a profile with its favorites and its own independent "pinned" section. Favorites are shared across profiles, so what you want is for the favorites section to be linked to the space rather than the profile. But doing away with profiles altogether is a bad recommendation, imo. Profiles are useful when you can just switch a space and you're logged into all your work accounts and then in another space you're in all your personal accounts and content, searches and history etc don't bleed into each other. If arc did away with profiles I would uninstall it immediately. Also you can two finger slide gestures to switch spaces, just fyi.
Wish I could upvote this more than once. It seems quite straightforward to just have a separate profile for each space; I wonder if there's a reason Theo isn't doing that? Maybe sharing logins across profiles? Not sure how Chrome manages them, but could it result in multiple "saved logins" that need to be kept synchronised across profiles?
This happens all the time. A person expresses an opinion about a product without taking the time to understand it. Admittedly Arc needs to do a better job of making it clear so that the person of average IQ can immediately get it. When you're developing a product, its use cases and intention is clear to you, but then your average person gets in there and starts mashing buttons and doing things you never expected, or expecting things you never expected. Remember, it's always your fault because obviously something isn't clear enough.
Definitely agree. While I enjoyed Theo’s recent video with critiques and suggestions for Notion, this one was painful to watch because he obviously didn’t understand the app. I sincerely hope that the Arc team takes what he says with a grain of salt, because I really enjoy how spaces and profiles are currently handled.
@@GabrielRodriguez-iz9ob Swift. For Windows, they implemented WinUI in Swift on Windows. They took a huge risk and had to create the implementation of WinUI in Swift, and created a bunch of tooling around Swift on Windows that just didn't exist. Presumably they'd want to use Swift on Linux, which is okay, sort of. Gtk bindings for Swift do exist, but what would the implementation look like? Apple and WinUI have distinct, standardized layouts, standard components, with guidance on how an app SHOULD look. GTK and KDE don't exactly have this sort of dynamic, and which would you use?
This seems significantly less convenient than Firefox Multi-Account Containers for my use, but I'm very happy to see some innovation in the browser UI space. It has been stagnant for too long.
@@lukivan8you can achieve vertical tab in Firefox with similar (or IMO better) implementation than arc does. Just browse around firefoxcss subreddit. You're most likely web engineers, CSS does not scare you.
i tried containers and they were meh. I did not find a usecase for having cookie isolation in the same window. also it doesn't isolate search, downloads or history. a separate profile for work and home is a much better flow for a majority of people.
As someone who’s used both, I actually find Arc’s management much more convenient (I haven’t found a way to break up bookmark bars in Firefox by container yet). Having my spaces with their bookmarks readily available is hugely helpful since I freelance for a few separate companies
@@crowmanhusk5644 in cases when you have multiple accounts, lets say, an student account and your every day account. Is really anoying when you have to open another browser window only for 2, maybe 3 websites because you are using other account for that. Instead, containers open that page automatically with your "student" container. I mean, is a really specific use case, but is pretty handy and easy to use. For me, I have 3 containers: my main user account, my student account and the last one for youtube only 😂. Containers are the only extension that keeps me tied to Firefox
As far as I know, their GUI using Swift on Windows is already live and open-source, so people can build their own Swift GUI apps for Windows now too. Would be interesting to see someone trying it.
Tabs in the sidebar is a really great feature. Before Arc I was that crazy person, who used Edge on Mac and Edge on Linux just because it has vertical tabs.
@@d3stinYwOw I'm very open to trying those, but so far the ones I've tried haven't integrated into my workflow as easily as the native Edge way of doing things. Any good recommendations?
While watching your video I agreed with your critique about spaces and profiles. But then I gave the spaces feature a go and having spaces not coupled to profiles makes a ton of sense. If you want the functionality of spaces being treated like different profiles, arc lets you do that. It's also very explicit when you create a new space about that. Moreover, I just wanted sectioning between work and non work but I still want a shared session between them. Spaces gives me that. I would rethink the critique there tbh. Not really a shortcoming of arc, but overall do agree that there are loose ends that they still need to tie up.
I use Arc as well, and for me the biggest draw is that I can have multiple "spaces" (the icons at the bottom) instead of multiple windows open, which makes things soooo much easier.
If you right click on the url when you have it on top rather than in the sidebar there's an option to show the full url so you can keep that extra context. I moved the url to the top and have it showing the full url, I think it's minimal enough that it stays out of my way and I like being able to actually see the full url.
Edge has tons of useless Microsoft bloat that *gets in your way* very badly. Source: I was Edge user for a very long time, but despite all my attempts, including making a huge bootstrap bat file with bunch of feature flags to disable things like Games or upsells, I've eventually found them adding more and [Do you want to reset your settings to Microsoft ones?] more bloat so off-putting I just switched [There's no need to download a new browser. Microsoft recommends ...] to Firefox. Not regretting it a slightest, even though I miss features like Read aloud a lot.
I started using arc way back when it was fairly new for mac and needed an invite. I found that for dev work it wasn’t great and had a few issues - thankfully they’ve fixed these issues and I bloody love it (though I am mostly a windows user at the moment for work)
@@thenewdesign I'm all for trying new things, and so I did give Arc a shot, months ago. I just don't understand its workflow. It looks pretty, but I'm just not seeing the thought process behind how I'm intended to navigate through everything
@@dinckelman Same, I was hyped on it before I actually tried it and on the waiting list for a seeming eternity. I have a bunch of ideas for making a browser myself, but never really dug into it. Arc's choices seem different for different's sake, without adding value. I can't blame Theo, his content path makes it super hard to come up w/ new video ideas so this is one he has to do. The fact that he didn't even know that Arc is canceled and the company is pivoting away from it is a bit surprising though
If Arc was built on top of webkit, I would have been so much more excited; combine that with the sweet sweet unified Swift codebase and you have your audience cut out for you. But no, its just chrome with botox.
been seeing a lot of your videos recently and noticed you used Arc so huge dub i've used it for a while not (discovered it much longer ago when i was a Windows user and was wanting a macbook lmao)
I don't understand, why don't you just use Vivaldi? They're both chromium based whilst Vivaldi is a free software (part of the Free Software Foundation, not open source completely, which is honestly still good), Vivaldi includes plethora of features that work phenomenally, and if you don't want it, you can turn it off. They have sidebars, workspaces, tab tiles, group tabs, tab hibernation, gestures, customisable keybinds, and so much more... Saying this as an ex Vivaldi user of 2+ years.
Could you use arc boost to solve your twitch chat profiles zoom issue. To get sidebar all the time you could use the dev mode with option d And I use cmd L also to see the full url when I need.
i tried Arc a long time ago, but the problem was: they use differnt shortcuts, so my muscle memory (settled from chrome usage) was against me, and Arc Support was not giving a solution, how to have shortcuts like in Chrome. I stopped then using Arc :/
In Windows we have the wonderful Edge browser (if you don't notice its obnoxiousness in advertising Microsoft products), which has borrowed some successful solutions from Arc and from other browsers (vertical tabs, window splitting, fast profiles switching for example).
After getting used to Vivaldi, without even touching most of its features, the gestures became second nature so much so, that when using other browsers, I try to open or close a tab with a gesture and get confused for a second, haha
this is why I'm against using tools that require different shortcuts or gestures, muscle memory is pita. About 10 years ago I wrote a script for a program to make my own shortcuts via F key behavior. A few years back I ended up using the same program on someone laptop my first reaction was to use my shortcuts. Today I don't use any shortcuts aside from the obvious ctrl + c, etc.
@@esnho it's just a neat little customization feature where you can create a preset style for each site. allows you to change the hue of the site and make it darker or lighter.
I've had access to the windows beta and its total booboo. It's unusably buggy/unstable and feels like it only has a fraction of a fraction of the features that mac has implemented.
I feel like Vivaldi already has it all and is around for a very long time compared to Arc, so honestly I'm quite sceptical about it. And hacking your way to build the Swift on Windows even though might be amazing, also sounds like trouble.
From a business point of view, I agree about Swift, but personally, I really hope that it becomes more of a mainstream language and stuff like this helps it
After learning Arc I tried Vivaldi, but I can't agree. Vivaldi's side bar doesn't have a concept of folders to organize your tabs into persistent bookmarks. Vivaldi has just the option to have a vertical tab bar, which is not the same.
The URL bar in full view is a MUST for any front end developer who works on multipage sites with dozens, hundreds or more routes. In fact, I wish I could increase the font size of the URL so can read more easily!! So Arc might work for personal use, but incognito chrome or firefox is a must for front end dev work
Also there is no conept of bookmarks where I just want to save some links without having a tab saved. because If I wanna move out of arc there is no way to export this list.
Wish it could have been easier, but everything you get from Arc out of the box is very possible to achieve in Firefox. It takes some elbow grease, but I even managed to reach near-identical UI and UX experiences with extra capabilities and fixes (e.g. auto-hiding the sidebar to expand above the webpage, fixing the page width closer to standard aspect-ratios and preventing layout shifting risk) that I'm sure will land on Arc in later releases. Firefox does suffer from the same issue of feature prioritisation conflicting with reasonable expiations from the user-base, but it's still worth investing into as the most promising alternative to compete with Chrome and Google's monopolization of the web platform.
3:00 oh nooo. Oh no. I currently have like 50-70+ tabs open (and try to keep it around that number all the time), and some of the tabs I have are open literally for MONTHS. They are not pinned(not static at all), they are more like "todo" but not as much strong as to put them somewhere in bookmarks, or a note. First group is like some github issues I currently have in work (maybe like 5-6), others is some immediately useful learning material, other music, and sometimes some random stuff as well. RU-vid does have "watch later", but it became so cluttered there that I just open it as a tab instead. I feel that I am, surprisingly, very productive with this setup, and overall with the chaotic style of organizing stuff.
Not seeing the URL bar is SOOOOO fucking frustrating for me… If they at least added the option to enable developer mode globally (dev mode shows a blue bar with full url and some buttons, but only for a specific domain) I could swallow it, but the current state is not acceptable at all… Also, I’m daily driving Safari because the “tab overview” feature is a game changer for me and I can’t live without it, whenever I have like 15 tabs of docs open, I just zoom out and I see a grid of all my tabs and it’s perfectly readable (on retina screen anyway 😃), and I can find a tab I want in seconds… the closest thing to this was alt tabbing on windows when using Edge (it showed each tab in the window switcher), but even that is not that good. Sorry, rant over 😂
I would love to hear about your workflow and what is it exactly that constitutes a "browser gets out of my way" behaviour. What are your criteria? Also also also, wouldn't it be even better if someone else actually created another rendering / JS engine instead of reusing Chrome? Or since MS gave up, now everyone bar Apple and Mozilla have given up?
I think the biggest selling point of Arc is that tabs and bookmarks are treated like files siding in an explorer (side bar). You can create folders and start organizing your open tabs into persistent bookmarks with hierarchy structures in separate spaces. It helps to organize your stuff and it's different compared to traditional bookmarks within folders, because their pinned bookmarks are technically just pinned tabs. It's not a link that gets opened in a new tab when you click on it, rather it will open in place, like opening a file. It feels way better to navigate the web like this. It's a pretty solution for people who end up with dozes of tabs on regular browsers. I even enjoy their auto-close feature, which really just archives the tab after a chosen period. I just leave tabs open in the background in case I need them again, if I don't, they will be cleared for me, unless I drag them into my pinned tabs (bookmarks). On top of that, you can also make (pinned) tabs with multiple pages, like shown in the video. It's super handy for contextual workflows.
I haven't looked at Arc but I hate the opinionated idea that tabs go away on their own. Anyway, I'm in the process of dropping Chrome for Vivaldi - have you looked at it?
I am happily giving Arc another try when they are ready for windows. I use both, macos and windows regularly but as long as they aren't ready yet I still use brave
it's always good to have competition. nonetheless, one shouldn't consider "shipping new features" as a reason to ditch a browser. We all agree that a browser is just.. a browser. Honestly what I care the most is stability, efficient resource consumption and no anti consumer moves.
Or, anyway, browsers should just be ... browsers. The more everybody kitchen-sinks them, the more maintenance, security, and usability problems for everybody.
I tend to default back to Safari, but I do really like Arc. I agree about disliking context being lost in the url, like right now I know I'm on youtube, the url should show the more relevant part (the channel/user). The side by side is really cool, not always a fan of disappearing tabs (as someone who opens then and only eventually closes them)
I hate the fact that you can't sync desktop Arc with your mobile Arc browser, I mean there is a mobile browser from Arc team but it is not working properly
using for some time already arc on mobile and mac - same opinion some stuff need to be fixed - for me the payment's is not the same that in chrome but i can live with it. Also gramarly is not integrated in it.Great content as usual.
I feel you fundamentally misunderstand the bookmarks. It is identical to chrome, in the sense one should be able to access them no matter where they are in the browser. As a college student, all my profiles are my different classes and the associated classes with them. The one common thing they have is a canvas page. Rather than pinning canvas to each profile, why would I not just bookmark canvas?
Different zooms I want this desperately! I find it so so so so annoying. Zoom in on one tab and the other tabs get zoomed in too (chrome) idk if this is the same on Arc
Had the same experience, after a day I switched back to Firefox and Chrome on my first try. Now super happy with Arc and learned a thing or two from your video. Thanks Theo
the zoom thing to me, feels like you should just have a different profile for the stream then. the whole point of the spaces with the same profile IMO is that they are the same browser, but you are just context switching but you expect to have the same logins/settings/etc, so if you want different zooms, then its not the same profile, and should setup another profile accordingly. That being said, would be nice to somehow import/export settings between profiles
they things you mention as things you dont like, are the things that I do like. they were explained in the onboarding. The top sections is supposed to be on all spaces with the same profile, thats the expected behavior. it really just sounds you are trying to do what its not setup to do, and then complaining about it. even though you could just create another profile and have it work exactly the way you would expect no problem
and after seeing this video, if i was Arc, i wouldnt fast pass you in either. you dont like some of the core features of the browser, and you run a channel with a large audience, so when you inevitably gripe about arc on windows, it puts out negativity around it.
When you started talking about browsers that introduce meaningful features, I was sure you were going to say you switched to Vivaldi. If I was not a die hard Firefox user, that's what I'd use. If you haven't tried tiled tabs and stacked tabs, you are missing out
Tiled tabs exist on Arc as well (its called split views). Haven't used stacks but I think that might be like folders in Arc? Either way, def agree that these are pretty killer features to have.
*crosses fingers* Please say that you're switching to Firefox, PLEASE! Edit: bruh, you're switching from Chrome, to a closed source chromium fork. I'd rather use an open source browser that isn't just another chromium fork. Also you can do similar stuff on Firefox with a little tweaking and a few add-ons. Also, no Linux support... no thank you.
I've used Arc for a long time and I love it with the profiles/workflow, especially cause I need to be signed in to about 3 accounts for work. However, they seem to be shifting hard to the AI route so I'm a bit worried about Arcs future, might have to switch back to chrome.
Memory management sucks still so I gave up on Arc for third time already. It slows my M1 mac with 16gb ram to a halt every time. The great suspender” works but if you split screen, it suspends the other window. This is only good if you have the patience to manually turn on/off tabs.
feel like many of these critique points coming from a very heavy power users perspective. like the zooming critique, most ppl aren't streamers. feels bit nitpicky. would also argue most ppl don't care about the URL one bit. if they even know how it works lol. so thinking removing it from your view makes the browser less clutter. a big thing why I like it so much. its so much less useless information everywhere.
Microsoft edge feels superior in every way, vertical tabs, profiles, workspaces, copilot, performance. and can be customized a lot. used all the browsers but edge has been my primary browser for almost 2 years and don't think i'll switch to any other.
Arc is by no means perfect, but I still like it and they do address a lot of the concerns relatively quickly-again maybe not as requested, but at least they listen and try to come up with a general solution without bloating it with 500 settings. Something to get used to, but it has been my daily driver for the past year.
I wonder what people think about Edge. I moved over to it when I used a lower powered Apple M1 for work and Edge allowed me to get work done on my 13 inch M1 with 8GB. Even though I have 16 inch M1 with 64GB RAM now I am still on Edge. What I like about it is that it’s like Chrome just better and more efficient.
I've used Edge for around 2 years now, this due to that it renders like Chrome but manages system resources much, much ... better. Chrome also has gone way off what it initially was -- a light and fast browser.
@@TommieHansen Chrome was never never never ever light and fast. Back when Battlefield 3 was started via the browser, the devs even recommended people to switch to firefox for higher ingame performance.
@@Murv I guess you weren't around when it first launched. It blew everybody's minds how fast and light it was, compared to the competition, which was pretty much just Firefox or 4 different awfully slow versions of IE.
This is gonna sound weird but idc about vertical space, I need that horizontal space.... I have about 8 extensions pinned and need to view the full URL a lot for debugging and making easy changes. I don't like Chrome but they are lightyears ahead with development for many use cases
i have a similar setup using firefoxx extensions and css to make it completely side bar oriented, and whenever i watch your videos and that side bar comes up i have been wondering what browser were you using / setup you had. now i got my answer and i definitely going to be looking into this
Arc is good for me when I have 4-5 project profiles I need to switch between. But other than that, the other small features aren't that life saving and keeping me in. Esp the performance is abysmal. I really tried but it is just slow.
Hey Theo 👋 I love your work, and I've learned a lot from you, and improved as a junior engineer. Thank you for all you're doing for the industry and the tech community.
That's weird, when i did the migration it brought over my chrome profiles as separate profiles and the pins on top are completely separate, and the zoom settings are separate. There must be a way to create separate spaces as profiles but I haven't looked into that since I haven't needed it. Then one can have multiple spaces under the same profile, but that can get a little crazy... do i create a space for each project under my profile? is that too much?
it's a very niche browser, i only use it to play videos on a vertical monitor without entering fullscreen, and without all the url bars. i kinda wish chrome had zen mode
