“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.
> 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.
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.
With something as wide scoped as a browser this inevitably comes down to "well the 200 things I think are relevant do/don't work the same in favor of a/b" out of tens of thousands, if not more, of things implemented.
For me Firefox is about as good as any. Upsides here, downsides there, and nothing truly outstanding overall. It seems severely far behind in modern color (e.g. HDR videos or all of the wide gamut CSS specifications coming out), ahead in terms of single profile compartmentalization (containers), but behind in profile management (the profile manager sucks if you even know how to get to it). For as much as it champions being the last bastion of the free web it comes default with a decent amount of crapware (pocket, vpn) and has lost its way in terms of power user flexibility (UI customization, mobile extension limits, removal of power user flags). That said it's still better than the alternatives in those spaces, just not as good as it used to be.
For another none of these might matter but a lot of other reasons I don't even think about might. In the end even Firefox's own usage statistic point to the vast majority seeming to agree it doesn't have anything compelling enough to be worth switching to/evangelizing for anymore though.
Firefox has image rescaling that doesn't blow chunks at non-integer scales.
For example scaling up the page 120% to be able to more easily read text that the designer made too small doesn't turn all the images on the page into a blurry mess like it does on Chrome.
I've tried reporting bug reports to the Chromium project, but they can't seem to understand the concept and keep misfiling the reports as duplicates of irrelevant bugs and closing them as fixed without having fixed the problem.
Constant crashes that lose open tabs, layout glitches where display gets offset from ui trigger points (including on this site), downloads that just fail / don't work.
You'd think that this would have me stop using it, but I really don't want to use Chrome/Brave/DDG so have just been putting up with it.
Like most small-backing Chromium clones it's usually ~2 months behind on patches (normal and security) and the published source is about ~10 months behind. Being effectively closed for the release version and very small from a development side it does wonky things like redirect your "Google" searches through their servers since they don't have proper search agreements.
I.e. it's basically "an interesting Chromium clone maintained by a couple of folks out of Estonia". If you're cool with that it can be a nifty browser, for many that just makes it to unproven to dump access to their entire online world into.
"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.
Vulnerabilities in the browser engine is only part of the issue. Plenty of malicious activity involves tricking the user or silently spying on them - blocking advertising/spyware/etc domains will greatly help with that.
It's the most popular browser by far, and they actually do have a very publicized team that reports bugs to not just Chrome, but Apple and Mozilla as well. In my circles this is well respected, and personally, it inspires more confidence in the infrastructure around Chrome to me. I'd be wary of any "new" browser engines in unsafe languages.
Just that people don’t consider chrome extremely secure, it may be acceptable 99% of the time, but it doesn’t get a free pass in extreme security environments.
What is the 'extreme security environment' you have in mind? Very little end-user software operates in an environment and with operational parameters as adversarial as a modern web browser's.
> Last month Google announced 30 new security including critical vulnerabilities in chrome.
This doesn't mean chrome is less secure than other options, it means people are heavily incentivized to find and report security problems and google is open about issues that are found.
This makes me feel better about chrome's security, not worse, and I say this as someone who is overall kind of iffy on google these days.
Firefox's problem is the company behind it, not the rendering engine. Firefox is actually a pretty fine browser if you pair it with uBlock Origin and neuter its wide range of user-hostile "features" and keep maintaining that as updates often introduce new "features" you'll need to disable.
Sure. This has happened before and they do eventually fix it. Then a different problem might happen on another page a few months later, and this'll last a few weeks.
Probably best solved by changing banks... firefox works just fine with the ~4 banks I currently use. Though the situation is probably worse on the usa-side of the pond.
Conversely, one of my banks returns a server error if you visit from Chrome. Their "solution" was to put a banner at the top advising an alternate browser.
Not only Mozilla's privacy claims are smoke and mirrors (you need uBlock Origin to get any reasonable privacy on the web today - why is it not included by default despite being permissively licensed?), they have opt-out telemetry (in breach of the GDPR), the browser will load a page with Google Analytics on first run and will nag you with bullshit on nearly every update (and it updates often) not to mention change the UI all the time for no good reason.
Firefox is the most user-hostile free & open-source software that I know of, and more hostile than a lot of paid, proprietary software.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately no, only personal experience working in bunch of different companies (some US based, some EU) where they've employed agencies like that and gotten the result they wanted (an article published).
Seeing as its a closed beta, I don't really have any links to any reading material on the app - However here are some screenshots however showing the Chromium pages within Arc Browser and some of the supporting files within the app bundle.
https://imgur.com/a/DXE1x0m
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.
There's a difference between forking a full browser (this is quite easy initially, but down the road your fork may end up being difficult to maintain) and building a new browser on top of the rendering engine (Blink here, could be Gecko or Webkit). In the latter case, the initial investment is higher, so getting to a daily driver product requires more effort. However long term that can be beneficial because you don't conflict that much with upstream changes.
Writing a new rendering engine and browser on top is totally different effort as you may guess.
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.
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.
+ 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
"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.
> 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?
> 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.
5? more like 10. Servo was in development for 8 years before Mozilla pulled the plug and it was nowhere near production ready. And the people working on it were experienced browser engineers already.
> 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.
Well, Google didn’t develop a new engine for Chrome. They forked WebKit. And then Samsung, Microsoft, and others forked Chromium for their own browsers. (These forks are kept close to Chromium, but they’re still forks.)
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
