It uses whatever rending engine works best on the platform you’re using - Chromium’s main advantage is the extensive plugin library so that’s the one they use on most platforms, though they have said they have internal builds that run on other rending engines and those work fine (except for plugins). If there’s every any reason to drop Chromium they will.
As for being “just another” anything - it really isn’t. The way tabs work is fundamentally different to any other browser. At a glance, it just looks like a basic browser with tabs in the sidebar instead of across the top but it’s so much more than that.
For example most browser have three types of tab - Regular, Pinned, and Incognito. Arc has “Today” tabs, Pinned Tabs, Favourite Tabs (these are closer to “Pinned” tabs in other browsers), “Little” tabs, Split tabs, Popup Tabs, and Incognito tabs.
Notice there is no “regular” on that list - none of the tabs in Arc behave like a regular browser tab. Arc also doesn’t have bookmarks - tabs replace bookmarks. Here’s the breakdown:
Today tabs go away at the end of the day (you can change this to be longer, I don’t recommend doing that). They go into an Archive and can easily be recovered.
Pinned tabs aren’t like pinned tabs are synced between all your devices/browser windows and they stick around until you get rid of them. The process to create and remove a pinned tab is really simple and they are organised in groups and folders. Pinned tabs won’t necessarily bne running in RAM, so in a way they’re almost like a bookmark.
Favorite tabs appear as just an icon instead of a full tab, and they appear in all of your groups (within a profile). They are also pre-loaded — handy for web apps that take a while to load.
A Little tab tab doesn’t have tabs - it harkens back to the old days when the web was a lot simpler. It’s useful for quickly looking something up and then closing it a few seconds later. Links from other apps open in this mode by default.
Split tabs are a single tab that contains multiple webpages - e.g. you might have your zoom meeting and your notes as a single tab.
Popup tabs are similar to “little” tabs, except instead of being in a separate window they are embedded in a tab. If you have, for example, your issue tracker as a pinned tab, and you load up a link to a different domain name, it will open in one of these. You can go back to your issue tracker by closing the popup tab instead of hitting the back button six times… but it will still be a single tab for both your issue tracker and the link that the issue tracker took you to.
Incognito works the same as any other browser.
Yes - it is closed source… but it uses an unmodified open source rendering engine and for me that’s good enough.
Nice explanation. I haven’t used it enough to judge yet myself. So far I find myself frustrated with the merging of tabs and bookmarks. Perhaps I’ll get used to it but it makes no sense to me yet. I see no viable substitute for traditional browser bookmarks (at least not the way I use them). 95% of my bookmarks are pages I do not visit every week or even every month. Where are they supposed to go where they’re both accessible and out of the way? Folders don’t seem like a solution to me.
Edit: another day in and I get it now. I realize now that opening folders in the pinned tabs section is madness, but there is a viable alternative: hover over the folder, then scroll/search for the bookmark you want and click it. That “tab” will now appear under the folder under pins, but the folder otherwise remains closed. So my tabs list does not get cluttered with inactive bookmarked pages, only the ones I have specifically opened, and only until I close them.
This isn’t a huge departure from “traditional” bookmarks systems.
So far I find that Lemmy specifically is much better in Arc, because link to external sites open in popup tabs. All this time I’ve been spawning whole new tabs using keyboard/mouse combos like an animal. The future is now!
It uses whatever rending engine works best on the platform you’re using - Chromium’s main advantage is the extensive plugin library so that’s the one they use on most platforms, though they have said they have internal builds that run on other rending engines and those work fine (except for plugins). If there’s every any reason to drop Chromium they will.
As for being “just another” anything - it really isn’t. The way tabs work is fundamentally different to any other browser. At a glance, it just looks like a basic browser with tabs in the sidebar instead of across the top but it’s so much more than that.
For example most browser have three types of tab - Regular, Pinned, and Incognito. Arc has “Today” tabs, Pinned Tabs, Favourite Tabs (these are closer to “Pinned” tabs in other browsers), “Little” tabs, Split tabs, Popup Tabs, and Incognito tabs.
Notice there is no “regular” on that list - none of the tabs in Arc behave like a regular browser tab. Arc also doesn’t have bookmarks - tabs replace bookmarks. Here’s the breakdown:
Yes - it is closed source… but it uses an unmodified open source rendering engine and for me that’s good enough.
so, are there chances that in future there can be builds based on gecko?
Nice explanation. I haven’t used it enough to judge yet myself. So far I find myself frustrated with the merging of tabs and bookmarks. Perhaps I’ll get used to it but it makes no sense to me yet. I see no viable substitute for traditional browser bookmarks (at least not the way I use them). 95% of my bookmarks are pages I do not visit every week or even every month. Where are they supposed to go where they’re both accessible and out of the way? Folders don’t seem like a solution to me.
Edit: another day in and I get it now. I realize now that opening folders in the pinned tabs section is madness, but there is a viable alternative: hover over the folder, then scroll/search for the bookmark you want and click it. That “tab” will now appear under the folder under pins, but the folder otherwise remains closed. So my tabs list does not get cluttered with inactive bookmarked pages, only the ones I have specifically opened, and only until I close them.
This isn’t a huge departure from “traditional” bookmarks systems.
So far I find that Lemmy specifically is much better in Arc, because link to external sites open in popup tabs. All this time I’ve been spawning whole new tabs using keyboard/mouse combos like an animal. The future is now!