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Discussion on: Have you tried the Arc browser?

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

Any product behind a waitlist is sus as far as I'm concerned, but once it's actually out I might give it a look.

Their website shows a lot of red flags to me:

Apple-centric talk

Arc is to your ex-browser what the iPhone was to cellphones. Or as one of our members said “like moving from a PC to a Mac.” It’s from the future — and just feels great.

Phrases like this turn me off. They're implying that Apple software is better, which is irrelevant to the issue at hand,

Compatibility problems baked-in

They go on to quote,

Arc is “the Chrome replacement I’ve been waiting for

followed by,

Arc is Chromium without the junk

...and I look at it very cautiously. Arc is based on Chromium, so it's not a "Chrome replacement" in any real sense, and the fact that it doesn't work on Windows (yet) or Linux (at all) is disturbing, since Chromium does. They've taken Chromium and deliberately broken it. That's not removing the junk, that's adding stuff that you know doesn't work for the majority of your users. And that's a weird business choice.

Have we learned from Brave?

Brave was very equivalent to Firefox with a few privacy-centric addons and some weird crypto bolted on.
Arc smells like Chromium with some privacy-centric addons bolted-on, and I can easily imagine the crypto (or whatever future capitalist tech) landing in a year's time.

Happy to be proved wrong though!

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bobdotjs profile image
Bob Bass

No, don't think of it as a chromium wrapper. It's fundamentally different. Even though it uses chromium it changes the way you use your browser in a way that Brave/Opera/etc x10 don't.

I was skeptical but I'm completely sold now.