Yeah, in my opinion this is highly dependent on how many tabs you usually have open. If it’s usually 1-5, traditional tab setups are better IMO. Some browsers, like Orion, allows for quick switching between the two modes. That’s pretty nice! (I think it should be possible to recreate that in Firefox as well.)
How exactly do you use Velja in this context? How does it differ from just setting a new browser as the default in settings?
I’ve been looking into using OpenIn (which looks like the same type of app - but it’s part of Setapp) to replicate Little Arc: By having Firefox Developer Edition acting as Little Fox, and using the “Send Page to Device” feature to send it to the main app.
I basically use Velja for the rules I can set to use specific browsers and it enables me to easily change the default browser via the top Menu bar instead of having to fish through System Settings to make that change.
Going back to my point about Safari, this is one of the quirks of that browser that prevents me from using it more consistently. For work, without going into too much detail, when I need to log into my remote desktop via my home Mac, it barfs in the authentication step when I have Safari as my default browser. So via Velja, I set a rule so that when I open my remote desktop app, which then generates a browser window, I force it to open Brave instead of my default.
And as noted, having that Velja icon in the top Menu bar, I can easily just change my default to Safari or any other browser if I’m in the mood to test things out or just try using a specific browser for a bit. And having that previous rule lets me use Safari or Firefox or Arc for everything else if I so choose.
I got the following set up with OpenIn two seconds ago:
I like the Little Arc idea of links opened from mail, messaging, Mastodon apps (etc.) opening in a separate window, as opposed to gunking up my main browser. So now my general rule (through OpenIn) is that stuff opens in Firefox Developer Edition (which acts as my Little Fox). Then I made a BetterTouchTool action (launched through a hotkey) for the following:
Activate the right click action “Send Page to Device → Erlend’s Firefox Macbook Pro”.
Close the tab (in Dev Edition)
Hide Dev edition
Open regular Firefox
Switch to the new tab
And then I set it so that when opening links in my document apps, links just open in regular Firefox (which I prefer).
What it doesn’t duplicate from Little Arc, is that I can send it to a specific Panel in Sideberry (which is like the Profiles in Arc) - but I’m still pretty happy!
A few years ago I followed the instructions on Chrome is Bad to completely clean it out of my system and never looked back. It’s bloated spyware and chrome extensions work great in Brave and Vivaldi, so no one needs it anymore even if they need a Chromium browser. I think it’s just habit that keeps people using it.
Vivaldi doesn’t have Brave’s outstanding anti-fingerprinting, but it’s easily the most customizable and powerful browser I’ve tried, and it’s not VC funded. I’ve found both Brave’s and Vivaldi’s built in ad blocking works just as well as uBlock Origin.
Still, I don’t like feeding the Chromium monoculture, and have been using Firefox more. I’m impressed by how light and fast it feels. Updates install much faster and it seems to use less battery power on a MacBook than Chromium browsers. It’s less hardened for privacy than Brave ootb, but there are guides to doing it manually, and there’s Arkenfox.
Safari is still my favourite browser, but there are a few open source extensions I rely on which are only available on Chrome/Firefox.
Recently I’ve swapped from Firefox to Opera and so far it’s fantastic. Vertical tabs, horizontal tab groups, workspaces. That’s pretty much everything I want. I’d never wanted it but the built in support for FB Messenger, WhatsApp & Telegram is pretty nice.
The only thing I miss is syncing tabs to mobile but … meh.
Yeah, I like Vivaldi! (They’re also based in the town I live! I’d never do it, of course, but it feels good to be able to go down there if they were to misbehave. )
Have you checked out Floorp?
Pretty dumb name, but after poking around, it seems like a very nice Firefox fork, with some of the best stuff from Vivaldi (like the little bar for web apps on the right side, and easy switching between vertical and horizontal tabs).
Maybe that could be something for you to check out as well, @adamshand ? They use Firefox sync, so I think you should be able to get mobile sync with the Firefox mobile browsers. (Which are very mediocre - but still!)
I feel that Firefox is the best choice morally. Every year, I attend the FOSDEM (open source developer conference), and I usually end up trying Firefox as they often promote the latest version there. Despite being a huge advocate of open source, I cannot ever bring myself to stay with it. I am also an Arc user, and it is much harder now that Arc has come along because comparing a native Swift app makes Firefox feel really outdated.
I never last more than a couple of days as I find I miss the features of Arc and its speed and responsiveness. The Firefox and Chrome interfaces feel really slow and unattractive compared to Arc or Safari, and I simply don’t enjoy using those apps. Safari is similar, and I like the native look and feel, but it is so uncommon in my country that most websites break on it, especially public services like train and tax services.
I should use Firefox, but I don’t because I haven’t found an extension to sync open tabs as Arc, Edge or Orion do. I see in the screenshot that you are using Sideberry, are you able to sync open tabs across sessions on different computers?
Ooh, that’s a good question… I don’t have two machines, so I can’t really test it. But I did find some discussions, pointing towards at least partial support and progress, here and here..
What it does support, is Snapshots, which I think is like loadouts. Not the same, though! And I haven’t tried it much yet, as I’ve just recently went back to trying my best to make Firefox close to how good I find Arc.
Hah - reading this feels like reading something I could’ve written myself! 🫶🏻
I made my first post here into a blog post yesterday, and there I rephrased a part which I think is relevant:
If someone asks me how good I think macOS is — should I answer how good I think it is out-of-the-box (“State A”), or after I’ve customised it and added a bunch of third-party software (“State B”)? I think State B is the most relevant — but I also think it’s relevant how hard/expensive it is to get it there.
In State A, Firefox is slightly worse than Safari, and much worse than Arc. On the plus side, the other two browsers can’t be improved that much — while Firefox’s State B is a huge improvement. Then I’d say it’s better than Safari and on par with Arc. However, getting it there is far too difficult (but luckily not expensive).
I care about how my apps look and feel - and Firefox just feels so uninspired compared to something like Arc. Again, I’m only pointing fingers at the leadership there, not the devs - but I wish someone had the time and responsibility to just make it nice. However, I do think it’s pretty fast. (But that also might because I used SigmaOS for a month, after stopping with Arc, and that can feel a bit sluggish sometimes. )
I think Floorp improves the State A of “Firefox” by quite a lot. And part of me wishes I started my journey with “Making the best State B of Firefox possible” with that instead of the OG. But I want to see if I can make it shareable, and then it’s easier to ask people to download the official app.
Speaking of, I’d love to hear about your favourite features of Arc, that you miss in Firefox. Here are some things I’ve (more or less) managed to recreate:
Little Arc
Vertical tabs, with different profiles (via Sideberry)
Hotkey, with feedback, to share the current link
(IMO) cleaner looks
Here’s a slightly updated screenshot from the one above:
I like the shadow effect at the bottom of the tabs, showing there’s more, and the rounded edges, and shadows for the “Profiles” and “Pinned” at the top of the tab bar.
One thing I don’t understand from Firefox, is that I think the logo and colour pallette is great - but they don’t use it at all in the design. So I’ve taken colours from it for the lines indicating tab levels - and I’ve also made gradients here and there in the menus, like this:
For Mac, I’ve been using Firefox forever. I think Safari is nice enough, but strongly prefer Firefox, probably out of habit. Now, if I could, I would run it on Windows too, but my corporate machine is locked way down so I have the choice of Edge or Chrome. Having never been able to enjoy Chrome, I am using Edge there.
Then we come to iOS and iPadOS - here I strongly prefer Safari. I think it’s excellent on the phone, and better than Firefox on the iPad. I’m thinking the forced use of the WebKit-engine really doesn’t give me Firefox at all, just a skinned version of Safari. Hoping the relaxed policies might soon give us a Gecko-based Firefox on iOS too, at least in the EU.
So, all in all, I’m very agnostic and use what works best for me in any given situation, but my heart belongs to Firefox.
Yeah, I strongly prefer Safari on iOS and iPadOS myself. But I think Apple forcing everyone to use WebKit becomes much worse when they also prevent anyone else from having extensions.
I mean, if Firefox could actually make a skin for Safari, it would be an upgrade compared to today! Because then I would be able to use 1Password, Superagent, StopTheMadness etc.
Now, I get that these two things are connected. (As no one else is allowed to offer WebKit extensions on the Mac either! See SigmaOS and Orion.) But I think blocking other browsers from having extensions is one of the most blatant anti-competitive moves from Apple.
Like, if Firefox (or anyone else) wants auto-dark mode on websites, they have to hard code it themselves. While Apple doesn’t have to do s**t because (the great) Noir does it for them. (And they took 15-30% of what I paid Noir to improve Safari! )
I’ve heard of it and it looks very interesting but I haven’t tried it. It’s from Japan, so I’m guessing it’s the transliteration of a Japanese word. I like that it’s based on Gecko.
I have to say that Floorp is basically a nice customisable Firefox theme in itself and all the plugins seem to work. And regarding plug-ins, Tab Stash seems a viable alternative to Sidebery or Tree Style Tabs that happen to sync the sessions via the bookmark sync, so it’s a good option.
Yes! I feel like I should use Firefox to support browser diversity but I don’t.
Maybe there is a safari plugin that fakes the browser information for websites and tells them that I am using Firefox? That would solve the problem for me.
I tried using it so many times as I think of myself as a privacy-focused user and every time I returned to Chromium (Brave) or Safari. Honestly, the Reddit army also forces it down your throat lol.
I feel it’s an inferior browser in many aspects:
Almost ZERO support for automation (this is a big NO for me)
The extension ecosystem is weak compared to Chrome. No competition here. Lol even Safari is getting better at this than Firefox.
Battery Life (argh. Safari > Brave > Chrome > Firefox)
Speed (Brave > Chrome/Safari > Firefox)
Support for websites (Chrome > Safari/Brave > Firefox)
The only thing it is better at out of the box is it privacy-focused, but people who know “stuff” (especially MPUers) can make Brave and Safari equally private as well. (uBlock, DNS, config changes, etc.)
I’ve went Safari → Orion → Firefox → Arc → SigmaOS → Firefox - and I gotta say: I mostly agree with you.
I’m on a base model MacBook Pro M1 (Pro) 14" (so not incredibly powerful, but not bad), and don’t use it on battery much - so I don’t read too much into the fact that I haven’t noticed any problems with speed or battery life. But I am very annoyed that Firefox isn’t better…
Like, when you’re the underdog that’s trying to punch above your weight, you at least have to be at your best. It would be hard for Firefox to win back market cap even if it was better than the others.
I really, really, hope Mozilla’s new leadership (who has said Firefox is going to be a larger priority!) changes focus. To me it seems obvious, that Step 1 to get back users should be “Make Firefox an amazing browser to use, on every platform.” - but Mozilla doesn’t seem to agree.
Regarding some of your points:
Hard agree on the automation! I recently found Mozeidon, btw. - which could help a bit here. Check it out!
I actually think the extension ecosystem is pretty good! I’ve found everything I need - and now that Chrome is losing uBlock Origin, Firefox gets a leg-up there. And uBlock Origin and things like Tampermonkey can, with scripts, fill many roles, instead of having 100 extensions installed.
I really think the point about “Support for websites” in inaccurate. It’s the websites who have poor Gecko (Firefox)/WebKit (Safari) support - not the other way around. I had two typical examples recently, while working on my website:
Blink/Chromium has a bug with the popular effect that is used to blur webcontent that’s beneath things like menu bars. However, even though it worked perfectly in WebKit and Gecko, I had to find a workaround because it didn’t work in Blink (due to the market share). Now, if something similar where to happen where it only works in Blink, and not in WebKit and Gecko, too many devs don’t bother with a workaround, and just ships it in this state.
Another example is from when I added drop caps (you know, when the first letter of a paragraph/post is much bitter than the others). Gecko does this way better than Blink and WebKit - however, because the other two has poor support, I had to go for a solution that comprimises how it ends up looking in Gecko!
Oh, and you can add to this that there are several things that Gecko and/or WebKit starts to support, but that Google just doesn’t like (like good Passkey support), and then just vetos out of existence. Maybe Google lands on a different solution (sometimes better, sometimes worse), and powers through. After a while, the others have to follow - and then everyone says “Omg, they’re so slow in supporting new stuff!”.
I tend to bounce between Safari, Firefox, and Chrome , sometimes using all 3 in the same day if the task requires it!
I’m back to Firefox as my main. Why? Pros
Cross platform and Cross Apple ID. I use multiple operating systems and physical computers on the daily. Personal work is on my personal Macbook with my personal ID, and work for my employer is on. my employer’s Macbook with my work Apple ID. Safari cannotsync bookmarks, etc. across both AppleIDs and Operating systems, so I use Firefox because it can.
Extensions - I don’t use a ton, but the ones I do use are not available on Safari.
Interface - Chrome was my main browser until they dumbed down bookmark navigation and removed the side panel, which I loved. Firefox wins in the interface battle.
Customization - About:config in Firefox lets me do things like open pop-up windows in tabs so that my extension still work in the window! That is just one example.
Profile specific proxy - I use web proxies extensively, different proxies for different use cases. Safari only allows one.
Cons
No Keyboard Maestro integration. KM can control Safari a lot better than it can Firefox. I use KM for automation so that lack of granular control is a negative.
power saving - Safari wins on saving power
Password and OTP autofill - Using Safari, one time passwords sent to my phone or email can be detected and automatically filled in sign in forms. I really wish Firefox had this!
Uncertainty of Design - While design changes haven’t killed the deal for me in the past, sometime Firefox will do things like remove dividers between tabs or remove features just like Chrome. I have to be wary of updates as I don’t know what beloved feature they will mess with next.
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(And they took 15-30% of what I paid Noir to improve Safari! 
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