Still hurts
- Typed on the Firefox Browser for macOS
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I’ve moved from Arc to Dia in the past month. Since the acquisition, they’ve been working hard on features that are important to Arc users. I guess it can help to have a new billionaire owner who loves Arc!
These were on my must-have list and are all released or in Early Birds:
- Sidebar tabs
- Better tab folder management
- New tab defaults to search/URL and not chat
- GitHub live folder
I don’t know if they’re going to push non-chat Dia features past Arc’s or just aim for parity, but since I like the design thinking in both browsers, I’m happy.
On the AI side, they’ve taken some steps towards agentic use. It’s the right move but it’s table-stakes now, and I don’t see them releasing anything better than asking one of the frontier models’ desktop apps to drive a browser to build artifacts.
Just sharing my personal update, don’t feel obligated to like Dia, etc.
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I was using Firefox as my second browser for a while now, my first choice was always Safari because being on a Macbook battery is one of my main concerns.
When Tahoe came out I switched to Firefox as my main browser. Safari is not bearable at the moment.
I used Firefox on and off over the last decades. I never liked it. It is slow, it is messy, it is buggy. And now, instead of fixing long consisting bugs or working on its speed, they put AI and more and more features into it. It is wasting memory all over the place.
I wanted to try Zen but with the same engine under the hood it seems to be just marginally better than Firefox.
So I switched to Vivaldi. And I’m so happy with it. It is so much faster, it has a ton of settings to make it work and look like I want it to be. It has a built in adblocker. With a hotkey or mouse gesture I can hide the UI and concentrate on a website. And the settings are not a complete mess.
Why? (What makes it unbearable for you?)
Is Vivaldi still inserting affiliate links into URLs to make money via its users?
(I know money has to come from somewhere and unlike Apple they don’t have a hardware business to “sponsor” the browser development)
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It’s a pity they never did a paid version of Arc. I still can’t find a good replacement, so I have stuck with ArC.
We’ll see how it goes…
Yes but they are very transparent about it. they do not track your browsing history or build a profile of you to sell to advertisers. They view these affiliate deals as the lesser evil compared to the data-mining models of Google or even the ad network model used by Brave.
And you can disable it in the settings. And they don’t need money from Google. Like Firefox.
I don’t think that will ever be profitable, let alone be profitable enough to satisfy the VC vampires. How many people will pay a subscription for a browser? Chrome is free. Edge and Safari are free. And I guess most Arc users are tech-fluent guys who lament the subscription-for-everything trend.
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