Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamie_ca | Hacker News Reader

Writing was on the wall once they pivoted to Dia, I'm pretty happy having switched to Zen (though for a few things that matter, it's Firefox-based not Chrome).

https://zen-browser.app/

They picked up a lot of cues from Arc - sidebar tabs, pinned vs generic tabs, global bookmarks, spaces...

View on HN

+1 for Zen. It's got a lot of Arc's neat UX but without all the AI garbage.

I find it odd Arc has AI garbage when Dia was supposed to be their AI browser. If they were going to put AI in Arc anyway, they should have stuck with one browser instead of rug pulling everyone right as it started to actually take off.

I’m pretty sure I saw more Arc videos posted after Dia than before. None of the people seemed to be aware that the browser they were pushing was effectively end of life.

> I find it odd Arc has AI garbage when Dia was supposed to be their AI browser.

Arc existed long before Dia, and had AI shoved into it when LLMs exploded, then the company decided to go all-in on an AI browser, Dia, and orphaned Arc...

But to their point, why rug pull instead of updating Arc? My guess is it has something to do with The Browser Company's acquisition by Atlassian

Yeah, makes sense.

I use Zen as my work browser but weirdly the developers seem to have a few Arc features they are actively opposed to despite ... let's say taking heavy inspiration from Arc otherwise. Two examples I can think of off the top of my head are the auto closing of tabs, and preventing websites from taking over certain keyboard shortcuts.

Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't Firefox have all those features? Why put third party intermediary between you and the source?

1) No they don't 2) Zen had them first

Firefox is "copying" from Zen, and I think that's good. I do like Zen, but I wouldn't mind having all the features in Firefox (and imho some of the UI lately in Zen is... weird)

Could you list a couple of things you find wierd? Wondering if its worth switching

Not OP, but I am not a fan of the newly introduced library. Exploring my history is bad in Firefox, and this is even worse. It doesn’t show full page titles, so it’s almost impossible to find the right page.

Agreed. It’s really annoying to be honest.

Honestly, pretty much this :')

History feels like the only part of Firefox that is still stuck somewhere in the late noughties. They should just copy what Chrome and Safari have done and make it a webpage instead of a separate window.

Slight correction with Safari, it uses a native NSOutlineView rather than a webpage, but the point that history works better in the main browser window stands.

Honestly, I haven't found browser history to be useful anymore. Not in 6 or 7 years. Too many sites are SPAs with server-side state, breaking the back button, breaking multiple open tabs in the same application, or breaking both.

I go hunting for pages i read months ago and need to reference again pretty often. Browser history containing only the site and title isn't great for that but it's what i have

Firefox's visible UI is made of webpages. They just decided to open this webpage in separate window without an option to do otherwise. Still can access it by visiting `chrome://browser/content/places/places.xhtml`.

Pretty sure in most/all the cases mentioned, they were available as extensions long before Zen had them. In particular, both Zen's and Firefox's built-in vertical tabs feel like a bit of a downgrade from Tree Style Tabs (which I continue to use on Firefox, and also used on Zen last time I tried it).

Depends on what one values. I tried TST and Sidebery among other extensions for Firefox, but their "bolted on" feeling always bothered me. That can be somewhat fixed with userChrome mods, but those tend to be fragile and it's not unusual for them break with updates, and even with the mods they're not as integrated as native vertical tabs.

For my personal usage I find the deep nesting of TST to get in the way more than it helps and so the simpler model of Arc/Zen where nesting only happens intentionally is nice.

Indeed you need to write some firefox css to use either TST or Sidebery. But it's pretty rare for it to break. It actually broke a few days ago, I fixed it in a few minutes - ctrl+shift+alt+i opens the developer tools for the browser UI itself, then it's a matter of selecting the faulty element and writing the CSS to hide it or whatever. Or, ask a LLM to write the CCS for you. Or check out https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/ since probably someone has posted a fix there

> even with the mods they're not as integrated as native vertical tabs.

Hmm what's Sidebery missing?

I was maintaining such a setup for a while and didn't have such luck. Sometimes it'd fully break and sometimes things would shift around due to other CSS changing, but whatever the case it's more than I had the patience to babysit.

> Hmm what's Sidebery missing?

The extensions themselves aren't lacking, but they suffer from being extensions and not part of the browser proper, which makes for occasional weird interactions and glitches and the "seams" between extension and host becoming tangible from time to time. Things just work better when the browser "knows" about the tabs being vertical and having deeper organization than is possible with horizontal tab bars, or is even designed around vertical tabs being the only option (like Arc/Zen).

Note that Firefox nowadays has vertical tabs. It's just less powerful than Sidebery (like, not sure if they nest)

Might be true, but that was not the point. The comparision was Firefox and Zen, not Firefox, Zen and whatever else is out there :>

Not to the degree of polish that Zen has. Source: I ran into a single particularly annoying Zen bug and attempted this: both myself and an agent.

You can add all the features, but you can't make them work well together (or look nice in some cases - which does matter!)

I used and love TST (plus a huge number of extensions - TST is an extension that is extended with further extensions!) but it's complex and clunky.

Sidebery can do the 80% of TST that matters, with a better UI and UX and saner defaults. Also it has a feature to save and restore all tabs, with the whole tree structure preserved (even though I think it should be its own extension)

Only problem is that I suspect that Sidebery has severe memory leaks (not entirely sure it's the culprit though)

Yes, the new library has so many problems, one of which is forced adoption. Zen fork time??

> first

Firefox has those features now, that's all that matters. Not sure I wanna trust a solo dev on my daily browser, however competent they are.

No it doesn't, don't cherry pick what fits your narrative. Firefox has vertical tabs, that's it. It's great that Firefox finally has native support for vertical tabs, but its roughly 10% of what I like in Arc/Zen.

Split tab view, convert to vertical/horizontal split, the easily swipable spaces... the list goes on

> vertical tabs, that's it

split panels, profile switcher, tab groups...

The 90% remaining are UI gimmicks that are irrelevant anyway (mods, custom cursor, free canvas?). Even when Arc was still alive they're useless which is why the browser died (it sucked at doing things that matter). Zen just picked up this lack of focus and make it worse with the solo maintainer situation.

Maybe I haven't looked too deep into Firefox multi-profile config, but:

- The distinction between pinned (soft-bookmarked) tabs and other tabs is very useful for me organizing things at work. (I didn't like when Arc added a setting to auto-delete other tabs X days after creating, though)

- Multiple "spaces" on the tab bar combined with global bookmarks at the top mean I can have a space for planning work and one for implementation work, and from both of those I have an easy link to Jira to search up tickets without needing to hop back and forth.

Personally, I just like the design of Zen more. With Firefox I felt like I was stuck with the same old UI forever. I'm not sure what Mozilla was doing with those bags of money from Google. I imagine Arc managed to do a lot more with their browser with way less money than Mozilla.

> I'm not sure what Mozilla was doing with those bags of money from Google.

Being paid to not compete. That includes taking any sort of UI risk that would lead to evolution.

Crest (https://crestbrowser.com/) looks like an interesting option. You can use both Chrome and Safari as the backing engine, and its main goal is basically to replicate all of Arc's features. Still feels a bit immature but it already implements a lot of the functionality. I still haven't tried it as a full-time replacement but I just might with this annoucement.

Am using it right now. iCloud sync of tabs/spaces can get funky; zoom is persisted to the tab, not the host, which is just bizarre but there's a roadmap to correct that to what it should be; be nice if they implemented a native adblocker but otherwise this has been a solid experience.

Looks good. Will try it out later

Are the shortcuts for moving between tabs and spaces good? I can see the appeal of the sidebar and the split view is genuinely cool, but it's features, like glance, feels really cursor heavy. Clicking on a page and then going back to the search results is so fast with a keyboard or track gestures. I want fewer mouse movements not more.

They're pretty good. There's a shortcut settings that lets you assign shortcuts for moving between spaces. I use Tridactyl for moving between tabs, though.

Zen is great on Mac, but on Windows it is nowhere near how good Arc felt (on MacOS). I think this is just a problem with the OS, with it not supporting SwiftUI and all that, but nonetheless, there doesn't seem to be a good browser for Windows. I am still using Chrome on Windows because A) I already use it and B) Vertical tabs are usable, and C) I have enough RAM for it

If only Zen was in the repositories of my Linux system, I'd have given it a try. Not a fan of running a browser of all things from outside the repositories.

Should maybe request it then.

It's also in Flatpak, if that makes a difference.

I intentionally run it from Flatpak, even though NixOS has it, because you _really_ need a browser to update at a faster cadence.

Alas! I made the jump to Zen browser but shitty support for audio share across tabs made work impossible. So back to Chrome (yes, need Google Meet for livelihood).

Zen turned to shit for me in the last month. So many stupid bugs started happening. For example, clicking on exes in the downloads would retrigger the download instead of running the file. Random crashes. I was able to drag the whole window by clicking on random parts of the page (I noticed this as I highlight text during reading). It got very slow. I tried to report these but the button to report would actually redirect to Firefox's feedback page lol.

I switched to Brave, migrated in a few minutes literally and feel much better.

I looked at this a while back but couldn't figure out how to migrate bookmarks from Arc to Zen. Is that possible now?

Yes, there's a github tool. I just ran the Arc-to-Zen tool from https://github.com/Thinkscape/arc-to-zen and it imported everything flawlessly. Zen now appears to be a drop-in replacement. Try it out!

Oh! Nice surprise, switched instantly! Love it!

The pivot from one new browser to another new ai browser was insanely bad optics and aura loss.

Why is the first thing after the "calmer internet" intro an ad to another app?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com