Whew. I’m glad I’m not the only one. I think I’ll give them some feedback. Thanks.
1 Like
Huh. I’ve never noticed any of that, even when I’m using Arc on my MacBook Air with the trackpad gestures. Yes, you do have to do them right, but that’s always the case with multi-touch gestures.
Most of my usage is on my iMac, however, where I use a Contour Designs Rollermouse instead of the trackpad, so there I switch space with the keyboard shortcuts, which work exactly as expected.
And yes, Arc has been free to download since July, but it does require an account so all your tabs and workspaces sync across all your devices.
Here’s the issue I experience almost daily. If, while using two fingers to scroll a page, you accidentally veer (just a little) left, it will interpret that as the “Back” gesture. However, if that tab has no history, it “goes back” to the root level of the site, and there is no “forward” history entry to return to where you were. It’s punishing to suddenly lose your page becasue you accidentally moved slightly off a true vertical movement.
Safari will also suprise you with a sudden “Back,” but it’s not as easily activated by accident, and in that browser the “Forward” gesture will return you to where you began. (Yes, I’ve reported this to Arc.)
I have never triggered this before on my MacBook Pro. Tried it now, and it worked as you explained, but when I did it in the opposite direction, it returned to where I began. Arc Version 1.21.2 (44530)
Afraid I’m a “me too” with @paal on this. Not doubting your experience, but on my setup (MBP in clamshell, 27" monitor, Apple Trackpad), it takes more than a slight deviation while scrolling to trigger the “back” action. If it do trigger it, the opposite “forward” gesture returns me back to where I was. I’ve tried several different tabs, but I can’t reproduce what you’re seeing. Very strange. (Arc 1.21.3, macOS Sonoma 14.2.1).
1 Like
I wasn’t really asking for confirmation, but thanks for trying.
In regard to the “back/forward” issue, I think what you’re missing is that it occurs when the tab has no history.Logically, Back shouldn’t go anywhere, as it’s a brand new tab, but it does, and then it forgets from whence it came.
In terms of the accidental “back” swipes, as I said, it never happens to me in Safari. Same equipment, same fingers, same caffeine level, etc. I suspect that Chromium is doing its own gesture recognition and it’s not as finely tuned.
These are reproducible 100% of the time for me (same OS and app version that you indicated). But, let’s not dive down this rabbit hole any further, as it’s an Arc support issue, and I’m pretty sure they’re not listening here.
An improvement I would like to see in Arc is a window navigator in which the title of the window starts with the space. Otherwise, I find myself needing to switch the space of the current window. Information navigation is key to “contextual computing” (which is what Hookmark is optimized for).
Hmm! Would adding the space name to the front of the window name in the Window menu address that? I only occasionally have multiple real Arc windows open. Little Arc windows are another story—I open and close them regularly.
1 Like
Yes, that is what I had in mind too.
I know that Arc is based on Chromium, and the recent leak of the very invasive (imo) metrics logged by Chrome has me wondering if it’s happening in Arc too. Does anyone who understands Chromium have any insight regarding Arc?
I don’t know how much of Google’s ad/spying infrastructure is in the Chromium baseline code.
But Arc explicitly states that they’ve disabled many Google features for security reasons.
From the Arc FAQ:
You might also find the Ungoogled Chromium project of interest. It’s a fork of the Chromium project, with all of Google’s web services deleted/disabled.
5 Likes
After 17 months of full-bore Arc usage, I’m moving away.
The final straw was the recent announcement that Arc for Mac will receive no new features from here on out (although continued fixes and security updates are promised). While this might be fine for those who are satisfied with the current behavior of Arc, it decreases my already-low confidence that Arc will be seen by its development team as a candidate for any serious improvement, feature-based or not.
I’ve had some irritations with Arc for a long time that may be unique to me. They include:
- A consistent startup time of eight seconds, more or less. Due to one of my five plug-ins? Maybe; I don’t have the energy to debug. But I didn’t buy an M2 MacBook Pro expecting to have to lean back in my chair while my browser launches.
- Willful disregard of Mac interface standards: specifically, not lighting the close/minimize/zoom button trio when the window is active. This has misled me hundreds of times into thinking that Arc was not the active window and sending my keystroke commands to the wrong application.
- I’ve never successfully internalized when clicking a tab’s close box closes the window, and when it removes the tab, although I can articulate the logic behind it. The same is true for other idiosyncrasies of Arc’s interface.
- Complete lack of response to my feedback from the Arc team.
I’m sorry that I can’t match Adam’s enthusiasm for Arc. I do like Arc’s concept of workspaces, so the next browser I try will be Vivaldi. (Before Arc, it was Brave. I continue to use Safari for some situations where its unique platform integration is helpful. I’ve spent a lot of time with Chrome and Firefox as well, but I don’t consider them particularly advantageous or convenient for general use on the Mac, and I’m only using Apple hardware at present.)
1 Like
Of course I had to test this on my 2015 MacBook Pro. 5 seconds. Not bothering me much since Arc is active for weeks.
Do you have a source for this news?
This feels like a major misunderstanding. The Browser Company is devoting most of its development resources to Arc 2.0, during which time Arc 1.0 has been receiving only bug and security fixes. That’s why we haven’t covered any changes to it in the Watchlist for quite some time. Arc isn’t going into maintenance mode; development is just focused on the next major revision.
I see about the same, but since Arc is always active and launches at startup, it’s irrelevant.
Honestly, I hadn’t noticed—I’ve never looked at those controls unless I plan to use them. Do you have any other examples?
For me, that’s just a matter of whether it’s a pinned tab or not. Closing a pinned tab merely closes the window. Closing a non-pinned tab removes (archives) it. Pin the tabs that matter, everything else is ephemeral.
Yeah, they suck at responding. It’s so strange because they’re a far more open and transparent company than any other, constantly sharing details about what they’re doing and why. I know about Arc 2.0 because they had a 10-episode podcast done by the CEO that talked about it in detail. He did respond to a few email messages each episode and claimed he was trying to reply to everything he received, but I don’t know if that was true or not.
There’s a lively discussion on Reddit (r/ArcBrowser) with links and screenshots of announcements from Arc’s CEO.
Here’s the CEO’s announcement. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9yZ0JusME4
Whoa! I hadn’t seen that yet, and frankly, it comes as something of a whiplash after listening to all the podcast episodes about Arc 2.0.
I’ll admit, I’m not wild about the stated new direction either, and the implication that Arc won’t be changing much. Let’s see if I get a reply from the CEO.
1 Like
Yeow. After watching this, I just kept hearing that phrase “Arc is not going anywhere” as, literally, “We’re done with Arc.”
I think Josh Miller is a classic tech-bro CEO, listening to his team, processing feedback, and incorporating his generational cohort’s concern for making stuff that their “friends and family will love.” All of which is commendable, but it’s that graph in the middle of the video, the one on which he comments that Arc is “never going to scale up to a billion users,” that really says it all.
- Not monetizable
- Not accessible
…are the two constraining factors driving a new, so far ephemeral not-Arc product.
I noticed in the Thursday release notes that they tried to walk back some of the “vibes” in this video.
Browsers were made unmarketable by Microsoft and Apple decades ago when they were bundled with operating systems, and maybe BCNY’s plan is to incorporate a monetizable component (“AI gliding”) into their next product.
Interesting. I heard “it’s not going anywhere” as “we are staying here”. I think they want more buy-ins to the model and there was a burst that has leveled off. Even here we have the “I tried it and it not for me” and the “I love it camp”. I see them adding and refining some features, but most of it will not be taken advantage of by the majority of users. I use it at work, but there are many parts of it that I don’t understand yet.
1 Like