Whew. I’m glad I’m not the only one. I think I’ll give them some feedback. Thanks.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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