Thanks. That looked like a trash icon to me. 
Perhaps I was hasty…I have the beta and will create an account with dummy info and see.
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It worked fine though.
I am through Adams’ article. Arc is now my main browser. I imported my Safari bookmarks. Kept only two bookmark folders that I had organized this winter and deleted the rest. The two folders went into two of the six spaces I have established. Now I populate the spaces by dragging URLs from Safari, Brave and Chrome when I need them.
I did an export of bookmarks from safari and checked how many lines it contained in the Terminal.
wc -l /Volumes/Diverse/tmp/Safari\ Bookmarks.html
2802 /Volumes/Div/tmp/Safari Bookmarks.html
2802! Starting with a clean slate feels very good.
Six spaces.
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One space is for websites that I frequent on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. I called it “Daily” Now it contains a website for local journey planner for metro, tram and bus. Another tab is for road and traffic information for Norway. One for a web-based drugstore. Keyboard shortcuts for ARC Shortcuts | Arc Resources have a tab and Adams’ article about ARC as well. This will probably get many new tabs in the next weeks.
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One space is for a project.
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Two very different hobbies have one each.
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One space related to personal finance.
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The last is for home IT with links to things like Redhat Errata, Google Cloud console and Uptime robot.
There are now 11 favorites. I think maybe some tabs in the “Daily” space should be in favorites instead. A work in progress.
I have assigned control-0 to “View Spaces” in Settings > Shortcuts.
A note in Arc contains a list of shortcuts that I want to learn. I moved it to the top of my daily, weekly, monthly space.
Several public webcams from different sites I have placed in an Easel in the same space.
I have reported one bug related to clicking tabs in the first space when in “View Spaces”.
What I dislike is the size of the icons on the tabs and favorites. The spaces icons are the worst. Hope there will be a way to make them and maybe also the text bigger.
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In today’s release, Arc introduced Air Traffic Control, which lets you route external links from specific domains to particular Spaces. I mostly just use Little Arc for external links, but perhaps it will be useful. Regardless, it’s another example of thinking differently from every other browser out there.
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If you get serious about using a bookmark manager I can recommend BookMacster. I’ve used it for many years after URLM Pro entered what turned out to be a temporary development hiatus. I currently have 15,670 bookmarks in BookMacster.
Development and support are among the best I’ve experienced since getting my first Mac in 1995. The developer is still on the Arc waitlist as of May 1. A license is $24.95 and the time period between major (discounted) upgrades is very reasonable considering what you get for your money.
I keep certain fave bookmarks in my browsers but everything goes into BookMacster. Browsers don’t have a good track record of managing a large number of bookmarks.
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Biggest barrier for me, so far, is that there’s no integration with iCloud Keychain accounts and passwords. For example, that means I’ve had to switch back to a Safari window to log in here and type this!
(Apple “maintain” a Chrome Extension for iCloud Keychain, but it only works on Windows. A macOS app can apparently only get entitlements to access the keychain if it is in the App Store…)
Admittedly it’s not integrated, but I had no problem exporting all my passwords from Safari and uploading them to Arc as outlined in the setup instructions.
I thought this would be an issue for me as well, but just the opposite happened. My password manager is Enpass. Under Safari, it was (whether by design or by my sub-optimal configuration) rarely invoked to supply a password. Safari seemed to override it (my passwords are in Keychain as well as in Enpass).
Switching to Arc forced me to rely solely on Enpass. And lo and behold, Enpass actually has a superior UI (IMO) than Safari for auto-entering passwords! It far more frequently successfully fills both the Username and Password fields, and is more successful at auto-submitting the login form.
If I end up going back to Safari, I hope I can figure out how to get Enpass to be the primary password supplier.
If I understand correctly, Arc is based on Chrome…?
In my world, Chrome is equal to Google, a company that I avoid as far as possible.
How can I know that what I do in Arc isn’t simply loaded into the profiling- and adds database at Google HQ, no matter what Arc writes in the privacy statements?
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I think you mean Chromium, the open-source browser. Chromium shares some of its code base with Chrome. They have common ancestry.
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I’ve been looking for how Arc is going to be monetized. The only thing I’ve found is a thread on Reddit. From this, it sounds like it will be free for personal use but the collaborative features will be paid. I haven’t been able to find any corraborating information anywhere.
Did anyone try typing ⌘t and “question” after launching Arc and viewing the introductory video (as suggested at the end of the video)? I just wondered why that took me to Google, entering a web search for “question”, instead of performing the action shown in the tutorial video. Great article, by the way.
Tried it and it has many aspects that make it a candidate for being the main browser. However, just like another mention, I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to populate the spaces with links exported from other browsers (that I wrote an article about in my own recent newsletter for my Swedish clients). One could only import everything from a browser or just start from scratch with Arc – tried to find a Chrome plugin, but could not, partly because Arc doesn’t deal with bookmarks. Standalone URL manager or just using notes in Notes with link lists for easy & intuitive syncing across units seems best right now. It was some time since people could only rely on one web browser which is the main reason that Arc’s way of not dealing with this makes a transition difficult. Main problem with note apps is to find a Notes app syncing across units only using plain text – Apple’s way of almost banning plain text from the universe is not very helpful.
This is not correct. After clicking import you can pick and choose.
Which plugin? Which URL?
I cannot see how you can choose to import selection of links to different spaces from different browsers. To me it looks like you can only import everything from one browser of your choice.
I have not found any Chrome plugin for importing lists of links to Arc, so could not tell you which one as I found nothing.
You get this in the third dialog:
You can choose Arc > “Import from another browser” as many times you want to as many spaces as you want.
Yes, as @kcjw wrote, Chromium is the open-source foundation for Google Chrome, but also for Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, and many others.
You could examine the Chromium source to reassure yourself that it’s not sending data to Google, but I think it’s safe to assume that all these other companies wouldn’t use Chromium if it was.
Hello,
Then I understand something of what you said. Unfortunately not any of the 100’s of links I want to move to Arc has been bookmarked and doing it manually would be as cumbersome as adding them link by link manually directly in Arc (it would be faster actually).
So the best would be to let people just drag a list of links into a space, which is what I am missing and have told them so, but get no reply from them on this (only on less important things).
All the best,
Jerry
What format are your links in from other browsers, @eyeless? I just tried dragging a .webloc file from the Finder into Arc’s sidebar and that worked fine.
I also tried pressing Command-T, typing “import bookmarks,” and selecting the command that comes up to bring up the import dialog. So it would seem possible to import whatever you want, whenever you want.
