Arc: A radical fresh take on the web browser Arc is a new Chromium-based web browser which shakes up the standard workflow that browsers have had ever since tabs were invented. It's good, but it will take some getting used to. The browser is based on the Chromium engine, and comes from a startup which modestly calls itself the Browser Company of New York. Arc isn't open …
"Presumably, the idea is that users will run it full-screen."
Good luck with that on a Mac. Apple taunts users with full screen and Spaces but the execution is so bad that it's much more annoying more than it is useful. Spaces can't be reserved for apps, so when a full-screen app reverts back to the desktop (e.g. when you hit escape, FFS) and it's re-maxed it goes to a new space at the far right, instead of where it was, which is where I wanted it. Some apps do odd things when set to full screen; VLC is crap at it - no matter how the "native MacOS" settings are set. It's another one of those Apple features that looked good in principle that they've just got bored with and can't be bothered to sort out.
They haven't known what they were doing with that since they suddenly had the bright idea of changing the green button to maximize an app into a new space, previously it maximized an app to use as much of the desktop as it needed and no more.
So now I have to remember to shift-click the green button. Progress indeed.
[Author here]
> shift-click the green button
I agree with you, but there are ways around it.
The very handy Rightzoom app fixes this.
https://www.blazingtools.com/right_zoom_mac.html
I am a tightwad so I have not yet paid for this. In the meantime, it's also a built in function in the very handy Rectangle tiling manager:
https://rectangleapp.com/
Command Plus option plus F (for full-screen?) zooms the current window _instead_ of making it full screen.
[Author here]
> One of the things I hated about OSX was a requirement to buy 3rd party apps to fix deficiencies in the base OS.
As a rule, you don't, and where possible I highlight free ways to achieve this -- as I did here, and as I did last time around in this story:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/05/mouse_button_101/
I pointed out the free middle-click-Ventura FOSS app in place of the paid-for middleclick.app.
I am a tad irked because I use an older version of Rightzoom on my x86 Macs, which I've had for years. However, apparently it is reaching a wider audience, and the creator is trying to monetise it. I don't blame them; everything is getting more expensive.
However personally my family and I just moved countries to one about 4-5x more expensive than our former home, and I am trying to (ha) minimise such expenditures. So I am trying to remember a new keystroke instead, but that's at a time when typing is painful due to a smashed and extensively reconstructed right arm...
You don't need this tool. Nobody needs it. It is a small convenience. There is no "deficiency" in the base OS.
Apple sells many more laptops than desktops. On a laptop, you have a trackpad and rich gesture support. Many people prefer to run full-screen in such an environment.
I prefer desktops, clicky keyboards, and symmetrical physical mice that I can use in my left hand. I dislike trackpads and gestures. I especially dislike products designed for the right hand only.
But there is no deficiency here. Any Mac user can opt-click that button. So, please, don't post this kind of FUD. It is not helpful or constructive; it is negative advocacy, and promotes anti-platform sentiment. I had little time for such negativity.
There are lots of things that merit negativity, such as large vendors promoting lock-in. Save it for where it helps.
There is no "deficiency" in the base OS
A fundamental deficiency in Finder is that when you open a new window it puts it almost directly over the current one. Why the fuck do they think I'm opening a new window? I want to see both so I can move or copy something from somewhere to somewhere else. I know there are ways to do this in a single window, but they just mostly result in files disappearing into a directory where you don't want them to be and then spending half an hour finding them because whoever designed Spotlight decided in advance which files and directories users would be allowed to find. Finder isn't designed to have more than one window open - witness how hard it is to set defaults (window size, colums, sorting) and the bugs that have been there for about 10 years (Desktop disappearing from sidebar). I'm sure if the designer were here he'd simply say "there's no need to have more than one window open" and "but you can get to the desktop by with a single mouse stroke".
All of these problems are probably down to those .DS_Store files which just don't work very well on network drives or even if there is more than one user locally and more than two decades later Apple still haven't seen fit to replace them with something less terrible.
About the previous post:
it is negative advocacy, and promotes anti-platform sentiment
Don't we all get to the point in IT where we hate all platforms equally? Apart from retro ones of course.
Presumably they think you want to look at it so opening it where you are already looking is not a bad guess.
More annoyingly, why are half the functions and options for most applications STILL on the top bar and not in the app (or vice versa)? And why is there no keyboard shortcut to get to the top bar menu items as a rule. I don't always want to move my hands off the keyboard to grab a mouse or trackpad for a click to activate menus (or, I actually NEVER want to do this, and even if I did, I'd like the option not to have to).
"Presumably, the idea is that users will run it full-screen."
Good luck with that on a Mac.
Especially on a Mac with a couple (or more) external monitors. Bring any application - say, a browser - to full screen on one of the displays and the others will go totally black. Used to annoy the hell out of me when I had to do stuff on a Mac - I wanted my VMs in full screen in Mission Control (Apple's lousy - unless you come from Windows - implementation of virtual desktops) and it was very frustrating.
[Author here]
> to full screen on one of the displays and the others will go totally black
Just tried it.
No, they don't. My other screen stayed alight. I am typing in Firefox, full screen, and I can still mouse over to Chrome on my other screen and read my Gmail or adjust the volume in the 6music player.
Again: please do not post disinformation. Check first.
Always confirm before posting negative info. Try to know what you know, but even more importantly, know what you _don't_ know. We all screw up sometimes but that was a big serious claim, so I tried, and it's not true.
Yes. It adds much to the discussion, usually, and helps form opinion on the authors too :-)
I like authors who defend their position and agree/admit[1] when commentards with an opposing or just different point of view changes the narrative of some or even all of the article.
[1] Or disagree with a commentard and put them right, as above :-)
Liam here is correct. In a macOS dual screen environment, going full screen on one display does not blank out any others. I worked like this for several weeks recently before I repurposed one of my two screens to another machine. However, I can imagine that some software that is not written to use native capabilities (like full-screen) might do something unexpected.
Before I parted with money to have it removed, the free version of classic Opera, way back in time, was "ad supported", meaning that there was a banner embedded in the window chrome. Quite a lot of the time this showed cartoons, the author of which was presumably hoping that you would buy some, but that I was happy to enjoy for free. But when filled with the usual commercial dross I tended to go full screen, which removed all the window decoration including the ad banner. And, indeed, the useless vertical scrollbar that IE used to insist on showing even when all the content fitted vertically. It remained eminently usable in this mode because of Opera's mouse gestures and copious keyboard shortcuts. Never subsequently bettered for usability, in my opinion.
-A.
I remember being in the US around turn of century when free-isps were in vogue (think I used NetZero) where you got a free internet connection (via dial up modem of course to an in-area code number to get free call) and in return they put an ad bar at the top of your screen. However as this was also the era of CRTs then judicious twiddling of the v-hold control etc could shift it off the visible screen!
[Author here]
> the free version of classic Opera [had] a banner embedded in the window chrome.
Oh my yes. I'd forgotten about that. I ran it on Win95 on AOL dialup when travelling, in that era.
> the useless vertical scrollbar that IE used to insist on showing even when all the content fitted vertically.
I'd rather than than modern ones which only appear when you mouse over where they should be.
Worse still, many web pages have now invented an ersatz scroll bar, either across the top or as a little dial that gradually completes, to show how far you've got... which would not be necessary if the clueless graphic-designer types hadn't removed scrollbars.
> Opera's mouse gestures
Ah, now, there was a feature I never could get on with. Chacun a son gout.
I got so accustomed that I still try to use them in other less enlightened browsers and get annoyed when nothing happens but a context menu popping up. They're pretty much useless on a trackpad, though, or anything other than an actual mouse with at least two buttons.
-A.
One time at an old job they gave me a choice between a Mac or PC workstation laptop. I stupidly picked a Mac and did my productivity ever take a hit as a result. macOS always has been aimed around the idea of using a single app, with a single window, at a time, but for some stupid reason Apple refuses to make it easy to have that window take up the entire screen like the Windows maximize function that's been around since at least Windows 3.1, but probably since 1.0.
It looks real pretty in screenshots, but when it comes to doing actual work, it gets in the way at almost every turn. The one lone exception, that I wish Microsoft would copy, is how you can drag the file icon in the titlebar and get the path to that file.
Actually, macOS was never designed around the idea of using a single app in a single window. From the very beginning of Macintosh Toolbox, Mac applications are independent of their windows: originally, windows were there to contain only documents, not toolbars or controls (those would go in their own “tool” panels: originally fixed, but later evolved into floating tool windows), and an application could theoretically be designed that never had any windows open, with only the menu-bar as its control mechanism. The fact that closing a Mac app’s windows does not close the app still catches out users of other systems.
Apple’s decision to pull the menu bar out of the window is based on sound ergonomic principles (for more detail, look up “Fitts’s Law”), and keeping the menu outside of the window frame also saved screen real-estate on a system whose original display was just 512 x 342 pixels.
Because the user interface was designed around having multiple document windows per application, the control you called “minimise” did not exist. Instead, you had a control that told the application to size the window to its optimal dimensions for the contents. Press once and the window becomes wide/tall enough for its content, or full-size if that content is bigger than the window; press again, and it returns to its previous size. Later Mac System versions (7.6+) added a true minimise by double-clicking the title-bar (this was originally a shareware product called “WindowShade”, which Apple either bought in or shamelessly ripped off - they had a habit of doing both in those days).
Where things went to shit was MacOS X, which was designed after Apple had fired its Human Interface Design Group. OSX was designed in Photoshop and Macromedia Flash, by graphic designers and animators, with one goal: look cool. That meant a lot of the subtle interface features from the Classic MacOS that were based on ergonomics and cognitive science were dumped. The “Minimise” button is a particularly obnoxious piece of UI because it is annoying to undo if accidentally pressed (you can't just click the same place again, as the click-target has moved; but worse, it causes the whole visual context to disappear, so you now have to visually search for where it’s hiding, and unlike Windows’s taskbar, the OSX Dock is centrally aligned and thus grows and shrinks, dicking around with your short-term spatial memory in the process), so Apple’s decision to put that right next to “enlarge” is a little inexplicable...
Actually it’s not inexplicable once you stop thinking about how it would be used, and focus instead just on how it looks... they wanted a “traffic-light” pattern, and with Red meaning “close” (this is actually a good reinforcement), Green meaning “big” (getting a little tenuous, but it’s the opposite of closing, I guess), then “minimise” had to be amber and also had to go in the middle to abide by the visual metaphor. Makes sense visually, but it’s the wrong place: one of many examples in OSX of a fetish for visual patterns overruling functional needs. A favourite example of mine: early OSX builds had the Apple-logo smack-bang in the middle of the menu-bar.. “to match the casework”... This, thankfully, did not last more than a month or so.
This isn’t a rant against graphic designers - I am one myself from time to time - it’s a rant against the belief that “graphic design” (or its modern cousin “experience design”) and “interface design” have the same goals and are interchangeable skills. They’re not, and sometimes a good interface needs to be not-quite-aesthetically pleasing in order to be learnable and usable.
[Author here]
> Lost me at Chromium.
I'd prefer not too, but I need to keep a Chrome-based browser around for some stuff, and innovation in any space is welcome.
Like the sound of it? Then get writing to the Mozilla forks and encourage them to try bold stuff like this. Go talk to Firefox addon vendors and request new features, detailing what of this you'd like to see. Go resurrect some old addon that did this, or bung someone some cash to get them to mimic it.
Toxic negativity is a bad thing. I am trying to write about something new and bold and innovative and cool, and it's really sad to just see people taking cheap shots at it.
[Author here]
> Bold stuff like what?
Okay. I came up with what I think is a better explanation of one of the things that they have done here after the article was submitted for publication.
So I will rise to your challenge and attempt to answer the question.
Ever since windows 98 introduced the "quick launch" bar, up until I think Windows Vista when it disappeared, you had the option of a small panel, inset into the taskbar, which could contain launcher icons for your most used apps.
(Aside: I think few people realised this, but you can use the keyboard to open these by pressing the windows key and digits one through nine. The Ubuntu Unity designers realised this and reproduced that feature in the Unity launcher. This, for me, is an example of the kind of deep thought and consideration that went into the design of the Unity desktop, which the casual critics did not explore and learn their way around, and so attacked on the basis of trivial cosmetics.)
(Aside to the aside: you can put the quick launch bar back in every version of windows up to and including Windows 10, buy right licking the task bar, picking "add new tool bar", and browsing to the `appdata/roaming/microsoft/internet explorer` folder in which you will find the old quick launch folder still working today. This even works on Windows 11 if you add the Explorer Patcher utility.)
Vista and later versions replaced this with the ability to pin apps to the taskbar.
The quick launch toolbar was good, it's handy, and I still use it today. (Even now, lots of apps dump a launch icon on the desktop when you install them. I just drag all of these into the quick launch folder, and that keeps my desktop nice and tidy.)
The problem, however, is that it causes redundancy and duplication (he said, redundantly): you end up with two icons for any running app, one in the quick launch bar, and one on the taskbar. Novice users are confused by that kind of thing, and that's perfectly fair. Pinning icons to the taskbar reproduces the behaviour of the Apple/Next dock. When I was very new to Mac OS X, I didn't realise that the distinction between an app waiting to be run, and an app that's open right now, is actually quite a trivial thing, and removing that distinction in the interests of removing duplication is a worthwhile step.
This is what Arc does with the browser sidebar.
Collapsed folders full of bookmarks are hidden… *unless* that bookmark is actually open right now, in which case it is shown. This is the same basic mechanism as the dock or the Vista taskbar. It reduces visual noise and eliminates duplication.
If you open a folder of bookmarks, you can see them all. If you close that folder they're out of the way, out of sight.
Unless you open one – in which case the folder shortcut is shown.
The developers of the Arc browser have brought across a desktop UI feature into the browser sidebar. It's one I never thought of applying in this way, and I think that that is a good example of insight and extension of a known mechanism.
"Toxic negativity is a bad thing. I am trying to write about something new and bold and innovative and cool, and it's really sad to just see people taking cheap shots at it."
Well, I for one quite like it. Not sure it'll work well on my laptop screen (and it might take a while to reach FreeBSD!!) but I think that format will work well on the immensely wide, curved screens we now have at work instead a pair of "wide screens". Going full screen when you only have one screen doesn't often work well for most apps or browsers, so I had to learn a "new" technique of grab title bar and drag to left edge to auto-size to half screen. Not a huge issue, but I can see having a single internal tiled browser taking the whole screen being simpler and nicer, especially with the multi-function side bar. My only issue at the moment is that I like and address bar, but since I don't have a Mac, can't check if that's an option yet. I often need to paste URIs into documents or emails so a cut'n'paste from the address bar is a vital function. Unless there's another method provided that isn't obvious from the screen shots. Can I, for example, just drag a tab from the side bar into an email and get the link that way? or is that something to suggest to the browser creators?
[Author here]
> I often need to paste URIs into documents or emails
Yes, me too. This flummoxed me at first, and I even sent in a support request – something, incidentally, that is so easy to do that I actually did it by accident – asking for the future to be made more apparent.
In fact, all you need to do is write click on the tab title in the sidebar, and there is an option to copy the URL. It's easy and it's quick… But it's not very discoverable.
[Author here]
> Vertical tab bar and more on Firefox...
I am aware. The screenshot shows such a thing. Me, I prefer a flat non-hierarchical layout, but you do you.
I'm not aware of anything that can tile tabs, though. This is the closest and it looks clunky:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tile-tabs-we/
Exactly the same, but some people are so fixated on Microsoft that have an enormous blind-spot for Google’s anticompetitive behaviour.
If you don’t use Chrome, every Google service periodically tells you to install it, claiming that the thing will run better in that browser (no, it won’t, because Chrome still can’t properly throttle resource use by background tabs).
And I also remember that when I sign in to Google web service (sheets, docs, mail, etc.) on a new machine using a non-Google browser, the “was this you?” email pushes Chrome at me too (sign-ins using Chrome use different wording).
But never mind that, Micro$$$oft hates Linux, so they must be evil.. yeah, they hate Linux so much that they give you an installer for it as part of Windows these days, in the form of WSL, and put other distros in the Windows App Store if you don’t fancy the default Ubuntu.
[Author here]
> they hate Linux so much that they give you an installer for it as part of Windows these days
It's just their standard old "embrace and extend" tactic.
I'll believe their marketing dept 0.1% more if I see any real integration, not a fake-friendly giant dark enfolding cape. A few examples...
* If installing/repairing Windows _after_ Linux doesn't overwrite GRUB.
* If Windows gains native read/write/check support for ext2/3/4/Btrfs/ZFS etc. -- by default.
* If FOSS licenced NTFS, ReFS etc drivers were submitted to the Linux kernel, and in a form the BSDs could use.
* If Bitlocker FDE gains some form or level of interop with LUKS
For now, no; it's marketing BS. WSL doesn't mean MS <3 Linux. WSL means MS hates and envies Linux and desperately wants to get Linux developers to run Windows instead.
And the replacement of the technologically-impressive but poorly-integrated WSL1 with the lash-up of WSL2 makes me think that MS no longer has anyone technologically competent enough to update the NT kernel POSIX environment any more, so they had to build something from scratch instead.
Public Enemy warned you:
Don't believe the hype.
Instead of doing sums in a spreadsheet model on a calculator and then entering the results manually* a power user wants to be able to program some macros to save 0.1% of the time in entering some figures. Unfortunately, the macros contain a fencepost error, the results are wrong, and the company risks going bust as a result..
Someone who the IT department think is a pain, but not because they have to be shown the on/off switch every day like most other pains.
That sort of person.
* I know a manager with a ten figure budget who does this for anything more complicated than summing a column of figures.
In one job I had it puzzled me how much whingeing I got when reviewing (paper) documentation from a bunch of engineers that reported to me until I found out that none of them used outlining in their docs, so if I requested a section be added, deleted or moved they had to manually re-number all the affected sections.
I have long held the view that organisations need to stop assuming that everyone knows how to use Word Processors and Spreadsheets, and get all new joiners onto a minimum of a day of training to show the basics like style sheets, outlining, and the use of formulae.
For some weird reason, this is very rarely well received, because every knows how to use WP and Spreadsheets, right?
GJC
I worked for a UK branch of a big US corp. and was a keen user of styles and templates for Word and Powerpoint . The corp spent a fortune rebranding and as part of this sent a mail out that we'd be issued with templates for Powerpoint to reflect the new branding and that these would be mandatory. I was pleased - until they arrived. They weren't Templates, they were just Lorem Ipsum presentations with the company logo and a proprietary font. There was a front sheet and a "normal" layout bullet sheet. Nothing else and they hadn't even changed the styles in the docs, so if you created, say, a sheet with a two-column layout the fonts and bullets all defaulted to Microsoft standard. Oh - and the page sizes were set to US so the headers didn't fit properly on A4 because they were ancored absolutely, not relative to the paper size. When I mailed the person who created this we ended up in a long and fruitless email exchange because they didn't know what a Powerpoint Template was.
I have long held the view that organisations need to stop assuming that everyone knows how to use Word Processors and Spreadsheets, and get all new joiners onto a minimum of a day of training to show the basics like style sheets, outlining, and the use of formulae.For some weird reason, this is very rarely well received, because every knows how to use WP and Spreadsheets, right?
Or the organisation could require people to have an International Computer Driving Licence.
This has the 'advantage' of pushing the training costs onto the candidates*, and meaning they have a certificate to show they achieved a common basic level of competence at some point.
*I have strong opinions on commercial certification training, which are not expressible in a family-orientated publication.
I have long held the view that organisations need to stop assuming that everyone knows how to use Word Processors and Spreadsheets
And employ technical documentation specialists - whether that's writers, illustrators or editors. Because they spend all day in their tools and will inevitably do a better job than asking an engineer/developer/CAD-jockey to write the documentation or provide illustrations. And it'll be more consistent as a result.
Although the concept of typing pools has a poor reputation for sexual harassment and misogyny, we had them for a reason - the professional typists (usually - but didn't have to be - women) were a damn sight better at what they did than the engineers/managers/men who sent them work - faster & more accurate. Senior bods still get a PA/Secretary for this reason (it's judged that the executive's time is too valuable to be spent on booking flights or managing their calendar), but there's a case to be made that a Secretarial/Professional Services pool should still be a feature of large organisations. In the modern era of course, they wouldn't be typing up emails for people - they would be specialised in helping people prepare for presentations, prepare bid documents, internal/external documentation, etc. How many staff-years are wasted by engineers manually renumbering the pages on documents because they don't know how to use the layout tools?
Especially since most of the review comments you get from the high-paid help are about format, layout, punctuation fonts, ise/ize, etc. and rarely about technical content. We used to have a Tech Docs dept who managed standard document Templates and Styles and maintained a company writing style guide (ripped off from one of the magazines one of them used to work for) so arguments about comma vs semi-colon could be resolved by referring to it. When they disappeared in a money-saving exercise it got a lot harder to get docs approved simply because someone upstairs was willing to die in a ditch about something like the Oxford comma.
It was a massive loss for bids because they tended be a collection of responses from departments across the company and when Tech Docs went those responses came with different fonts, some without outlining, some with pics embedded, some with them at the end, some with figure numbers done properly, some with them embedded in the image, ........etc. If you were managing a bid it could take longer to collate and sort the final bid package than it did to write the actual sections.
> none of them used outlining in their docs
Back in the early nineties I introduced Windows PCs to my workplace, an IBM agency producing RPG code for AS/400.
Quite a lot of the RPG-ers had been so scarred by their entirely record-oriented world that they inserted their own line breaks in word-processor documents, manually reformatting should any edits be required.
-A.
[Author here]
> I used to write macros to save days of work a month.
This. Last time I did it was a decade ago, but 2 of them -- 1 in Word, 1 in Excel -- turned multi-hour manual operations into one keypress and a few seconds.
I gained a reputation as a wizard.
If it isn't quicker to both write and use the macro, it isn't worth doing. This is axiomatic, to the extent that it's a joke:
https://xkcd.com/1319/
Quite right! I have a number of scripts that save me plenty of time.
I also have some that didn't. Some made things worse, per xkcd 1319.
Knowing which will be the end result is - to me at least - similar to the halting problem. Most of the time, you can look at it and go 'yeah, reasonably easy' or 'nah, too many possible inputs', but especially when you're relying on someone upstream not to change their output or what input they want, you can get caught out.
I wrote a script which polls the council's website and scrapes the bin collection dates. It then changes an icon on my home page to tell me which bin to put out. It must save me literally seconds every month.
Of course, it will break if they make even a tiny change to the format of their page.
I suspect the reminder to put out the bins, and which bins, helps out in ways a lot bigger than a few seconds per month. Like not having the bins so full you can't put more in them, because you missed the collection again.
(I use an alarm on my phone which goes off every Monday night; pickup is Tuesday oh-dark-thirty.)
So, so this.
At one company, I took over the process of sending certain equipment out to third parties to be serviced. When I took over, I was given a notebook of handwritten pages, each containing the record of one piece of equipment that was going to be sent or had been sent and had not yet returned. There was an entire folder of letters to the vendors (as Word docs, at least), often retyped each time. Then the hand-written shipping form. It took an hour or so for each piece of equipment, each time, just to do the paperwork. When I was done, you filled in an Excel template with the basic info (equipment ID, vendor, PO #, etc.), saved all the Excel forms for a particular shipment in the same folder, saved an instance of the Word template into that folder, and told it how many boxes were being sent. The macro collected the data from the Excel files to create both the vendor letter and the shipping form. Total time per equipment was about 5 minutes.
> I used to write macros to save days of work a month.
Good. That is a sensible way to use macros (or any other programming).
But did you go around calling yourself a Power User?
You are aware that, as well as sane people, there are self-aggrandising people who constantly tell you that they are writing The Greatest Macros Ever, Without Which The Company Can Not Survive, which they constantly tweak (so no two runs do exactly the same thing) and for which saving 0.1% of the time put into them would be an achievement? *Those* are the Power Users - and quite a few of them are Road Warriors as well.
My old boss introduced a ticketing system, ostensibly to make the team run more efficiently, but we think it was actually to track how much work each technician was doing. Because he didn't really read the tickets, the staff who were directly user facing (we didn't really have lines of support, but they would have been first line) dealt with mostly password resets, turning things off and on again (they assigned anything more complicated to us), they appeared to be doing an order of magnitude more than we did. We did seriously complain because the kinds of problems we were resolving could take a long time, so by definitiion, we appeared to be doing less work. Of course, the flipside of that is on some occassions, by making a single change, we *could* potentially resolve dozens of user's problems, but that didn't happen often.
The boss quietly abandoned the idea when a colleague found the documentation for the API for the open source ticketing system we'd installed and wrote a small perl script that would run at random interviews, create a ticket, assign it to my friend, then resolve it with the comment "Fixed <tech name>'s fuck up", when <tech name> was a random name picked from a list of the technicians who worked for us at the time..
So they want to write some code to remove the chance of pressing a wrong button on a calculator while mindlessly entering figures, something that has the chance to produce incorrect results every single time, replacing it with something that can be tested and, having done so, will produce the same correct or incorrect results every time? The horror. It's a good thing I'm in IT (okay, I confess, I'm a developer which I know isn't considered as good) where we never do that kind of thing. Shell scripts are forbidden, you hear? Manual typing at the shell only.
Instead of doing sums in a spreadsheet model on a calculator and then entering the results manually* ...* I know a manager with a ten figure budget who does this for anything more complicated than summing a column of figures.
I can sum a column of figures (on paper) manually faster than typing them into a spreadsheet and removing all my keying errors (I have never said I was an accurate typist). Of course, if the data is already electronic, copy-n-paste is fine, so long as Excel doesn't decide 'helpfully' to convert some numbers into dates. Does Excel still do that? SuperUser: Stop excel from converting copy-pasted number/text values to date
Usually, it either means someone who makes heavy use of a piece of software or someone who understands niche functionality of that software. In this case, it's the former, so since journalists probably have a lot of tabs open at all times, they value more functions to manage them than I do, since I only have five open right now and I'm going to close a couple of them soon anyway.
.. via the 'early invite' process.
Couldn't get on with it (probably because the way current browsers work suits me). They also *required* me to have an Arc account to use the browser properly.
So it got deleted in short order and I went back to using Brave, Vivaldi or Firefox (depending on use-case)
[Author here]
> the hoi polloi
I thank you. :-) Took me years to learn that.
Greek is not in my repertoire, but I can kind of read the alphabet, very poorly, and I know literally a few words. It is both personally pleasing, but also rather sad, that my Greek friends and colleagues are astounded and delighted that I can do even that much.
Highly recommended reading: _Greece on my Wheels_ by Edward Enfield, Harry Enfield's dad. Much fun rambling about ancient versus modern Greek and more. And bikes.
From the OED
"Hoi is the Greek word for the, and the phrase hoi polloi means ‘the many.’ This has led some traditionalists to insist that hoi polloi should not be used in English with the, since that would be to state the word the twice. But, once established in English, expressions such as hoi polloi are typically treated as fixed units and are subject to the rules and conventions of English. Evidence shows that use with the has now become an accepted part of standard English usage"
"So, I had to wait until _hoi polloi_ got their chance..."
Did you also have to register an account to use it? That wold be a deal breaker for me. Collecting telemetry, even linked to an IP address, is one thing, but linking that data to an email address is something else, even if it is a throwaway one.
[Author here]
> Did you also have to register an account to use it?
Yes, I did. I mean they already had my email address because I was on the waiting list. I have over 100 email rules that filter an awful lot of stuff into one of nearly 100 sub folders and subfolders of subfolders, so that generally only a single digit number of emails per day actually require my attention. As such I really don't care about things like email registration. Alright, I concede, the number of times when it's actually useful or brings me some benefit is minute, but it is so par for the course these days that it's not worth fighting against.
Sorry, not interested.
I'd be interested in a modern revamp of Gopher that simplifies the web and avoids some of the modern browser issues.
However, Chrome? The same Google Chrome currently generating controversy about the 'this is all theoretical, but we're already baking WEI into the code base anyway to restrict the open web' ?
Not interested. Target an open solution instead.
Indeed.
No matter how cool a browser might be, if it relies on technical debt like the heavy legacy behemoth Chromium engine, it will sooner or later be pulled down into the cesspit along with it.
I would honestly be more interested if Arc was based on i.e hubub, libcss (two of netsurfs backends). At least then I would know it was maintainable in the long term. Plus I know it would not be contributing to annoying web developers making naff overconsuming web pages.
That was my experience, under OS/2 and later Linux. I always wanted to like Opera, but it was too weird in its interface and, much worse, flaky as hell on both platforms. I gather that it's now just a skin on Chromium, which should at least deal with the crashing but leaves "weird interface" as the USP, which does not appeal.
Same with Vivaldi. I really liked the idea of it after a review here, and tried it for a couple of weeks, after which it was annoying me so much that I went thankfully back to Chrome. Fireforx - on Linux anyway - seems to be in one of its "Let's see how much CPU and RAM we can use while displaying pages as slowly as possible" phases. That doesn't appeal either.
"back in the day"
Um, Opera 1.0 was 1995 whilst Firefox 1.0 was 2004.
By the time Firefox was gaining traction (which still took time after v1), Opera was already beginning its decline (slowing dev, not much new going on).
By 1998 Netscape had taken on some of the improvements that Opera (and other browsers) provided and those got sucked into Firefox, but the long pause (1998 to 2004) whilst Firefox was generated out of the code cleanup meant it had to work to catch up - which it did, of course.
[Author here]
> Though it has rather lost its sparkle now.
I keep around the contemporary (Chinese) version just for the built-in VPN. I occasionally find that handy for circumventing ISP imposed blocks. It's not very often, but when I want it, I *really* want it, add a that point in time I don't really want to have to install another hundred megabytes of browser.
"For a while, it remained possible in the Waterfox Classic fork of pre-Quantum Firefox, but today, sadly, that browser is barely usable anymore."
What about Palemoon and/or Basilisk?
Actually an article on the Mozilla spin-offs would be welcome. I've read the long article on the Palemoon site and left with the impression that it's the XUL Liberation Front vs the Liberation Front for XUL or something along those lines. Throw in Epyrus & the Matt Tobin projects for good measure.
[Author here]
> What about Palemoon and/or Basilisk?
I tried them, and I wrote the piece you're asking for:
https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/04/waterfox_firefox_fork/
Sad to say, IMHO, they are too old to be much use. Waterfox Classic is a fork of the newest pre-Quantum codebase available, and in taking that screenshot in the article, I had so many tabs crash on me that it stopped being funny.
Pale moon is forked off an extremely early version of the Firefox code, and Basilisk off something somewhat newer — but still elderly and not that much use today.B
I will probably get down voted or attacked for this, but I have to speak as I find. Additionally, as far as I can see, Basilisk gets very little maintenance these days.
K-Meleon is very slightly more current, and as I mentioned in the recent article on running Windows XP 64-bit, MyPal 68 is actually pretty modern and works quite well… on a 20-year-old operating system, anyway.
While Pale Moon was well behind the curve for a long time, it's recently seen some major improvements and now works well enough for the most part. Whether it can keep that up or fade away again remains to be seen.
But it's a constant game of whack-a-mole trying to handle all the new misfeatures that all the chromesites have implemented.
There seem to have been very recent changes. Waterfox has escaped from System 1. Basilisk has separated from Palemoon. BinaryOutcast seems to be busy rebuilding the website - it appears to have gone through some sort of trauma; I don't know if the browser has been discontinued and only Interlink is surviving. There also seems to be a new Thunderbird fork, Epyrus on the go related to all this.
The issue for me, and, presumably for many, is that after Mozilla made their changes (TBH I never really followed their Quantum, Australis or whatever it was and all that other branding stuff) they could no longer follow existing desktop theming and just looked as if they didn't belong - not as ugly as GTK4 but certainly not as intuitive to use. The marketing and crayon departments are in charge - both at the browser vendors and the websites - and they want New, New, New whilst a good user interface needs, the opposite: clarity resulting from consistency and familiarity (which is consistency with the past).
[Author here]
> Then forgets to mention whether this new browser has any such thing.
You know what, that's a fair cop.
Yes, it does and you can add them: it's compatible with Chrome extensions. However, as it's quite significantly different, I suspect that in the fullness of time it will prove to be rather less compatible than other Chromium-based browsers.
Them's fighting words around here, especially after the godforsaken mess that Google's expert programmers have made of the tab handling in recent versions of Android Chrome.
I mean, it's not hard is it? A list of opened pages, scroll through and pick the one you want to go back to.
Enter Chrome, where the objects in the list might be pages or it might be a little box containing n other pages, meaning that what you're looking for......could be bloody anywhere.
#insert <red-rage-emoji.h>
Just to make it even more fun, Chrome on my Android 12 tablet offer both "Open in new tab" and "Open in new tab in group" but doesn't actually have groups. Weird. I think the functional difference is that a "new tab" is on the right of all other tabs while a "new tab in group" is to the immediate right of the parent tab or any children. Still no "group", though.
Was hoping to read about how good it is with "mandatory" addons/plugins: script blockers, ad blockers, track blockers, tab segregation and containerisation.
Then I saw that it was Chrome based, so only would allow castrated addons, so Google can continue to get their pound of ad flesh.
Pass!
This just feels like a spork to me.
I’m sure a few people will love it.
The rest of us were perfectly happy with a spoon, are still happy with a spoon, and will continue to be happy with a spoon.
New browser? Looks more like a badly mangled version of an old browser that hardly anybody will really want or like.
I'm all for people trying new ideas like this. I wish the open source world would do this more because they're free from all the commercial constraints like profit. Throw a bunch of ideas at the wall and see what sticks. Maybe they'll hit on some new thing that helps advance the UI world past the desktop metaphor it's been stuck with since it's inception. I wish Vivaldi would make a Firefox based version of their browser.
I'll be keeping my eye on Arc, and if/when it comes to Windows I'll give it a shot.
I'm not convinced in any way that this browser will make my life easier. I'll stick to Firefox since it works flawlessly on all platforms I use (Windows and Linux) and I like its Bookmarks and History functionality.
An internal windowing system isn't exactly novel or even a unique selling point. What about multiple monitor support when using this scheme? Or is one limited to one window only?
>” An internal windowing system isn't exactly novel or even a unique selling point.”
Trouble is how few applications support this highly useful display feature. Too many have blindly subscribed to the design school ideas that resulted in TIFKAM et al…
>” What about multiple monitor support when using this scheme?”
Far too useful, see above; the design school gods have decided you should only be using one monitor.
I dunno. I've recently had problems with a couple of websites that didn't work properly on FF or Safari even with shields down and their support just told to me use Chrome cos that's what their sites are designed for. I can live without one of them but the other could be a bit of a pain if I don't find a way round it. Hopefully this is just an unfortunate glitch.
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