Arc browser is now available for Windows 11

OAT said:

I tested it and found it very resource intensive.

Click to expand...

Extremely!!!

Terrible browser!!!
I like the SplitView feature though!

Turn off pre-loading pages, that will may help. And you can supposedly no change the timeout period for tab archiving, I think (default is 12 hours).

I have a lot more than 25 (total) tabs, and I'm right at 2.5 GB as well - but when I first started using it it was hitting 4 GB lol. So it's already improved.

For context, when I first started using Arc, this is how it compared with Fx using CTG:




The pages I was opening was GMail in each Space (again with its own dedicated Profile).

But with Fx and CTG, I have a boatload more tabs already assigned than in Arc:

I had 2 tabs rendering and about 20 child processes sleeping in the background..., well, at almost 2GB of memory, they certainly didn't seem as though they were sleeping!

Pre-loading is a PITA, for sure. All browsers suffer from it - trying to give you a seemingly faster experience, but killing your resources in the process lol.

I hate it. As well as browsers that like to run in the background (I kill both those features from any browser I use - I want pages loaded only when I actually click on a tab. Not before. And not when I close the damned thing.

Thank you all for your answers -
still testing at home since yesterday, Much improved on previous versions.

I'll get back to you to let you know what I think with more intensive use;

What's up with all these people wanting to develop more and more browsers -- I'm perfectly happy with what I have - Firefox and Edge both on Linux (Edge does run on Linux BTW) and Windows. How about developing some NEW stuff like better AI than copilot or universal software that runs almost ANY hardware without needing drivers etc etc. - If the OS has a decent API then it shouldn't need to load ANY drivers -- the hardware application should just be able to call the relevant API to perform the required function.

Perhaps Ms should in the words of "The Good Book" recall "physician --heal thyself ..." -- why not get the AI to start improving the next generation of Windows itself !!!!.

Cheers
jimbo

NormanF said:

So many Chrome based browsers.

Its obvious why Microsoft decided to give up developing a proprietary, in-house browser.

Click to expand...

Which is a pity as the original Edge was very efficient and fast compared with Edgium.

cereberus said:

Which is a pity as the original Edge was very efficient and fast compared with Edgium.

Click to expand...

Rapidly morphing into "Dodgium".

Cheers
jimbo

I don't get their slogan: "Meet the internet again"!
It has nothing to do with getting reacquainted with the internet!
They're simply attempting to develop something totally different just for the sake of developing something totally different!
It's convoluted, inefficient and non-intuitive.

I've spent a good bit of time with Arc. It does things differently on purpose, and it's the only browser that actually allows for seamless yet total separation of profiles within the same instance (Fx with CTG, or, really, anything that makes good use of the native Containers system, does so as well) - but I'm only comparing it with the big 3 Fx, Chrome and Edge.

The native Splitview is something I've not seen in the big name browsers at all without an addon.

The sidebar view of your tabs is something you can do natively in Edge, but in Chrome you need an addon, as well as in Fx.

As a fairly young browser, in terms of a Windows client, it's come a long way quickly, and is in active development.

And while the implementation is definitely hitting some speed bumps, just the ability to have a native splitscreen and the seamless Spaces with dedicated Profiles (aka seamless total profile separation) is absolutely necessary if you work from home and don't want multiple browsers open, and / or want to easily access info from a separate login without having to share logins in the same profile. If you don't need it, great - but when you do need it it is a godsend.

The last time swapping between profiles was this fast was waaaaaaaaaaay back in Fx days when a dev (maybe Mel Reyes aka MRTech?) had that addon that allowed you to use a drop down added to Firefox and Thunderbird to pick your profile easily enough - Yes, Chrome can do that too, but you first have to click your avatar. In Fx and Tb it was literally there on your main screen tucked off to the ... bottom right, I think, in the status bar,, or in that general vicinity.

It still opened a separate instance, though, with the new profile. I don't really know of any browser doing it in the same instance (other than Fx with CTG, and a few other Containers-based addons).

If I didn't make heavy use of this one feature, and make a good bit of use of the splitview, honestly, Arc would be much more "meh" for me as well. But those two features really keep me using it, for now.

One thing I had forgotten about completely is that Arc also supports Folders (aka groups in most other browsers' vernacular).

So, I started recreating a bit more of my my Firefox Nightly with Container Tab Groups setup in Arc for this profile.



The way I've been doing it is opening a CTG in Nightly, scrolling through and only opening the tabs I want to copy over to Arc. So, relatively speaking, I have the same tabs actually loaded in Nightly and Arc.

And, I hate to say it, but Arc is currently kicking Nightly's ass in terms of resource consumption (not to mention Firefox Stable, also with the CTG addon):



So, Nightly is only using 55% of the processes that Arc is using, and yet is consuming over 20% more resources.

Remember, CTG is set up so that upon loading Firefox does not automatically refresh all tabs - so, only the tabs that have been actively opened are, in fact, using resources (and that is because I have both pre-loading as well as run in the background disabled).

Now, the other big caveat is that comparing Nightly to Arc is a closer comparison than Firefox to Arc, because Arc is in high development mode right now, as is Firefox Nightly, being the so-called alpha builds of Firefox. But the fact that it is outdoing Firefox Stable too shows that this is beginning to show signs of being a true game changer in the browser world - as long as it doesn't get stuck behind a paywall.

When I click New Tab and paste a url, it doesn't go there, it opens some other random web page!!!

To add url's to a folder and make it so the folder is totally collapsible...
You have to hover the url over the folder...



then you have to click on the minus mark...



only then will the entire folder become collapsible...



A real pain in the gonads! Unintuitive!

Edwin said:

When I click New Tab and paste a url, it doesn't go there, it opens some other random web page!!!

View attachment 98401

Click to expand...

Uh, no idea what you're doing, but it works perfectly fine here.

I did notice that when I first started using Arc as my daily driver, though, I would type in google and it would suggest Google in various other countries - Japan, Spain, France, Argentina, Brazil, etc. for the first couple of days. Finally, after manually typing in google.com several times, it finally started suggesting google.com and not the others lol.

I wonder if this is a related issue?

Edwin said:

To add url's to a folder and make it so the folder is totally collapsible...
You have to hover the url over the folder...

View attachment 98402

then you have to click on the minus mark...

View attachment 98403

only then will the entire folder become collapsible...

View attachment 98404

A real pain in the gonads! Unintuitive!

Click to expand...

Uh, nope, I'm simply dragging and dropping and that is it.

If I get a chance to later on today, I'll get some ShareX GIFs of both of these and show you it works perfectly fine on my end.

YouTube Mini Player will reside in the Sidebar..., that's pretty cool!

Still no theme manager after update.