Getting back to Arc

So my current browser has piled up too much annoying issue, stuff the just don’t get out of the way on some quick task I want to breeze through.

The first really annoying thing was those horrible horizontal tabs (bad idea), after failing many attempts of converting comet to normal tabs layout (vertical) I kept it as is, and at least ones a week I accidentally close a tab by pressing the X instead of clicking the actual tab that I want to switch to. That is some annoying shit. Another quirk was the shortcut CMD+SHIFT+C wasn’t always copying the current url to my clipboard, weird I know, and maybe not even comet fault, but it’s so workflow breaking, because I discover it when I want to paste, and then I need to get back to the tab I wanted to copy, such a mess.

I do have few more, can’t remember now, maybe I will add later. But those alone are enough to frustrate any hardworking web guy.

So I spent an evening exploring browsers options, skimming through weird ones, and downloading and using for a minute some more cooked up ones, by the way, the all mighty perplexity just couldn’t find browsers, so weird, it gave me a list of browsers with duplicates, some stuff that’s not relevant like Samsung browser for android, I insisted with him to find browsers but he didn’t catch wavebox or click for example. That was also some points reduced to comet (which is perplexity)

Initially safari was interesting specially after what I saw in wwdc2026 where safari would get ai extension, but while really polished with good ux, it still lacked features like pinned apps and profiles in spaces , also the dev tools are not so good. I then naturally reviewed again Orion, the browser I wish I could use daily (and pay kagi) but also, profiles opened in another window instead of a space, and the dev tools are safari’s, which is not enough.

I then went to the chromiums, I knew Vivaldi and opera wasn’t for me since I tried them few months ago, I did try edge, I know, but hearing Dave Rupert saying that edge is ok over and over. It’s not ok, I don’t know what they are trying to do there, but it’s not looking in a good direction, sorry. Next one was shift, something I tested before but not actually, they claim to be the most customizable browser, but in real life it’s kind of limited. I couldn’t even adjust the size of the sidebar (why the hell not??) there were few more, don’t remember them. I saw helium but it was looking too vanilla for me.

I tried zen, I already had it installed and even used for a while, I like it, it’s a good browsers, standing on the shoulders of giants, it is firefoxy, which can be good, but also can have issues, I heard people say it froze sometime, and Firefox does have good dev tools, but chrome is best for all the productivity people.

So that leaves me with Arc. Arc, my old friend, those geniuses there got us to create profile cards saying when we started with arc, I started on October 2022, wild. Arc still feel better and more cooked than other browsers that still ship new features (and take money for that). I did thought about using zen, but I really think giving Arc a chance again (or maybe zen first arc second, not sure)

Dia is not even worth mention in my opinion, sorry.

When will a browser be a real work tool?