I loved Arc so much when it came out. I had been using vertical tabs on Firefox for years, via the treestyle tabs extension. But Arc felt like a breath of fresh air in 2022. Native vertical tabs. Air Traffic Control to open specific links in specific profiles. Swish UI. Unfortunately it's yet another Chromium-based browser, and I hated to make Firefox lose another user to Google's web engine. But at the time, that was a sacrifice I was willing to make to experience a "better Internet" or whatever.
But I'm done with it. It's been death by a thousand cuts. I'm going to spend quite a long time explaining all my annoyances with Arc, and link to a few guides on switching back to Firefox.
Air Traffic Control was great initially. Links matching Jira/Github etc were configured to open automatically in my work profile. I kinda wished manually configured URLs like that would open in a little Arc window, but instead they'd bring me to the main window. No big deal I guess. But anything not manually configured would just open in a Little Arc window in whatever the last profile in use was. So I'd have to click the dropdown arrow beside "Open in Personal", then click "Open in Work" instead, then I'd be taken to the main Arc window with the tab loading again. Too many clicks. I was later able to realise a better version of this feature using Velja with multiple Firefox profiles.
Their gimmicky Artificial Intelligence "Arc Max" pivot shouldn't have come as a surprise, since they're chasing that venture capital money. The features seemed interesting at first, but I quickly switched them off. Ask on page was intrusive when using cmd+f to search for words, and asking an AI questions about a page is not the way I want to interact with the web. Tidy tab titles and downloads would invariably name the tab/download something unhelpful. And Arc would forget the AI generated tab titles after a restart anyway. Infuriating. Tidy tabs was a bit pointless. The best way to tidy tabs is to clear them completely, not categorise them in a rapidly growing sidebar.
Boosts seemed fun, and I even made one or two. "Take control of the Internet", they said. And then they made a boosts store and didn't let users submit javascript-based boosts? Just silly CSS amendments and element removal like I could do with uBlock Origin anyway? I'd rather just stick to Tampermonkey, thanks, rather than make Boosts in your walled garden.
They decided to keep the useless boosts feature, but deprecated Arc Notes, as not enough users were using it. They spun this as a leaner, simpler Arc "to better serve your needs". Well, I //was// using that feature. When I began using it, I remember thinking "I don't want to get locked into using this and then they remove it later, or I change browsers". Well, guess what happened. More fool me.
Maybe I filled up my sidebar with too many folders, but it's got too much shit in it that I want to keep around. My today tabs has a tiny amount of space left, and I have to scroll the sidebar to go up to the "bookmarks" I've placed in folders. An actual bookmarks feature would've been preferable to this sytem. Or just make the sidebar text a bit smaller, less fisher-pricey and with a bit less whitespace?
Another minor annoyance I was living with: If I've got a tab open which is inside a folder, I want to close the folder before scrolling down the sidebar to open something else. But if I close the folder //before// switching away from the tab, the folder remains open with just that tab showing. So I have to switch to the other tab, then click the folder twice to close it fully. Such a tiny annoyance, but it //kept// happening to me and there was no option to behave differently. Compare that to Tree Style Tabs for Firefox, which has dozens of options to fit almost every user's workflow.
If I want to edit the URL, I have to click the address bar, then move my mouse down to the new address bar in the middle of the screen. You also can't scroll left/right with the mac scrollbar to scroll the URL. And hiding the full URL in the address bar is baby shit. Let me see it in full, and edit it in place.
They made the Arc for iPhone IOS app which synced the sidebar nicely, but couldn't sync passwords. Then they abandoned it in favour of Arc Search, with all its AI fluff and inability to sync the sidebar.
Speaking of sync, "History, passwords, extensions, Favorites tabs, and Profiles will not Sync between devices." - laughable. They say they plan to add it, but guess what? Firefox does that now, on Windows, Android, Mac, and Linux. I've slowly realised I'm waiting for features that I used to have at my fingertips.
I was living with all of the above, but their Windows rollout was the last straw. I grabbed a beta invite as soon as I could, and there was no communication that it would be Windows 11 only. None of my PCs have a TPM chip, so I'd rather stay on Windows 10 than take my computers to a landfill. The one thing I did see them say was that once Arc for Windows is out of beta, it'd be available for Windows 10. Nope. I refuse to wait another few months to be able to sync my tabs (but not my history, extensions, profiles etc lol) with Windows.
So I started switching back to Firefox. But here's the final annoyance - onboarding with Arc is super easy. Offboarding is not. Exporting my history was a tedious experience. I was a sucker, getting willingly locked into a platform, for the first time since I still believed in Google. I believed in Arc. More fool me.
They'll ride the AI wave for a while and have some success I'm sure. They now have so many users, they're going to end up making a lowest common denominator browser and it'll be no better than Edge in the end. Firefox is so feature-rich and customisable that there's no benefit to using a browser with features that could be provided with a nice extension.
If you want to switch from Arc to Firefox, it'll take some work. I recommend running through this list of Arc features that work better on Firefox.
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