A colleague asked me today which browser I was using to debug things. I said I was using Arc, which I had been for the last year or so. I've been a little disappointed to hear that the team behind Arc were moving on to something different and were leaving this potentially world-class browser in the dust. They mentioned it would get security updates — it has, but that's all. I miss the days when every Thursday or Friday there would be a What's New notification, which came with a bunch of new features adding interesting and novel tools that made browsing the web and collecting your thoughts easier.
In the same thread, another colleague mentioned they’d gone back to Firefox and that it was much quicker so I thought I’d give it a go. I used to use Firefox when I was in university, but I haven't given it a go in the last 10 years. The first thing I noticed was that it was incredibly fast. To open tabs and use the search is generally faster. I didn't need to be on a resource-intensive website to notice the changes. Every interaction with the browser felt faster.
Now that Firefox has vertical tabs, the initial experience feels very similar to Arc. I am used to working on a 14-inch MacBook Pro so managing my screen space is particularly important, and vertical tabs seem to work better for me in this regard. I don't like their containerisation setup at all. It doesn't feel as easy or as intuitive. Arc made it so easy to keep spaces separate, and I came to rely very heavily on having tabs for work things and tabs for personal things. The functionality is there, but it's not as smooth.
I'm going to continue to give it a go for a while and make it my default browser. The changes in speed alone make it a much more pleasant browsing experience compared to Arc, but whether I will miss all the little quality-of-life improvements that Arc gave me, I'm not sure. Only time will tell.