trumad / I'm done with Arc Browser.md
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.
