Browsers Are Weird Right Now

Published on February 5, 2024

Arc really excited me. The sidebar felt like a much more intuitive way of managing tabs across workspaces. I loved its picture-in-picture mode that automatically triggered when switching tabs. And its split view stuff is ingenious. But it’s finicky to use in a multi-monitor setup, I still can’t decide if the “Little Arc” feature serves any real purpose, and Arc Search is a disappointment.

Brave replaces advertising and affiliate links with their own, hoping site owners will embrace crypto nonsense to reclaim their revenue. Their leadership supported homophobic legislation and broadcast misinformation about the pandemic. Let’s move on.

Chrome is what you’re probably using. I remember sitting in the office of my first real web design job, reading Scott McCloud’s Google Chrome comic along with my coworkers and thinking “this is the future.” It’s a good browser, but using it today feels like surrendering to the browser monoculture. (See also: Contra Chrome by Leah Elliot.)

Edge’s transition to Chromium still makes me a little sad. It seems like a fine choice for unopinionated Windows users, but the prominent sidebar with AI and shopping buttons suggests I’m not the target audience. I also take issue with some of Microsoft’s marketing tactics for Edge.

Firefox has been my default the longest… I’m old enough to remember loading “Mozilla Firebird” on a USB drive in defiance of my high school’s Internet Explorer hegemony. It’s the only surviving engine without roots in WebKit/Blink, which makes it special. I think it has the best CSS dev tools. But given its declining usage and Mozilla’s recent emphasis on AI in marketing materials, its future looks bumpy.

Opera is a shadow of its former self after a downward spiral of business shenanigans. I wouldn’t touch this (or any of its spinoff browsers like Opera GX) with a ten-foot pole today.

Safari’s seen a promising spike in development recently. Still, because it’s the only game in town on iOS, the issues I do encounter have this irritating layer of obligation. It’s probably the most battery-friendly browser on macOS, and it really set the standard for mobile web browsing. But it’s the only option here that’s unsupported outside one manufacturer’s hardware.

Vivaldi’s UI reminds me of Opera’s before it went to the dark side… which makes sense, given its leadership. While I admire the level of customization in principle, in practice I find all of the teeny tiny bars, panels, themes and settings pretty overwhelming.

There are a bunch more, but those seem like the major players (at least in this part of the globe).

It was fun trying Arc for a year, but I think I’m going back to Firefox for now. I’m worried about it, but it’s the only big cross-platform option that maintains its own rendering engine.

Plus, it lets me put the bookmarks toolbar next to the address field:

More room for browsin’. So that’s nice.

Update (February 7, 2024)

Follow-up (February 12, 2024)

Update (February 13, 2024)

Update (February 14, 2024)