Some of the things I want in a web browser
Still using Arc over here. Help.
Art by my wife. I got the permission to share!
I believe software can mature to a point where it could be considered complete. The authors don't need to continue shipping new things for me to stick around. If I'm already happy with a tool compared to its competition, I'd mostly want bug fixes and security patches to stick with it.
That's how I feel about Arc as a web browser. It's obviously not getting any love and care anymore, but I've been happy to use it since they're at least bumping chromium. I don't actually need new features.
Buuut... there are a few bugs I'd love to see fixed and it doesn't seem like they ever will be. This has been pushing me away. It's happened that I called out an issue during code review which, unknown to me, was exclusive to Arc. Not Safari, Firefox or Chrome had this problem and I felt bad about it as it's not the author's fault that my choice of browser is buggy.
I've been using Arc with the assumption it would have the same "web page bugs" as Chrome, but that was not true.
So I looked at Zen: a fork of Firefox customized to resemble Arc. It's still in beta, but it seems like a popular alternative. I decided I'm going to miss Chrome DevTools and try it.
To be honest, I was quite impressed. Performance-wise it felt better, and it doesn't have the bugs I knew from Arc. Sadly, I was only trading one set of issues for another:
- Airtraffic control
This feature allows pattern matching links to determine which 'profile' to open it in. Zen/Firefox has the concept of 'containers' and I think it supports something similar, but I could not get it to work even though my job is working with computers.
- Live folders
I love this feature. I use it for managing GitHub pull request reviews. Reviewing code is almost always a top priority and seeing a review request pop up in my sidebar is the right amount of pestering I need to get to it. Zen doesn't have it.
- Shortcut overrides
With Arc, you could customize the override per shortcut and globally across all sites. In Zen, you have to configure this per website again and again, and it does not support per shortcut preference.
- Tab switcher
Just like I could switch between apps with meta + tab I want to be able to switch between browser tabs. Zen actually supports this, but it does not work as well. For example, switching between pinned tabs does not work.
- Not hanging on pages with monstrous amounts of JavaScript
At work, I spend a lot of time in the Logs Explorer on Google Cloud. It was unfortunate that Zen would randomly hang and stop responding on this page.
While it's true that there are third-party extensions/plugins that could help with some of those issues, I would much prefer built-in support that's deeply integrated with better security and polish.
And that's basically what I ran into in a couple days of using Zen. I learned about some of the things I should look for when eye-ing a new browser.
