Attempting a Safari Move

Safari isn’t any better with battery life. I feel like that needs to be shared more as it’s very strong folk tech wisdom that Chrome eats battery and Safari does not, which is apparently not true at all, and might be the opposite.

But I don’t care too much about that. I have a first-gen M1 Mac from 2021 and the battery on it is still pretty damn impressive and I don’t do anything but smurf around in web browsers.

I still wanted to give Safari a try for a daily driver browser. I don’t think I’ve ever done that.

I’m doing this is because I’m a little mad at Arc/The Browser Company.

I’m mad because I care. Arc clicks with me in a big way. I think it’s a really great web browser. They came in hot, released a great product, then quickly iterated building in great feature after great feature and refining what they had, not being afraid to rip out what wasn’t working.

I wanted the best for Arc. I want them to keep going! Iterate on the business model as much as the product, if needed, to keep make something great that people love forever.

But then the ambitions started to feel weird. Like they wanted to make an entirely new internet? Or something? Or an entirely new computer? OK? That’s cool. Tech visionaries are always weird, so sure, shoot for the stars.

But then those same ambitions seem to be what also includes “don’t work on Arc anymore.” I don’t get that part. Why throw the baby out with the bathwater? People like you for THAT, keep THAT.

The only stab at a business plan I’ve seen was to release some baby fart AI features that didn’t click with me at all. There is a ton of more stuff to try, surely.

They are done with Arc. They say they aren’t, but in the same breath say that it’s feature complete and the entire company is building Dia, a new AI-focused browser with fresh idea. I’ll be watching for sure, the company has proven they can ship innovate stuff in a space I really care about. But they’ve also proven that AI-specific features can be boring, useless, and downright bad.

So for now I’m salty about Arc.

It’s this “the stars or nothing” ambition that I struggle with.

Arc has grown fast — users quadrupled this year alone — but it has also become clear that Arc is never going to be a truly mainstream product. It’s too complicated, too different, too hard to get into. “It’s just too much novelty and change,” Miller says, “to get to the number of people we really want to get to.”

Maybe they’ll nail it, but I fear that in building something that tries to appeal to everyone, that’s not a fight with great features and great design, that’s just a marketing fight.

The Good & Bads in Comparing Safari and Arc

Anyway! Here’s what I’ve found while trying to switch to Safari from Arc.

• ✅ You can have side-tabs in Safari. Just open the side panel. They can be grouped.
• ✅ The default hide-show sidebar command is Command-Shift-L, which might actually be better than the default Command-S in Arc (I know it’s changeable, I just like defaults). Command-S interferes with all sorts of stuff forcing you to awkwardly do it twice in Arc.
• ❌ You’re forced to see tabs on the side AND on top in Safari. Ideally there would be some way to hide top-tabs entirely when the sidebar is open.
• ✅ Pinning Tabs. I really like the Arc feature where if you’re just done for now with a tab and close it. This doesn’t actually close the tab forever, it just “resets” it to whatever it was essentially bookmarked to. Turns out this is the same behavior as when you “Pin” a tab in Safari, which feels sensible.
• ✅ Tabs sync with iCloud in Safari. It works better for me than Arc tab syncing, which regularly stopped working.
• ✅ Profiles are pretty cool in Safari. Spaces are a great concept in Arc too, but those spaces are always there whereas with a profile all the stuff from other profiles is entirely gone until you switch back.
• ✅ Command-Shift-C for copying URL with no tracking is a wonderful feature in Arc. Someone told me Safari has something like this, but I can’t find it?? Anyway this extension for Safari brings the exact command, so three ❤️❤️❤️s for that.
• ❌ Split layouts are fricking awesome in Arc. Every browser obviously needs this. Please get on it. This alone might nuke my switch and keep me on Arc.
• ❌ Renaming Tabs. Another fantastic Arc feature that no other browser including Safari has.
• ✅ The most important extensions work: 1Password and Ad Blockers. But there are far less interesting and good extensions in Safari. One example is Codeium, which I like and isn’t offered in Safari.
• ❌ DevTools are fine in Safari but Chrome’s are definitely superior. Three examples from just super recently: no animations inspector in Safari, no screenshotting tool in Safari, no Lighthouse in Safari.
• ❌ Little Arc is another tremendous feature of Arc. It somehow knows when links I click really should just be temporary popups not full blown tabs. It’s hard to explain I guess I just really like it.
• ✅ Safari’s DevTools can inspect Safari open in iOS Simulator (and plugged in iOS devices) and that’s awfully handy.
• ✅ Safari’s reader mode is pretty nice. Weird that Arc never went there at all.
• ✅ There are quite a few Arc features that I just don’t find useful at all, like the Library and awkward screenshotting tools, Quoting, Tab Group sharing, Boosts (weirdly), Easels, fiddling with “Show Toolbar”, so just not having them is kind of a bonus in Safari.
• ❌ And yet some little features that I miss, like the automatic picture-in-picture videos when moving tabs.

I have yet to try the even newer-fangled browsers like Zen and Horse, so I’ll put that on my winter TODO list.