I need to be really honest with you guys, I've had a rough time with browsers over the last year. Arc was great and I think it's fair to say, was, because I'm far from the only person having massive problems with it, in particular performance issues.

My wonderful M2 MacBook Pro Max, whatever heck the spec is on it, that used to get eight to 10 hours of battery, gets less than two if I have Arc open.

When I complained about it publicly, I was far from the only one having these issues. I need to emphasize how absurd the battery drain is though.

We're talking six times more being used, less than Chrome was doing. I was going mad. I was trying to get work done in Uber and my laptop's fans had spun up and it was falling apart, and when I went and checked what browser company and Arc were up to, they hadn't posted anything other than icons in like a year, and even the icon posts were November.

It's clear that this browser is actually dead, and everybody who was mad at me for saying this earlier was wrong.

Arc is dead, and I am genuinely sorry to anybody who started using it based on my recommendations.

I will say I have lost a lot of credibility in recommending browsers, which means you shouldn't use this as an end-all be-all, the right place to go if you want the best possible browser, but I need to write some of my wrongs here, recommending a VC funded browser that hates its users, that has no interest in fixing the problems that they caused, and is specifically continuously dodging the opportunities to own it, fix it, or just open-source it.

So I am frustrated. I have done everything from trying browsers that are ancient that were C customizable to building my own and I think I finally landed somewhere good but before we can get there a quick word from today's sponsor.

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This is an app I'm running on Local Host, it's one of their templates and it's really cool.

I'm going to send a message, please subscribe and it basically instantly appeared in the other browser. It's a different browser CU I wanted to show this isn't doing some weird stuff locally this is actually server side sync so what does the code look like it's got to be really complex right?

Well here in our real code base it's just inside of it next to our nextjs application we have a folder named convex.

In this folder we have our list query has no arguments has a Handler which will hit the context. dbquery for messages order to send take 100 then you just return a promise it's writing traditional typescript the mutation looks pretty much the same if you're curious about the database definitions here's the schema that's the whole thing yes it is actually that easy you've now seen pretty much all the backend code where is the complexity?

Is it hidden in the app? Let's look here we have messages is usequery api.messages.list that looks familiar that's kind of kind of like TRPC and sure as hell if you command click it brings you right to the backend code, best DX ever, and it makes sure that if you make a change somewhere, it hydrates throughout your whole app and you'll see type errors where they actually happen and now you get the free sync.

You literally just call the query and now it will automatically update. You're done. How cool is that? If you want the best Typescript first solution for your back end, it's pretty hard to beat Convex.

Check them out today. So, dealing, so with Convex, as I saw how many people were having problems and how little work was being done fixing them, I started once again investigating all my alternatives.

I made a quick list of the ones that people recommend the most and why they are not what I'm looking for.

Obviously, gold standard is Chrome, is stable, well supported, and has a good ecosystem, but it has none of the customizability that I'm looking for.

Now, not that I customized Arc a ton. Hell, I barely even used half the features, but I have fallen in love with a couple key things like the sidebar, like not having the top of the browser have this giant bar on it that takes up a third of my vertical space on my small screen, like having hot keys that actually make sense for a bunch of things.

I missed all of that so much that I just couldn't do Chrome.

I tried. I couldn't. I'll be honest, I still think most people should probably just use Chrome and if you haven't gotten addicted to these custom UIs and workflows yet, don't.

It's like getting an SSD where you don't realize how slow hard drives were until you have one and now you can't live without it anymore.

So honestly, don't dive down this rabbit hole if you could avoid it because it will make you unhappy for the rest of your life.

Speaking of unhappy, we need to talk about Brave.

Because I do not genuinely understand how anyone recommends this browser. It runs like it looks, like it's full of web3. It doesn't have any customization whatsoever.

You have no control over the hotkeys. You can't even set a hotkey for opening and closing the sidebar. I don't-- all Brave is is a web3 skinned, worse Chrome with a sidebar.

And at least you can get it without the web3 skin if you use Edge.

So I guess the most reasonable recommendation to get some of this functionality is probably Edge, but there is zero customization of hotkeys in it at all.

I was blown away how little control you have in Edge considering how much different it is. I couldn't get it to do any of the things I wanted it to do.

Cool that it had vertical tabs, like, if I open it quick, uh, Edge, certainly, you can tell it's chromium electron base with the speed of opening.

Like, it looks fine. This animation when you hover here is the worst thing ever. It's super-- it's-- that's not just the compression or my video, it is that jank.

It just looks awful, especially on high refresh rate screens. You can't really hide-- you can't make this top bar go away, and we're losing so much real estate from that.

It's sad, but it's better than Brave, low bar, but honestly, personally, I would just use Chrome. Like, this isn't a big enough win, especially with how ugly that sliding is and the fact that you can't hotkey to to pin unpin it, which is all I want.

If I could have a hotkey that hit that button, I probably would have given Edge a real shot, but after seeing how much the team downplayed the needs of people in their forums, I just stopped caring.

Next, we have Zen, which is very customizable and very close to what I want, but it's Firefox based, which is probably the biggest flaw.

It's still early and has problems, which I'm sure we'll talk about in a bit, and as far as I understood at the time, the battery life and the performance weren't great.

We'll come back to Zen. Speaking of Zen, Firefox, we're going to move on. I wrote down this list of the specific things I wanted: a vertical tab bar, the ability to hide everything for a simple UI like what I have on the screen now where all I have open is the website and I have the little like border around, which is fine.

A command shift C to copy current URL. I cannot tell you how much this is important to me, the regularity in which I am copying a URL to put it in my notes, to send it to somebody, to put it somewhere else.

It is a constant thing. I am doing this at least 20 times a day, probably more, and multiple hotkeys to select the thing and then copy from it, not acceptable.

I could not tolerate that, especially because of how slow that flow was and all the browsers I tried it with.

I also need a hotkey to toggle the sidebar. I would like it to be Chrome based and I want the performance to not suck.

There is a browser that hit all of these things and it has the world's most ugly browser icon, Vivaldi, and I was surprised.

It genuinely seemed like Vivaldi was going to be the right browser for me. I had no way to hide the top bar, which was sad but tolerable.

I could set my hotkey for the sidebar and disable the animation on it. I could put it on the right, which was a nice benefit.

Couldn't do that with Arc. I was feeling pretty good. It was ugly as sin, but with a little bit of customization, I could make it tolerable looking.

I was still sad I couldn't get rid of the top bar, but like, whatever.

But there were a couple things I couldn't deal with. The first was the quick copy, which I got working, and I'm actually really impressed with the level of customization you can do in here.

The quick commands in Vivaldi are incredible, and I created one: copy current URL. It focuses the address bar, it has a 10 millisecond delay, it copies the content, it has another 10 millisecond delay, and then it focuses the page.

And then I bound this in the keyboard layer to be a hot key: copy current URL, command shift C.

And this works great. You'll see that little flicker up there. That's because I copied the URL and it's there. Awesome. I was reviewing a PR a few days ago.

I'll find a random upload thing, one, and I was in the pull request, I was looking through files and I wanted to send to somebody on my team, so I command shift C'd it, and I guess it's working now.

I don't know why, because when I tried this yesterday, I couldn't because the hot key conflicted with the page, and Vivaldi will prioritize the page's hot keys over yours always, even the ones built into the browser.

So if you happen to have a hotkey that some random website had as one that you use regularly, you will not be able to use that hotkey in that website one of the killers for me was Excalidraw because I bind command shift E as my open close and command shift E is export in Excalidraw so I cannot close my sidebar with a hotkey when I have Excalidraw open and there is no option anywhere in Vivaldi to change this and this is when I learned something very valuable about Vivaldi, they don't really care about what their users want.

I have read enough of the forums now to be very confident and very certain of that statement. They don't give a and that goes one layer deeper because one of the things that they give a about is laptop users.

I don't know what went wrong. I feel like I just went down the craziest rabbit hole, which is what happens whenever I screw with Vivaldi.

The quick form of what I want to say is that swipe gestures did not work in Vivaldi and it was my understanding that nobody who contributes to Vivaldi uses a laptop with a trackpad so they were not interested at all.

What they prefer are their very strange Mouse gestures which as far as I know cannot work on Mac because the way their Mouse gestures work is you hold down right click and you move the mouse some way to trigger something.

So they have you can go back by holding that right click and moving to the left.

I hate this and honestly if I do come back I don't want this on. I'm turning it off.

The more painful thing here is that they don't really support trackpad gestures. I know that because yesterday I went insane trying to get my swipe back and forward working and I couldn't and when I read through their forums it seemed like it just doesn't tou gestures for backward just starting use a Vivaldi on my laptop, really like it, but my laptop, the touchpad gesture, swiping two fingers, doesn't seem to work.

Reading other posts, it's not implemented in Vivaldi. Is this real? It's a crucial feature on a laptop. It's always been a strange oversight.

Yeah, it's strange. So for these people it didn't work, what you have to do, and what I had done, and I don't know why it's behaving properly now is I installed an extension that fixed it.

Yes, two years ago, I don't care. I was in here and there were posts a week ago that had the problem, so it's not a thing they fixed.

The solution as of 2024 was this extension someone recommended to fix it and I had it and it fixed it.

Is I used it and I just uninstalled it and it's still working, so I'm very confused.

I'm extraordinarily confused. I have reset the browser multiple times. I've changed a lot of things, but the fact that there are this many people posting in here saying that they need this and they're using the extension to fix it, the functionality is not available in Vivaldi.

I have no idea what's going on that is allowing it to work, but there is no way in the last 24 hours they shipped a new version that fixes this.

Everybody's saying that should feel bad. I this browser drove me mad. There's a lot of these little things where they just refuse to budge and that kind of seems like the philosophy of the Vivaldi team is if it's not an option they offer in here, it's not an option that matters.

There was a lot of soft breaks like this bar not being hideable was very upsetting to me, but the hard break was definitely the hotkey thing.

The fact that a webpage's hotkeys take precedence over the browser hotkeys was enough of a problem for me to just give up.

But I was actually leaning towards sticking with it, but I'd seen enough people giving another browser a go that I decided to ignore them and make my own.

So I started working on what is not a browser. I insist that it is not a browser. You should not act like it is a browser.

It was an experiment, but I started playing with what would a browser that I made look like? And I got to the point where I can search for things, do things on the web, make tabs, even cut, put that here.

And look, I can even see my own stream from T3. Not a browser.

Tab switching is immediate. I even have navigation working. I didn't have command W working proper, but for something I built in an hour, not bad. I mostly did this as a joke, and I will not be continuing.

This is literally four files and an index HTML. The whole browser window is HTML, and I'm using Electron heavily, very heavily.

I've learned a lot about building browsers in Electron. The most painful thing is that you can't really sandbox the different tabs because Electron was built with the assumption that you own all of the pages that could opened in it.

I could either DIY my own encapsulation layer to containerize pages properly and then build all of the memory management, sleeping, and everything else necessary to make that viable, or I could fork Chromium and build it in C.

And as I realized that there are decisions necessary to do any of this, I think I know making a browser isn't easy, but as I realized even the easy path had so many annoying gotchas that would result in something that was either really insecure or absolutely miserable.

Yeah, I was not going to do this. I knew going in I wasn't. I even have my posts. The start of this thread was, I won't make a browser, I won't make a browser, I won't make a browser.

And a lot of very smart people told me I should make a browser, which makes me concerned that they might not actually be that smart.

Like, we have, he please don't make me do this, where I did the first demo of it, and he really wanted me to, but I'm not going to betray Mark.

I'm not going to do it. It is tempting, and I might even in the future put out a scaffold that has all the features that I want but is not safe or functional.

I don't think anyone should use and see if others end up maintaining it and making it something real. It would be cool. I'm not going to, though, because Vivaldi was close, and Vivaldi was close enough that I really thought I was going to stick with it.

But after the gesture stuff, which according to chat apparently isn't a case in a vanilla install, which is weird, because I had a pretty vanilla install and it just didn't work.

Where is the yeah, so gestures work in Vol un clean install.

That was not my experience, I don't know. But the hotkey thing was enough, and the fact that they have no interest in fixing the hotkey thing was enough that I will absolutely not be using Vivaldi as my main browser, and I was close.

So where did I end up? I ended up somewhere I did not expect. I ended up some somewhere that I never thought I would land.

It was a browser that I supported the existence of, a team that I was really confident in, and a project that I wanted to see find success because I think Zen browser was doing everything right, and I still do.

Zen browser is a project you've probably already heard of and we're probably screaming the name of as you watch this video because my most popular video about browsers by far is my Zen video.

It's my seventh most popular video, eighth most popular video ever because it was really exciting to me. The thing that made me excited about Zen is that they weren't trying to reinvent the world, they weren't trying to build a new browser engine from scratch, they weren't trying to make JavaScript go die somewhere, they weren't trying to prove how smart and capable they are.

They just wanted an open-source alternative to Arc that was good and customizable and when I first tried it, it was rough around the edges.

Now it's still a little bit pointy, but despite the fact it is Firefox based, I think I'm making the move to Zen.

I've been using this as my main browser for the last 24 hours after using Vivaldi as my main browser for the last few days and it has been a net improvement over Vivaldi in every single way and it is even better than Arc in a handful of ways that I am genuinely quite excited about.

Zen learned all of the right lessons from all of the other browsers.

The team is genuinely awesome, their Discord is super fun, half of them are watching me live talking about this right now. I feel like this community is set up for for success.

It's a team of people who deeply care, who listen and want to make the best browser. They don't want to show off how great they are, they don't want to raise a bunch of VC money, none of them even own a Macbook yet and I am fixing that.

I am going to ship a MacBook to one of the maintainers so it's easier for them to maintain the Mac version because I want this browser to win.

I'm Finally Moving On (I have a new browser)

Hi, I'm a software dev nerd mostly known for full stack TypeScript stuff. Check out me and my stack at t3.gg
