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 that 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 the heck the specs are on it—that used to get 8 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 the browser company and Arc were up to, they hadn't posted anything

other than icons in, like, a year. 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. It 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 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

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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, the gold standard is Chrome. It's 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 of 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 hotkeys 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

UI's 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 web; 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 by 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 a Chromium/Electron base with the speed of opening. Like, it looks fine; this

animation when you hover is the worst thing ever. It's super—that's not just the compression or my video; it

is that janky. 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's 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 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 the 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 in 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 hotkey: 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 them to

somebody on my team, so I command-shift-C, and I guess it's working now. I don't know why, because when I tried this

yesterday, I couldn't, because the hotkey conflicted with the page. And Vivaldi will prioritize the page's hotkeys over

yours, always—even the ones built into the browser. So if you happen to have a hotkey that some random website has as

one that you use regularly, you will not be able to use that hotkey on 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 damn. And

that goes one layer deeper, because one of the things that they *do* care 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

support gestures for backward swiping.  Just starting to use Vivaldi on my laptop. Really like it, but my laptop's touchpad gesture

swiping with 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

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
