[HN Gopher] Nothing Left to Solve
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Nothing Left to Solve
Author : robenkleene
Score : 21 points
Date : 2024-10-27 20:40 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lmnt.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (lmnt.me)
| tiltowait wrote:
| Arc isn't unique for it, but vertical tabs would be a boon for
| most "ordinary" people I know. When I look at others' browser
| windows, they usually have so many tabs open, they can only see
| favicons, and sometimes not even that. Vertical tabs fixes that--
| but it's a feature, not a product. If that kind of feature caught
| on, absolutely nothing would stop Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc.
| from implementing it.
| kazinator wrote:
| There is no shortage of extensions for existing browsers that
| give you vertical tabs down the left side.
| reissbaker wrote:
| AFAIK there aren't any good ones for Chrome -- you can't
| disable the tabs on the top of the browser, so you have this
| giant waste of space. Ditto for Safari. Firefox requires user
| CSS to disable the tabs on top, and the extensions don't do
| it for you AFAIK. It's pretty bizarre how the existing
| browsers have such bad vertical tabs options -- only Edge has
| a decent implementation, and even theirs isn't perfect: if
| you have enough tabs that they overflow offscreen, there's no
| visual indication in the UI when you open a new tab, because
| the new tab appears at the end of the list offscreen and
| there's no animation or other indication that it was added.
|
| Arc seemed pretty nice from a UI perspective, but crash-y in
| my experience, with no support for Linux or Android, and
| their iOS app wasn't even much of a browser. Now it sounds
| like they're putting Arc into maintenance mode and trying to
| build a conventional looking browser with AI features, so I
| think there's not much hope for it.
|
| Kinda sad that browser UIs are frozen in 2008.
| bdhdbebebeb wrote:
| Chrome has groups. You can expand collapse them. It somewhat
| helps.
|
| A decent fzf style history search runnable from the top bar
| might encourage me to close more tabs.
| raykyri wrote:
| I've been on Brave with vertical tabs since the beginning of
| the year now. It doesn't seems like most people know about it,
| but it's more compact and faster than Arc and I couldn't
| imagine going back to Chrome now.
| QuantumG wrote:
| What?
|
| If you're gunna post a blog, at least choose one that writes
| well.
| ramon156 wrote:
| What makes you consider this a bad blog post? I liked it
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Arc and the Browser Company are a great example of the zirp
| phenomenon. If you look at the offices and the rightly called out
| hubris of the company which makes a Chrome skin, you would think
| they are at least Stripe scale.
| webstrand wrote:
| The reason I'm not interested in arc Arc is that its not open
| source, not even source-available. It may not be hostile to me
| right now, but the existing browsers that I use definitely aren't
| (ungoogled-chromium, firefox) and if that changes, well, I have
| their source code. Figuring out how to switch my workflow to a
| new browser isn't effortless, either.
| jw_mc wrote:
| Source availability doesn't really feel relevant to a
| discussion about why most people don't use it. Most people
| don't know anything about open source.
| titanomachy wrote:
| I think it actually was a factor in adoption of Firefox.
| Enthusiasts switched in part because they understand what
| open-source means. Ordinary people started using it because
| their tech-savvy friends insisted it was better than IE, even
| if they didn't understand exactly why.
| revskill wrote:
| Vertical tabs dont work because the width of a screen is bigger
| than height.
| sshine wrote:
| I saw an ad for Opera on YouTube that argued why Opera is
| better because it lets you organize tabs in groups.
|
| Somehow tab management is the killer feature that will change
| browsers?
| kazinator wrote:
| The remarks about calculators made me remember the Google's
| horrible calculator app in Android.
| nuc1e0n wrote:
| It may be that a commonly established convention is what's meant
| by a problem being 'solved'. Maybe some things could be done in
| many different ways that are all about as good as each other. At
| some point having 'a' way to do things rather than someone's
| arbitrary notion of the 'best' way is sufficient and trying to
| find some better way (that may or may not exist) is only a waste
| of effort.
| lmeyerov wrote:
| It's hard to square seeing the magnitudes of capability coming
| from genAI & AR and thinking the web UX is done because someone's
| idea of browser tab layout is boring
|
| How we use the web today, with the Chrome engine and skins as the
| user agent, seems like the last decade's local optimum. We have
| begun iterating to the next leap, and I don't think the winning
| companies will be perplexity.ai, Anthropic 's compute API, meta's
| Ray-Bans, or some browser ChatGPT extension startup. There is a
| lot of room for new winners.
|
| I do agree with ZIRP comments saying this is NOT a matter like
| Zoom doing everything 10% better to be enough: browser teams need
| to be thinking 10X+ better on broad use. Brave tapped into the
| privacy & ads psyche, which is a leap for a large niche, but
| still not enough compared to some sort of more ambitious Jarvis
| etc rethink.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Indistinguishable browser automation, thread-safe embedded web
| views, embedding browsing in general, low resource consumption
| browsing, a formally defined CSS 2.1 layout algorithm. JavaScript
| implementation diversity. Native alternative web language depth
| beyond WebAssembly. User agents with partial implementations that
| intentionally reject specific standards. I could go on and on.
|
| There's so much to solve that hasn't been solved. This author
| just doesn't spend enough time in the problem space to realize
| it.
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