I’ve bounced between browsers over the years. Chrome or Chromium were my default for many years while I ran Linux, with a few small dalliances with Chrome-powered alternatives like Brave. I tried Safari when I switched to a MacBook and used it for months. I then hopped on the Arc Browser bandwagon, which introduced me to features that I now consider essential. That experience wouldn’t last forever.
Enlightenment
The creators of Arc, The Browser Company, is rethinking what browsers mean in today’s computing world. For the vast majority of computer users, their most important application is the browser, and Arc takes that seriously. They built a screenshot tool, a few ways to take shareable notes or create dashboard-like collections of webpages, and also created single window tab split-screen.
While none of those features were vital to my usage, they indicated the care and attention that Arc had for how browsing can and should work moving forward. What instead hooked me were static pinned tabs, vertical tab arrangement, and robust picture-in-picture video.
Pinned tabs are efficient during my work day. I’m constantly switching between my email, calendar, Salesforce, and Google Drive, and knowing I’m a consistent keyboard command away from getting to one of those pages helps tremendously. Arc made these pinned tabs first-class citizens, including creating custom support for common pages like your calendar, where there would be a note in the tab preview telling you when your next meeting is; hovering over the tab would give a short preview of the next couple hours, and a button to join a meeting that’s about to begin.
Vertical tabs are space-efficient without adjusting information density. New tabs open at the bottom of the list, but the preview of what that page is always allow the same number of characters regardless of how many tabs you’ve opened—there’s no relying on shortened descriptions or just an icon when you have more than 10 tabs open. It also allows for “nesting” tabs inside each other to create a hierarchy based on what tabs may have opened from links, or manually adjusting them based on any other sensible procedure one may concoct.
Finally, picture-in-picture video—common on phones—has also proved useful in a desktop setting. It negates the need for spawning new windows dedicated only to a YouTube video or other stream you want to play in the background. Instead, you pop the video out into a frameless stream with built-in controls, and arbitrarily resize it as needed. Arc played a few tricks to also make this work with an entire Google Meet stream, which was incredibly useful while working on a laptop screen. It meant I could open up various meeting notes or other bits of documentation I needed while a resizable feed of the virtual meeting could hang out in a corner, so I could still see my coworkers.
These three elements ended up being a surprising cornerstone in how I use a browser, and helped me develop an opinion on certain features beyond a vague feeling about how a browser works.
Frustration
When Arc first launched, it had a strong opinion about its space in the new browser world: for the most part, you only ever need 1 browser window. They built split-screen into the browser as a way to avoid spawning new screens. Links that opened in new windows were, by default, placed into “Little Arc” windows that were sandboxed away from a proper window. That experience was clunky and made it difficult to manage links. Most egregiously, a new window would duplicate all of the tabs from your existing window. That is, if I had my email, a YouTube video, and an article open in a window, and I hid Cmd + N to make a new window, I would get a window containing my email, the same YouTube video, and the same article. Creating a new tab in either window would create the same new tab in the other window. The team at The Browser Company did huge cartwheels to make this feature work, because you can imagine the conflicts that arise by this behavior.
A month or so after I joined the beta, they changed course and made windows act like every other browser: each window was a separate instance with its own tabs. I worked under this paradigm quite happily until, many months later, they changed their minds again back to the original mode. Others in my position hoped they could make this choice a setting, given that they’d built it both ways, but they came down firm in their position this second time.
This revised approach heavily conflicted with how my brain works with a browser, and poorly affected my efficiency given my typical desktop setup. Split-screen was clunky to operate, but having duplicated tabs made navigation difficult: I never precisely knew where on my screen the information I needed was.
While this double about-face was difficult to work with, I felt I could still manage. But in the month surrounding the feature reversion, they also began heavily discussing their desire to implement various AI features. Chat prompts became first-class citizens, they built a feature to rename tabs and folders using AI, and their overall roadmap seemed focused more on these types of additions rather than polishing or streamlining how the overall program operated. It added unnecessary bloat to an already resource-intensive browser. I decided I needed to move away from Arc for the time being.
I knew Chrome wasn’t the most likely successor, because its resource usage is similar by design. Arc is based on Chromium, so there wouldn’t be much change. I played around with Safari, but their way of implementing saved and pinned tabs was frustrating, plus their profiles lacked some the flexibility and persistence of Arc. After a week of messing around, I rediscovered Firefox and how flexible it truly is.
Recovery
Firefox is rooted in an open-source mindset. They do their own thing, have a huge number of settings, and a flexible interface that allows for a larger number of extensions that directly modify how the browser runs. The biggest upshot to this is how easily I was able to replicate vertical and pinned tabs in a way that’s sufficient for my needs.
I’m using Tree Style Tab to create vertical tabs. It has a huge number of settings, most of which I ignore, but its sense of hierarchy is excellent and I can still pin tabs up top in a specified order.
I then enabled Containers. Containers create profiles within tabs, so in a single window you can have tabs that are siloed away from each other, each color-coded however you specify. It lets me separate my personal and work accounts, but there’s no need to have multiple browser windows open to accomplish my task.
As it turns out, Firefox’s picture-in-picture video is also excellent. It works for YouTube and, importantly, the MLB TV website. Normally during a commercial break, all video navigation is removed from the stream. This is different than on the iPad or TV versions of the MLB app, where you can easily skip past commercial breaks when rewatching a game. However, you can turn the game stream into a picture-in-picture video, and it comes with navigation controls to easily jump around.
Not everything has gone perfectly. Chrome is still the leader of the web: every website is designed around Chrome, with Firefox and Safari support a distant second in importance. I have a few infrequent tasks at work that fail to work in Firefox, and some services rely on browser extensions that they only build for Chrome. Luckily none of these have been deal breakers yet, but at times I’m running dangerously close to needing to use multiple browsers to accomplish everything I need to do.
Even so, I’m happy to be supporting Firefox by using it, and it’s overall good for the web ecosystem if it remains relevant. It’s been a successful experiment, and I hope to keep using Firefox far into the future, at least until any other decent browsers make vertical tabs available.