Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 25

An interesting experiment in finding different ways to use the web, on the idea that people don’t want to use it more, they want to use the web less to accomplish what they want. Arc has a sidebar-based design that encourages organization. It can open a “mini” temporary window that you close when you’re done, or that will close itself after a few hours. Room for a handful of pinned tabs, multiple workspaces, all to keep what’s visible easy to deal with instead of a zillion open tabs or a long list of a zillion bookmarks.

Useful AI?

When browsers like Opera and Brave were jumping on the bandwagon and just tossing AI chatbots into the browser for the sake of buzz, Arc was adding small AI features to do useful tasks, like generating link previews with summaries, shortening long titles so you can see something meaningful on the tab, or organizing your downloads. Unfortunately these “Max” features still require calling out to a remote service to do it.

Customization

It’s built on Chromium, and can run most Chrome extensions, but has no concept of bookmarks. If you import bookmarks from another browser, you get them as pinned tabs.

You can create a “boost” for a website which modifies its appearance. Arc gives you a color scheme map, some font options, and the ability to hide (or “zap”) elements, or you can write custom CSS or JavaScript for a particular site. Early in the beta, back when boosts were entirely JavaScript, I used one to create a pair of buttons to fill in for the Wayback Machine bookmarklets. If I stick with Arc for a while, I may do something similar to add an item to Postmarks.

Where

I used Arc regularly on macOS for several months and multiple releases, but lost interest by the time they finally released a version for Windows 10. (For a while there I was seriously wondering if they’d end up postponing until after the October 2025 end of support and just stick with Windows 11. Also: There’s no Linux version, and it doesn’t run on Wine.) I came back to it to refresh my memory and see what’s new since then, and also to compare it to Zen, which is building a similar browser on top of Firefox instead of Chromium.

There is a mobile app, Arc Search, which is different enough that I like it better than the desktop version and reviewed it separately!

Late last year, Arc went into maintenance mode. It’s still getting bug fixes, but all new feature work is going into the next browser, Dia, which really leans into AI.

Weirdly enough, Arc still requires you to sign into an account just to use it, instead of waiting until you’re actually going to use their online services. Early in the closed beta, when you needed to sign up just to download it, that made sense, but now? Why bother?

Online web app for managing your bookmarks using your own Nextcloud server. You can save pages to it using a bookmarklet on a desktop web browser, and you can install it to your home screen on a phone. There are also mobile apps that can connect to it.

Usually I use it indirectly through Floccus Bookmark Sync, which can use this as the online storage to sync across multiple desktop web browsers.

The main web view of the app is a bit slow and unwieldy, especially on lower-spec hardware (like VMs and the PineTab2), but that’s not so much the fault of the Bookmarks app as it is the design of the general Nextcloud UI. One of these days I’ll get around to writing a script that exports it to HTML for use with Dillo, or syncs it to Falkon bookmarks. (Falkon can handle it just fine on faster hardware, but I mostly use it on slower systems.)

I also had to block it from allowing network access so it wouldn’t check every bookmark for broken links - including some that really shouldn’t be spidered!

There are several Android apps that can sync with Nextcloud Bookmarks. I settled on the mobile version of Floccus since, well, I was already using it.

A full-featured, if awkward Gemini Protocol client for Android and iOS. I keep looking for settings and features in the meatball menu instead of under the tab button, which is where you actually find things like bookmarks, subscribed pages, etc.

Early on when I was first experimenting with Gemini, I preferred Ariane (now Buran) because I didn’t have to keep second-guessing myself while using it. These days, Lagrange is a better choice IMO, being more intuitive than Deedum and more capable than Buran.

The iPad version can run on recent versions of macOS with M-series hardware. It’s fast and light, but it’s still designed for a touch screen, so you have to use mouse gestures or a trackpad to imitate swiping instead of dragging a scrollbar or using the wheel.

Deedum hasn’t been updated since 2022, but it’s still available through F-Droid and on Apple’s App Store.

Ariane was a simple, fast, intuitive Gemini Protocol client for Android with a clean interface that quickly became my favorite mobile client. It was discontinued, forked first by the original author as a paid app called Seren (also discontinued) and later as a free app called Buran.

Buran hasn’t been updated since 2022, but it’s still available through F-Droid and still works great! Bookmarks and client certificates are both supported. It feels faster than Lagrange, though I’m not sure it actually is, and it doesn’t support subscriptions.

More than Waterfox or LibreWolf, IceCat can be described as “Firefox Minus Firefox,” as its primary purpose is to remove the branding, connections to Mozilla services, and any non-Free-with-a-capital-F add-ons.

At present, IceCat is based on an older Firefox ESR release (115) than Waterfox (128), but it does appear to still be maintained.

Syncless and Add-Ons

Like Ungoogled Chromium, all the sync and Mozilla website/service connections have been removed, though you can still go to the Firefox add-ons site yourself or install add-ons manually. There’s also a GNU-curated collection of add-ons, but it doesn’t seem to have been updated since mid-2023 (and the link from the application settings is broken), so you’re better off using the GNU site to vet license compatibility, then go to the Firefox site to get the current version of the add-on.

KeePassXC-Browser is on their list, though I would’ve tried it anyway – and I was able to connect the native Fedora package of IceCat using the “Firefox” settings on KeePassXC.

JavaScript License Checks

IceCat also adds GNU LibreJS, an add-on that blocks JavaScript that isn’t known to be or labeled as GPL-compatibly licensed (unless it’s really small). That’s an interesting ideological take, but the free your JavaScript spec hasn’t made a dent in the growing web application landscape in the decade it’s been online. I had to whitelist my entire Nextcloud server on LibreJS to get it to function, and Nextcloud is AGPL3 licensed!

Availability

GNU doesn’t distribute installers themselves, just scripts to build it from Firefox’s source code. Fedora packages a version of it with some additional add-ons that do things like add alternatives to some of the specific scripts that are blocked by LibreJS.

Overkill

I would only recommend IceCat if you’re really serious about using only free-as-in-libre software. (And in that case, I assume you’re not running on Windows or macOS in the first place.) Even then, I’d suggest LibreWolf, which has similar goals but is more up to date capability-wise and appears to be better maintained. And if you really want to block non-Free JavaScript, well, you can always install LibreJS on there.