33
votes
ArcFox, an opensource project to make Firefox flow like Arc browser
Link information
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- Title
- GitHub - betterbrowser/arcfox: Make firefox flow like arc
- Authors
- betterbrowser
- Word count
- 464 words
Interesting. I use tree style tab and some simple adjustments to a firefox file to remove the top bar and make it sidebarish. Still lacking in some functionality (bookmarks take a few extra steps than Id like), so im always interested in anything making this easier/better. Sounds like FF themsevles are moving this way as well, but I don't want to bet on that.
You might be into the project I maintain, one of the main features that I made sure to work out is easy access to the bookmark sidebar (and others).
You are not wrong. This might be exactly what i've been looking for.
Edit-
Ok yeah this is basically everything i've been hoping for. Thanks.
Edit 2-
Well sorta. Seems i'm not getting expected behavior when i import the addon json. Not sure if it's sideberry itself, your json, or some extension I have (tabliss maybe? Everything else shoudln't touch it), but lots of weird behavior.
Looks like your style isn't getting applied (just standard sideberry?)
for ref: https://imgur.com/a/K9BaLif
Edit 3:
Miiigh be after digging through your readme that you've split it all off into the subfolder extensions and those need to be added to the main css if I want the same appearance? Can't test at the moment because I'm stuck waiting for something to finish before I can browser reboot.
That looks like the style! I'm not sure if I'm just missing something here? Should follow most (as much as it can) Firefox theme settings.
Huh, just looks different than the style shown on the github repo video. On top of that it seems that I can't easily toggle between panels by clicking on them. Clicking in that area in general is a little wonky, but that might be due to other configurations i've done and need to adjust.
I just installed and I really like it. Do you know a way to hide the top bar until you hover over it? I know I can make the browser full screen but then I also loose the OS toolbar.
Top bar? Which one are you talking about?
The address bar, I was sleepy when I typed that out.
I prefer a cleaner interface, so I started to hide the top bars and only access the tabs as needed. Using shortcuts like CTRL + L in combination with another extension for managing tabs is quite effective. I also use ArcFox for its appealing theme, which is customizable, allowing me to tweak it for enhanced functionality.
I find that surprisingly interesting. My first instinct was to dismiss this as taking up way too much space but websites tend to be more vertical than horizontal, there's a limit to how many characters per line you want in a block of text.
Is there more unique to it than the sidebar?
It's basically just install an extension that gives you side bar tabs (sideberry does seem much better), and then you need to follow a guide to paste some custom css in a specific spot to hide the current top bar and move some things around.
It's very simple (just follow instructions), but it makes everything flow great. Especially sideberries panels.
I have yet another modification that makes it so that when you fullscreen a video, it only takes up the space allocated to that window, not the entire monitor, which is helpful so I can split my screen as needed.
I've been looking for something like this for ages, would you be able to share it or is it something that a relative novice would be able to do?
It's very easy (at least on firefox).
Go to
about:configin your url, accept the risk and continue, then start typingfull-screen-api.ignore-widgetsin the search box exactly as is, and set that option to "true". That's it.Having a sidebar on the side on a big screen, I really like this new flow to web browsing.
I've been working on a tabs and bookmarks management extension for the past 1.5/2yrs so I'm glad to see that topic randomly pop up on Tildes! My extension also features a side bar (as a separate popup for now) with access to both tabs and bookmarks in a tree structure with folders (like for a file system, but with tabs and bookmarks instead of files). It also supports tags, filters (to filter by tag, node type, i.e. tabs and bookmarks), a dynamic informational box with additional info about the item you're hovering over, a button to quickly close all your tabs (handy if you need to close tabs because you got distracted, need to update your browser, or are simply in a hurry and need to leave), drag & drop, a search bar, a zoom-in feature to show only a given folder (to focus on the part of the tree you need right now and hide the rest), a breadcrumbs component, etc. It also features themes (you can create custom themes as well), and multiple languages.
In the future, I'd like to add features such as split-screen (to work with multiple trees), drag & drop between trees, a mobile version, integrations with third-party software like Obsidian, Workflowy, Notion, etc., sessions to easily resume your work, undo-redo with a bin, keyboard shortcuts, and probably other things as well that I'm not thinking of right now.
I should clarify that the extension displays both tabs and bookmarks together (or only one or the other depending on filters). Tabs and bookmarks are treated as very similar entities conceptually speaking. The extension lets you turn a tab into a bookmark and vice versa very easily. So when you're done browsing, you don't need to save your bookmarks, in fact, they are already saved! The extension wil add and remove bookmarks and folders to your profile as you browse, so they are kept in sync with the extension, so to speak.
This helps you avoid ending up with multiple folders of bookmarks and lots of duplicates. Instead of saving your tabs in a bookmarks folder and resuming your work another day, and then saving your tabs again in a new folder, you just keep browsing using your current tabs/bookmarks. You don't end up with multiple snapshots of your browsing session, but your bookmarks are kept in sync with your browsing session as your browse, so you don't even need to save anything when you're done, it's already there in your bookmarks, it's been all along. So, no duplicate folders and no duplicate bookmarks. Just resume your work and stop when you're done for the day, it's all taken care of.
I intend to launch it this month so I'll probably make a post about it on Tildes soon, but I still have a number of things to do before I'm ready. I'm in a bit of a hurry to be honest.
It'll be available on Chrome first due to resource constraints, but I'd like to support other browsers, like Firefox, in the future as well.
I hope you guys will like it if you ever check it out.
By the way, if you have any feature requests, let me know and I'll see if I can add them to the roadmap. Feel free to describe to me your dream tabs & bookmarks management extension!
I like to think that my product offers good value and is based on a good idea, but maybe I'm missing something that users really want, so do let me know.
Ohh nice! I was so sad Arc also chose Chromium as their engine. I know it makes some sense, but we need better engine diversity ASAP to save the web from monopoly. It's unlikely a extension will be able to have the deep control Arc can have by writing a the browser from scratch, but it'll be nice to borrow some features from it so we can have a similar experience on Firefox.
Out of curiosity, a while back I looked into forking Firefox to build in some features that don't lend themselves well to userChrome hacks or extensions and unfortunately it's anything but straightforward. Or rather, forking itself isn't so hard, but you're in for a bad time if you want to continuously bring things like security patches over from mainline Firefox into your fork, which is really bad with how ubiquitous 0days have become. It would really be in Mozilla's best interest to make forking easier but unfortunately I don't see that happening any time soon.
I've been wondering why all these other browsers used Chromium instead of Firefox and what you said maybe gives a glimpse of what goes into that decision. I would think Firefox would benefit greatly from having many forks of the browser, as presumably it would lead to more contributors to Firefox since those contributions would often end up in some of the forked browsers. I could be wrong in my understanding of how that works but I assume companies like Vivaldi or The Browser Company (the ones that make the Arc browser) would essentially be able to take some of their resources and contribute them to Firefox since they'd have a vested interest in making it better.
Seems to me Mozilla should have prioritized that a long time ago to give others a chance to contribute to Firefox in that way rather than basically leaving everyone with only one option of using Chromium.
I have forked Firefox for a specific vendor reason, and it was absolutely crushingly bad.
Firefox years ago had their processes separated, or were beginning to, to make forks possible, but they have purposefully embedded them together in such a way that it is near impossible to make your own distinct flavor of Firefox. If they were truly intent on being open, they would have, should have, consciously decided against, separating the rendering agent from the UI, but they did not in an attempt to control the browser and its future. It's absolutely asinine. There was movement a few years back (probably a decade) to ensure that it was all separated through their servo process, but they didn't. Whereas chromium, on the other side, distinctly made the decision to separate a good chunk of it which has allowed so many forks to proliferate: not just that, but they are much more open in allowing outside contributors and have developed much better resources.
I still believe Firefox has the far superior rendering engine (just look at that font rendering!) but they didn't decouple it enough to make it worth it to develop proper forks and they did that on purpose.
That decision to remove embedding support years ago was tragic with how it killed several cool browser projects in the process.
My favorite (and perhaps the most prominent of the group) was Camino, which took Gecko and packaged it into a browser built with the native OS X UI toolkit (Cocoa/AppKit) with all the OS integrations and adherence to platform conventions one would expect to come with that. Later on it also added a handful of quality of life features and bits of polish that Firefox still doesn't have even now.
A couple of others that come to mind were K-Meleon, which was kind of like the Windows counterpart to Camino (a Gecko browser built to use native Windows UI), and even GNOME Web (then known as Epiphany) which later switched to WebKit.
That sounds like a terrible vision and management from Firefox leadership. I can't imagine what those people were thinking to go that route with the browser. Of course maybe a lot of those decisions were made so many years ago that they were overconfident in their position relative to Chrome or IE, versus what the landscape looks like today where Firefox could use all the help it could get.
While playing with this I combined the custom CSS of ArcFox (the file called
userChrome.css) with the Firefox Tab Stash extension:https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-stash/
and the result is great! It offers a side bar that is easily customizable and persistent between sessions.
Tab Stash to my mind is the better version of Vivaldi workspaces, and the ArcFox layout is an improved version of hiding the address bar.
The only thing is that with this CSS the extension menu does not show the next level. I use that for profile switching. But this is not so hard to move over to a brief command line instruction (eg.
> firefox -P personal tildes.net)