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The Arc Browser Is Dead (www.howtogeek.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 0 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Hah. Well, that and a good fullscreen browser for OLED displays were my main motivations. Both of those are addressed by FF now.

Also, the vertical bar can be set to whatever width you want on both, I think. On FF (which is what I'm typing this in, so I can check) you can shrink it down so it only displays a single row of icons.

The idea is to hide it altogether when you're not using it, in any case, but you can definitely make it as skinny or skinnier than tthe top bar.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    you can shrink it down so it only displays a single row of icons.

    I'm aware of this, but even that single row of icons is very fat compared to the rest of the bars that exist on the browser (e.g. the window bar, the bookmarks bar, the search bar, etc). It just looks out of place.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    You made me count, because I could have sworn it was thinner than the top bar, but it's a bit more complicated than that. On a 4K display the single-icon vertical tabs on Firefox are 75 pixels wide. The horizontal tabs bar is a sliver narrower, at 65 pixels tall. Of course that stacks on top of the address bar, which itself is 60 pixels tall, so you end up with 125 pixels of top bar.

    I don't know if I could notice the 10 px difference between the two, given that they're in different orientations and 10 pixels is 0.5% of the horizontal pixel count and 0.3% of the vertical, but human perception is weird. Like I said, I keep the bar much wider to read the titles and just... hide it when I'm not tabbing, so it's not an issue at all for me. Although I'll say that even with the wide sidebar deployed you get a pretty comfy square-ish space to work with that turns a 16:9 display to 16:10 in a satisfying way. And on ultrawide 21:9 it's a no-brainer, just like having a side-aligned taskbar (hear that, Windows 11?).

    I should add that none of that changes that Firefox is... quite ugly in general. Zen is definitely sleeker at a glance, regardless of your setup.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Haha, it's funny that you went that far. I think the reason why I notice it and you don't, is the 4k factor. My screen is 1920x1200 iirc.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Heh, what can I say, nerding out about UI design is definitely part of my general dysfunction.

    But yeah, if you're already in a 19:10 display you generally won't want the sidebar as much because you already have a naturally taller display, so your workspace is shaped the same as mine when you use horizontal and I use vertical. It's probably more a problem of proportions that sizes.

    Which, hey, is why being able to have a vertical and horizontal tabs option is good. We're in a world where browsers need to fit not just horizontal and vertical displays on PCs and phones, but a whole bunch of screen aspect ratios.

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