was already sick of @ArcInternet browser and planning to switch and the final straw was when I hit cmd+w a few times to close out all the open tabs in a given space... and when it ran out of tabs in that space it closed the entire browser
Arc browser's broken hotkeys and incoherent metaphors
12 tweets · January 2024 · 6 likes · 0 retweets · read on Twitter
now arguably this is just code they left in because that's the behavior of an empty browser *window* in other browsers, but there's also no such thing as an empty browser window, there's only a window with one tab close last tab, lose window
but Arc's whole deal is that it doesn't work that way. there's no new tab page, but it sometimes enters a mode where there's no tab at all so I think somebody actively added this behavior
so this behavior of cmd+w shows some mix of: - a lack of attention to the meaning of the metaphors they are trying to employ - a blatant disregard for not overloading hotkeys to do different things in different-but-similar situations, when other hotkeys already exist for that
I already knew they had that disrespect for serious hotkey users, bc they fucking overloaded cmd+z to "undo" closing a tab IFF there was nothing to cmd+z on the page itself. but there's ALREADY cmd-shift-t to unclose!!! let me hit cmd+z however many times I want inside the page
likewise, in today's situation, there's already a hotkey on mac (by default cmd+q but I changed it to cmd+shift+w because I don't like to quit that easily) for closing the whole window!!!! if I wanted to close the fucking window I would fucking use the close-window hotkey!
this is the hotkey equivalent of if your toaster, if you ran it without any toast in it, would unplug itself it's the hotkey equivalent of going to a restaurant, ordering "burger with no tomato and extra onions" and they come back "no onions so we gave you extra tomato"
I wonder if there's a fool somewhere at @browsercompany who thinks that hotkeys should always do something in all situations, and is going around adding fallback behaviors for situations where the default behavior isn't relevant
these guys are the first people I've seen seriously innovating on a new browser in 15 years, kinda ever. glad to see experiments! but they have no coherent idea of what they're doing, as far as I can tell. no principles, no new central metaphor!
they were like "these are your SPACES. you can think of a space as like a ROOM" 🤨 bruh then why didn't you call it a "room"? answer: because it's not. it really doesn't act like a room. the metaphor doesn't hold up. it's incoherent.
anyway, I am getting tempted to try to build a replacement for browsers myself, which is kind of terrifying tbh as it's such a large project I've been chewing on it for awhile but am gradually accepting that nobody else is gonna do it for me
and watching The Browser Company of NY make a beautiful, functional, well-marketed, incoherent mess ...is definitely making that more obvious!