Goodbye, Arc

After being a long-time Firefox user and fan, in 2022 I decided to switch to Arc, given their promise to make the web better — although using the Chromium engine, which isn’t better per se. It has been my default browser ever since, even though I felt like I was betraying the web by leveraging Chromium.

Now it’s been a while since The Browser Company released a compelling update that’s not just a bump to the internal Chromium version, and filling their release notes with irrelevant content. Of course, they are focusing on their AI-based browser Dia, but I feel betrayed, considering all the promises they made.

There’s one thing that kept me on Arc, though: its sidebar. The sidebar was a great concept, and I could simply drag-and-drop tabs to read later, and it would just sync across my computers. That was great — until it became a mess. My sidebar is long. I mean really long. And searching/exploring it became hard. Adding all that up, I felt it was time to switch back to Firefox — and switch back I did.

But, what about my sidebar? Well, Arc does not offer a way to export the sidebar, but luckily, it keeps it in a JSON file in its Application Support directory. So a quick Ruby script later, all my links were exported. The point then was: where to place those items?.

Fixing my Bookmarks Issue

The first place I looked was raindrop.io, which I used for a while after it launched. Raindrop is great — really — but it has one small issue that I can’t stand: It does not permanently store YouTube videos — which makes sense, I think.

So I started working on my own solution to that: Rio (Retain Information Onshore). Rio takes a URL or file from my system, processes it, and permanently stores it, be it a web page, PDF, docx, or video. With a little help from Llama/Mistral, PDFs are correctly summarized and have their title extracted, so everything stays organized.

I have plans to also add a Solr integration for full-text search, but that will have to wait longer.

This is somewhat a big project, and may be interesting to other people who like to self-host stuff, so eventually it may become open-source. Who knows :)

So, so long Arc. It was good while you lasted. Let’s rock Firefox Nightly and keep the web balanced.