Crest – an Arc-inspired open-source browser for Mac

Why do we need this if there's already Zen? (https://zen-browser.app/)

Appears to use Chromium by default, and also ship WebKit to toggle for individual websites: https://crestbrowser.com/guides/engines/

Of course this comment section also warrants a mention of Zen Browser, another Arc alternative that's been going for a while already, is based on Firefox, and is available cross-platform: https://zen-browser.app

I don't get the appeal of the Arc-esque browsers. They look very clean in screenshots, but I tried both Arc and Zen and never got to feel productive with them. Can someone enlighten me?

I am sort of working on the same thing. It is mostly for my own use so far, I might share it at some point.

What I’ve focused on besides the basic features of the arc sidebar is memory usage.

I am a tab power user, in Brave I had 370 tabs “open”. Each tab still takes resources when asleep though. But I use these tabs more as bookmarks. So they are asleep 99.99% of the time, if not more.

The browser I’ve been working on looks a lot like Crest because they both take Arc as a starting point. I am interested to see where they both move towards from there.

Finally. Most important features that kept me from switching to chrome, brave or any other browser was: 1. The sidebar with tabs that shares the same state over multiple windows. 2. The preview windows that open directly where you open a link.

Most of these features are in Firefox. Vertical tabs, tab groups/containers, split view, etc.

Also just wanna get in here and promote Zen, i love it. But the crest and design things here seem nice

The dual engine approach is interesting, never seen that