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wuhhh | 6 months ago

I've been trying All The Browsers lately and Arc is definitely still my favourite; I actually had no idea that development had stopped on it, that's a shame. Zen looks good, but they are off the charts on this graph! https://sizeof.cat/post/web-browser-telemetry-2025-edition/ What is going on there?

Their Privacy Policy says no telemetry, but then they have a section on those connections made at startup which apparently are "necessary for the proper functioning of the browser and are not used for tracking or profiling purposes"... they then go on to say "can be disabled through the browser flags (about:config)"

Does that mean the browser will no longer function correctly?

Among the connections made (according to the report) are x.com, google.com (plus a bunch of other google domains). reddit.com and notion.com, discordapp.com, cloudflareinsights.com

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zamadatix|6 months ago

> Among the connections made (according to the report) are x.com, google.com (plus a bunch of other google domains). reddit.com and notion.com, discordapp.com, cloudflareinsights.com

Reddit, X, Discord, and Notion are all part of the default sites in the sidebar. Perhaps it's loading them to grab the favicons and such, leading to all of their calls to CDNs, analytics, etc being called.

wuhhh|6 months ago

Thanks for calling that out, I had not got as far as installing the browser so had no idea they were default favourites / shortcuts. Seems like that telemetry report has given a couple of browser vendors the kick they needed to reduce initial connections. I wonder how much of an effect this stuff has on how snappy it feels to actually open these applications. In my dock I currently have FF and FF nightly, Chrome, Ungoogled Chrome, Arc and Safari. Ungoogled loads in the blink of an eye, the rest are all shades of sluggish. I guess this is the price of having a few extensions and “quality of life” features :shrug: