911: Browsers in 2025: Whats up with Arc, Dia, Firefox, Chrome and Opera GX?

Scott and Wes break down the state of web browsers in 2025, from the rise and fall of Arc and the fate of Firefox to hot takes on Opera GX, Raycast, and why power users might not be profitable. They compare rendering engines, rant about dev tools, and reveal what browser stats say about Syntax listeners. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 01:37 Rendering Engines. 02:11 Arc Browser. 02:41 Microsoft Edge. 03:45 Why not Brave? 05:25 Brought to you by Sentry.io. 05:50 Google Manifest v2. 07:32 Opera. OperaGX. 10:13 Vivaldi. 11:23 The death of Arc Browser. 11:44 Dia? 14:43 No revenue from power-users. Letter to Arc Members. 15:38 Arc’s transition to a new browser. 17:02 Browser companies need to lock users fast! 19:42 Gecko. 19:45 Firefox. 21:08 Zen. 22:38 Webkit. There Still Arent Any iPhone Browsers With Custom Engines 29:18 Wtf is Ladybird? 34:14 Usage statistics. StatCounter.com. 39:32 Dev Tools experience ranked. 42:06 Tab experience. 43:37 Containers and profiles. Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Scott Tolinski?

  Welcome to Syntax. Today, we're going to be talking about surfing the web with browsers. That's right, we're going to be talking all about the web browser landscape in 2025. Where things are at, what rendering engines exists, and who's using what? And even just a little bit of fun conversation around some niche browsers and stuff like that. My name is Scott Tolinski. I'm a developer from Denver. With me as always is Wes Boss. What's up, my man?

• 0:26Wes Bos?

  Hey, still to talk about this is, it feels like the browser landscape is, is kind of shifting right now. Not towards like, like lower level engines, although there are some new players in that space. We'll talk about that, but more towards like the actual using of it. I think all this like AI tooling and whatnot has, has made a lot of people reconsider it. And then they're also, all, all of this AI tooling is also making a lot of people reconsider leaving it as well. When they try to stuff it down your throat in every single possible way.

• 1:00Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, it is, it's interesting and I think there's a lot here. And you know what? Before we get off the jump, people got a lot of strong opinions on browsers. Just know that your, your favorite browser might not just be the best browser in the entire world. No questions asked, because there's always give and takes with any of this stuff. I always feel like anytime we talk about browsers or anybody does in the comments, it's crazy just how overwhelmingly skewed the comments are like Firefox is the only browser. And then you look, look at the usage statistics and it's like 10 people using it. So we'll get into it a little bit first, but let's start with some of the rendering engine based talk.

• 1:42Scott Tolinski?

  We can start with the most used, most popular rendering engine out there, which is Blink. These are the Chromium based browsers typically, and there's a handful of these things. Chrome being the most popular one. I actually have ended up being using Chrome Canary full time. Canary is like the pre-release version of Chrome. So that's been my browser full time for the past couple of weeks are my default browser, even though I still have Arc set up.

• 2:10Wes Bos?

  How long were you on Arc for?

• 2:13Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, since it came out and I'm

• 2:15Wes Bos?

  Man.

• 2:15Scott Tolinski?

  I'm I'm weaning. I'm having a hard time. I'm only getting off Arc because like there's some crazy stuff that happens.

• 2:22Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 2:23Scott Tolinski?

  It's like, it's like gone into like total like use at your own risk mode and people will be like, it's fine for me. And it's like, yeah, you know what? As an Arc fanatic, I've held out so long and I wish I could say it was it was fine to use right now, but it is. It is showing its lack of maintenance. I'll say that. So you have Edge, which is Microsoft's Chromium, which is, you know, their successor to Internet Explorer in many ways, but like more or less a a version of Chromium with a lot of Microsoft stuff. And and if I understand correctly, you use Edge full time. Is that correct?

• 2:57Wes Bos?

  I was. So I was on Firefox for probably six years and about a year ago I switched to Edge. And I've been been really happy with it, both because of the dev tools, also because of of how it looks and how you can customize it. Out of the box, it's it's absolutely awful. You have to turn off like games and like all this like like Microsoft Clippy and and like sign in with like Chipotle and all these like weird things, but you turn them all off. And it's it's actually a really nice browser.

• 3:28Scott Tolinski?

  Okay.

• 3:28Wes Bos?

  Especially the the dev tools. It's been slightly tweaked here and there. They do have people working on the actual engine as well in the dev tool. So it's not like they're just taking Chrome and slapping a Microsoft logo on it. So I've been been pretty happy with it, although every time I talk about it, everybody says, why not Brave?

• 3:50Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 3:51Wes Bos?

  I don't really have an answer there.

• 3:54Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 3:54Wes Bos?

  Unfortunately.

• 3:55Scott Tolinski?

  Brave just kind of exists, right? And it's one of those things where I'm like, it is just a Chrome, you know, skin in a way with some ad blocker and some built in VPN. I think. The thing that turned me off, I did use Brave for a while. The thing that turned me off from using Brave was really that it was like, we are the crypto browser. And, you know, it's not like I'm, I mean, to an extent, you know, the cryptocurrency stuff or the web three stuff. It, it, it still exists. It's not like gone by any means or something like that. You know, they're what Bitcoin just hit an all time high.

• 4:29Wes Bos?

  It's the highest it's ever been, yeah.

• 4:31Scott Tolinski?

  Right. So in that regard, great. And the hype cycle for crypto, I feel like is that the least annoying it's ever been. You know, you, you, you don't, I mean, maybe not the least annoying it's ever been. I maybe like 2012 was the least annoying it's ever been. But it is interesting that they have kind of moved away from that in their advertising, uh, where it's like, Brave is the, the private search, the AI assistant, the VPN browser. And then there is the, the BAT, uh, token stuff as well. But it does seem like even they have been like, well, let's turn that knob down just a little bit, um, in terms of how exactly we're pumping that. I, I actually, in prepping for this episode,

• 5:13Scott Tolinski?

  I, I, I started to look at Brave and started to think like, eh, maybe I shouldn't use Brave. I am using Chrome already. And it is basically Chrome with some extra stuff. So I don't know. I might give Brave a rip for a little bit.

• 5:25Wes Bos?

  Give it a shot.

• 5:26Scott Tolinski?

  And if you want to see all of the errors in your application, you'll want to check out Sentry at sentry.io forward slash syntax. You don't want a production application out there that, well, you have no visibility into in case something is blowing up and you might not even know it. So head on over to sentry.io forward slash syntax. Again, we've been using this tool for a long time and it totally rules. All right.

• 5:50Wes Bos?

  So one killer feature of using either Brave or Edge is that they still support Google Manifest version two, meaning that you can use the older ad block extensions, right? And That's great. I know Microsoft Edge has said that they will eventually deprecate V2, but the thing about Microsoft is they love enterprise. And if there is one enterprise user using some random extension, they're not going to like hurt them, right? That's the reason why we had IE stick around for so long. So if they do take away Manifest

• 6:31Wes Bos?

  V2, I'll have to like, I don't know, have you tried the like, the V3 ad block? We had Oliver on the podcast talking about how good it is and whatnot, but I haven't haven't switched over to it yet.

• 6:46Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, you know, I couldn't tell you. I use whatever is baked into Arc.

• 6:52Wes Bos?

  But like on Chrome, are you using an ad blocker?

• 6:56Scott Tolinski?

  I am. Let me check.

• 6:59Scott Tolinski?

  Eh, no, which is crazy, but like I'm mostly using Chrome right now for development just because my my browsing life has been so wrapped up into Arc. It's like I still have all my tabs and stuff in there and I still have Arc open. So it's like, yeah. So when I say I switched over, it is like, it is my like, development browser. I have all new links open up in Chrome. But yeah, it's crazy that I haven't been running an ad blocker on this thing. Maybe I should just move over to Brave.

• 7:31Wes Bos?

  Give it a shot and let us know. But also there's Opera and Opera GX. What's the difference there?

• 7:39Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I'll tell you what, man, this is so funny. I accidentally installed Opera GX because I just Googled Opera and I was like, ooh, a new Opera named Opera GX. This must be the latest one with its cool name. And, oh, man, Opera GX is a wild experience, Wes. It's like, what if we took? The year 2004 flash aesthetic and put it as the default for a browser and the browser has interface, kind of like the uh sounds and stuff like that. And it honestly feels like you stepped into Tron or Tron the Ride and you're like, all of a sudden, this is my browser. I I found it to be a bewildering experience, honestly. Uh, Opera GX is a crazy place to be.

• 8:22Scott Tolinski?

  Um, and it made me feel very old. I will tell you that I opened up this browser and I was like, I'm old. This thing's crazy.

• 8:29Wes Bos?

  Hold on, there's Opera Air as well.

• 8:32Scott Tolinski?

  Okay.

• 8:33Wes Bos?

  Opera Air is the world's first browser with mindfulness at its core. Experience a focus, balance and stress-free web.

• 8:43Scott Tolinski?

  Okay.

• 8:44Wes Bos?

  It tells you to like do neck exercises and meditation. What the hell?

• 8:50Scott Tolinski?

  What are they, what are they smoking over there at Opera? Because like, why do we need Opera Air? Opera and Opera GX, Opera GX. And I will tell you, something was very funny because you think Opera GX might just be a skinned version of it and it was like a skinned version of Opera. But there was like several features that were missing from actual Opera that were in GX, like import, like when you do the import from browser or whatever. Opera showed like three browser options and then Opera GX was like import from these eight op browser options. It's like, this is the same window, just skinned differently. Why is the main Opera so much? Like, why does it have less options than Opera GX there? I don't know, it's crazy world.

• 9:30Wes Bos?

  That's hilarious. It just goes to show that the fact that they have Opera GX and Opera Air, like web developers are not the primary audience of any of these companies. And as much as it kills us uh to to hear that, it's, they're trying to make money off of regular users trying to browse the web. And that's why they're trying to push all these features like mindfulness and AI.

• 9:55Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. And and in case Opera GX is like the browser for gamers and it's like the archetype of the person who's using Opera GX is like some 18-year-old wearing Crocs like just browsing the web. It's like, that's who they're going for. It's not me, I guess.

• 10:13Wes Bos?

  Oh, and what else do we have? We have Vidalvi, um, which seems to be Vivaldi.

• 10:21Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, my gosh. Do you, do you not know who Vivaldi is?

• 10:24Wes Bos?

  Uh, no, I don't. It's, it sounds like a musician or something.

• 10:28Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, he's the red priest. He's a famous.

• 10:30Wes Bos?

  I know who that is then.

• 10:32Scott Tolinski?

  Violinist, I believe.

• 10:33Wes Bos?

  But basically, they have a, another version of Chrome, which is, is one of these browsers with all kinds of features built into it. Um, certainly this one seems more like a power user browser.

• 10:45Scott Tolinski?

  Really?

• 10:45Wes Bos?

  So maybe I should give this a shot.

• 10:47Scott Tolinski?

  It's existed for a long time. Vivaldi has been around for a very long time.

• 10:51Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:52Scott Tolinski?

  Probably one of the only one of these I've never installed, which is very odd because I, I, I feel like I have every browser installed all the time. Um, so Vivaldi, it's out there. It exists. If you're out there in Vivaldi Opera or Opera GX is your number one browser, I want you to leave a comment below telling us why. Because I'm interested. Honestly, I'm interested. I think they're neat, but at the end of the day, again, they're just kind of Chrome extensions with, uh, various, yeah, various additions on to them. Yeah.

• 11:23Wes Bos?

  Let's, let's talk about Arc though. So Arc was like the, everybody loved it. It was this like, what, what would you explain? It was a kind of a new UI, um, and everybody was going crazy over it. Uh, everybody loved it. And then, I don't know, probably be six months, a year ago, they announced that they are no longer going to be working on Arc and they're, they're launching a new one called Dia?

• 11:47Scott Tolinski?

  Dia? I would say Dia. I would say Dia. Um, yeah, it's, I found the announcement to be kind of bewildering, like Arc is dead. Now we're making a new browser.

• 11:58Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 11:59Scott Tolinski?

  But they just released a blog post, uh, explaining kind of like, you know, why they chose to release a new browser. I do find it like, you know, the, the explanation it largely comes down to, they built too much, too quickly and bloated Arc, which, yes, they did. And the iOS app is bewildering. They had one iOS app and then they released a second one that was like a kind of less featured version. And if you, if you move the phone the wrong way, then like a fake phone dialer pops up and I'm just like, what is going on here? Uh, so I get it, but like, I do feel like you could have still built on a new foundation and just called it Arc 2, you know, like it's, it's Arc,

• 12:44Scott Tolinski?

  even though, because they're both Chromium based, they both look similar in some ways, but like, just to be like, you know what? We're done and we're picking a new one. It's still weird to me. That said, uh, Dia is kind of the AI first browser and it's going to be a, not a next generation version of Arc, because if you look at the two, Dia doesn't have like the whole side tab layout and stuff like that. It is like normal tabs, but it is more like using the web via cursor. So they were basically like, well, let's rethink the browser with Arc. And Arc had a number of features, like it had one, you don't see the URL bar by default, which I don't know why that wigs some people out.

• 13:27Scott Tolinski?

  I know what website I'm on. I have object permanence. I'm not going to like, be like, oh, where'd I go? You know, or when you hit command T, it brings up a prompt, like a Raycast type deal. When you start typing, it'll autocomplete, it'll open bookmarks. It will open the tab already. If you have the tab already open and has all kinds of built in pinning and workspaces. So like when you're in your default workspace, you just do a two finger swipe over. Next thing you know, you're in a new workspace with new logins, new container, whatever. And that feels so good. The UI on Arc from day one was like the best. And it took a little bit of getting used to, but once you did, you're like, this is a new experience for a web browser and they nailed it.

• 14:12Scott Tolinski?

  So that's why I think people were a little like, yeah, what's going on here? Why, why did they abandon this? But at the end of the day, it does seem like Arc had some challenges. It wasn't necessarily getting the adoption they wanted it to get and were like, you know what? Let's just start fresh. And I do think it's pissing off a lot of the Arc power users. Uh, I don't think that they necessarily care. Uh, I don't think they care.

• 14:42Wes Bos?

  No.

• 14:42Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 14:43Wes Bos?

  My, yeah, my hottest take is that you cannot make money on software power users. And it honestly makes me worried for apps like Raycast or Warp or a lot of these apps where you see them starting to push a little harder on the AI subscriptions because. People absolutely love the apps, but when you've raised so much money, like something like Alfred is run by a person or two, like that's a good business, right? But when you're trying to make billions of dollars or many millions of dollars with these things.

• 15:21Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 15:21Wes Bos?

  It becomes very hard to squeeze money out of us, obnoxious software developers who consider ourselves power users, you know? So it's, it's a little worrisome and certainly I think that's why Arc is no longer around.

• 15:37Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, in, in basically it has not seen updates in a while. It like hardly hardly works. They just released as of the day we're recording this, a, an article or a post explaining the, the whole transition and everything like that. And this quote I thought really resonated with your point, which was, "D1 retention was strong. Those who stuck around after a few days were fanatics." That's me. "But our metrics were more like a highly specialized professional tool, like a video editor than a mass market consumer product, which we aspire to be closer to." And I, I do think that comes down to, you know, dollar, dollar bills, y'all.

• 16:17Scott Tolinski?

  I think that's what that comes down to. They aspire to be closer to a mass market computer product because like, to make any kind of real money off of a specialized professional tool, video editors cost 500 bucks, 400 bucks for good ones, whatever, even more than that. If you're talking like Avid or something like that. So they're not making any cash on this if they release it with a, you know, $9 a month subscription, which who knows if people will even want to do that. So I don't know if DIA is a play to make money, but I think it's a play to get more adoption. It feels weird, but I hope to get access to it anyways. I talked to Josh, the CEO of Browser Company and they're hoping to come on the show or we're hoping to have them on the show. So. Would be great.

• 17:02Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 17:02Scott Tolinski?

  We could talk about it.

• 17:03Wes Bos?

  I'd like to hear about it. I also think that like what what browser somebody uses in the next two years is going to be very heavily pushed. These like I think OpenAI is gonna release a browser.

• 17:18Scott Tolinski?

  I was gonna just say.

• 17:19Wes Bos?

  That was my prediction for this year. Just like like the browser is going to be the entry point for a lot of these things. The OS is the entry point, which is why Apple has such a leg up and I think Google will have such a leg up as well. But if they can get you into their browser, like that's your entry point. So you gotta think they're like, well, someone's gonna wanna buy a browser that doesn't have one yet. And you know, like, when's Claude gonna gonna does Claude even Claude maybe even has their own browser yet?

• 17:52Scott Tolinski?

  They have an app, but you know, that app could probably become a browser. I think you're totally right. The moment that you said like that, I'm just thinking like, yes, the the OpenAI browser is going to exist at some point. And the way that we browse the web is going to change. And the browser company folks are betting on that. And I do think they will probably be first to market with what is this agentic type of actual browser. Now, there's other people who are doing this type of thing, but it is built into the core of that. I mean, it is like, they're not strapping something on the side of it and calling it a day. So it'll be interesting, you

• 18:32Scott Tolinski?

  know, whatever perplexity type of deal ends up being how we browse the web and navigates it for you. I would look forward to it when it can do things like, I mean, you can probably do this right now. But I just want to be like, hey, collect all my expense receipts and submit them. Please, I don't want to do that right now.

• 18:50Wes Bos?

  Yeah, or watch me. I've done this 37 times in the past. Now do that for me. I don't it's it's a race for those features and the bad people using those features to absolutely ruin the web, which is. Which is kind of already happening, right? Like, look at my email. Look at the replies to all of my tweets. It's half of them are just like AI bots that are sending this garbage over, you know? Imagine what's gonna happen when you give that functionality to like a landscaper who wants to make a little bit more money and needs to email a bunch of people, you know, it's it's gonna be bad.

• 19:26Scott Tolinski?

  Those those landscapers, you gotta watch them.

• 19:29Wes Bos?

  Well, like, I'm just thinking like, like, the bad people are using the AI for bad stuff right now. But like, what happens when you give those tools to just regular people? You know, it's gonna it's gonna get out of control.

• 19:42Scott Tolinski?

  Word. Let's talk about Gecko.

• 19:45Wes Bos?

  Gecko, that's the engine behind Firefox. Firefox's last couple of years has been rather sluggish with their development, which is really frustrating. It's just Firefox received most of its money from Google by people using Firefox, searching on Google, clicking on ads. And now people doing less of that, using Firefox less, means that they have less money to actually put towards the development, which absolutely kills me because Firefox has always been that like sort of holdout, which is not a mega corporation developing a browser. And they're still chugging along. They just they just shipped Temporal, which is the very first browser to ship support for it, which is huge.

• 20:31Wes Bos?

  I really hope somebody comes along and like uses Firefox, like maybe OpenAI. Imagine they choose to use Firefox. That would be amazing for the development of it.

• 20:43Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, it would be. And I, yeah, I don't know. You know, to me, Firefox has a number of issues, or at least the rendering engine.

• 20:54Scott Tolinski?

  One of which is it is like relatively slow compared to all of them. Granted, it uses less RAM, so you, you know, it's slower, but uses less resources. Okay. And honestly, are you going to notice that slowness in, in action? I don't know. Um, there's also another browser that has been getting, I don't know, you could say nerd, nerd kind of a press lately. And I would say people act like this again, like this is like Firefox. People act like everybody uses this browser, but I would say not many people do. It's called Zen and Zen is a Firefox, Firefox based like ARC alternative.

• 21:35Scott Tolinski?

  And the thing that I don't understand about the people who like Zen as an alternative to ARC is that to me ARC is like, what if we just slapped the ARC theme on Firefox? And that's fine, but it's not ARC and it doesn't replicate the features of ARC. So for me, it's like, if I, if I just want that coat of paint, then I don't know how, you know, I don't need the coat of paint. I want, I want the full feature set. So maybe eventually it'll get there, but yeah, Zen is, is kind of like, what if we took ARC look and, um, put it on to Firefox?

• 22:13Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah. And there's no, there's no mobile app either. Like I can't use a browser that doesn't sync my history to my phone. Because then you're like, oh, what was that? Or if you need to open something quickly on your phone, you should be able to just go there immediately. So.

• 22:28Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Yeah, that's where it's at. I, I haven't used Firefox in a number of years, but I do keep it open for testing. I, it exists on my computer for testing.

• 22:37Wes Bos?

  There you go. Webkit, next one, very well used. Anytime I talk about Safari, everyone's like, who uses Safari? Like literally half the world. It's the only browser that runs on iOS. Although I guess like whatever happened to that, the, in the year up.

• 22:57Wes Bos?

  They mandated that you, they can run multiple browsers, not just, and a lot of people don't seem to know this, but if you install Chrome or Edge or whatever on iOS, it uses the Safari engine, right? It's still, it's not actually rendering it with the Chrome engine or the Edge engine. It's literally using Safari web views inside of it. Except in Europe, they ruled maybe six months ago that you must be able to use it. And there was a huge list of different browsers that have, it was like 40 or 50 browsers, which blew my mind. A lot of them are just like, like corporate VPN browsers that you must use because of your job.

• 23:39Wes Bos?

  But I was kind of hoping that we would start to see newer browsers pop up with different rendering engines on Safari. I haven't seen too much yet. Let us know, European users, if you can close all those cookie banners, if you can find out if that's, if that's been shipped yet.

• 23:56Scott Tolinski?

  I know, I did see an article from October saying there are still no custom engines other than WebKit on iOS, but like, like in existence, not that they can't do it. I don't know what the status is there.

• 24:09Wes Bos?

  I think it's a big, a big lift to be able to do that. And again, at the end of the day, most users don't necessarily care what engine is actually running. We care as web developers because we care a lot about the feature set and the performance and things like that. But most people just want to know that my password is saved in there or, or something similar to that. But anytime we talk about Safari, people give us all kinds of crap because it's, it's Apple and they love to, love to hold back features from you. Apple's been cranking on, they've been first to a lot of the new CSS features.

• 24:51Wes Bos?

  They've been cranking on a lot of the JavaScript features. They do approach a lot of, specifically a lot of their APIs around progressive web apps. They, they approach it in an alternative way, which is very frustrating. But what were some of the other APIs that were frustrating?

• 25:10Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, it's mostly PWA stuff, but like, you know, the Web MIDI API, they don't support that for absolutely no good reason. They would say it's a good reason, but it's not a good reason, which is like many of the Apple things is that they either just don't talk about it, or they give you a bad reason and say that this is, this is a reasonable argument for this, why we can't have this. Oh, we can't simply vet all of the devices you could possibly plug into your computer, so therefore, no MIDI for you. I don't, it's dumb, it's weird. I will say, there's one, like Safari is the fastest browser, hands down. It's wonderful in many ways. I've tried moving to Safari so many times, but there's

• 25:51Scott Tolinski?

  one massive bug in Safari that I don't understand how nobody else experiences. The longer that you use Safari, you end up getting like a latency from when you can start typing in the search bar. So if you use it for the first time, second time, whatever, it's fine. But if you use it for a few months, when you start typing into the search bar, there is an inherent latency that pops up, and it is enough to drive me absolutely nuts. But other than that, once you're using the browser, it's very fast. And I think Safari gets more shit than it deserves, but at the same time, like Safari to me is a better experience than Firefox. I'm sorry, folks. But at the same time, there's a number of things holding it back for me wanting to use it full-time. The biggest one for me in Safari,

• 26:36Scott Tolinski?

  the reason why I can't use it full-time is the developer tools are bad. And I, they've never gotten any better. They're, they're just kind of where they're at, and they've been at the same. I think everything's kind of wonky and weird in them, finding things is odd. Cookie storage is weird. They've like locked down cookie storage, so it has to be on a secure, so you can't, you can't do like HTTP-only cookies the same way that you can using localhost on Safari. It's like...

• 27:05Wes Bos?

  Yeah, that's, that's really frustrating. Like I have a local setup for using Caddy server, which gives me like a local HTTPS and it works in all the browsers except Safari. And in order to make it work on Safari, I have to like set up some custom host names in my etc hosts file.

• 27:24Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 27:25Wes Bos?

  But that's, that's just a weird thing. The dev tools really frustrate me in Safari. I don't know how anyone can use that full time. They feel like dated and they just don't feel as like smooth to use and I can find exactly what I'm looking for. Like I can jump between the dev tools of Edge and Chrome. Obviously they're similar. Not exactly similar though. And Firefox, no problem. But like whenever I'm looking for something in Safari, it's very, very frustrating. I can't exactly find what I want. And like autocomplete is not as good. But the remote debugging, if you've like got an issue on iOS and you want to like debug it, it's very good. Once you plug in a cord once, it's wireless and that, that

• 28:10Wes Bos?

  is a really good experience. I've been happy with that.

• 28:13Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, I just wish I could use Chrome's instead when I'm debugging apps.

• 28:18Wes Bos?

  You can now. You can. If you go in, if you go into Chrome, yeah, as of Chrome 1.15, you can enable Safari Web Inspector for, oh no, I'm wrong. I'm wrong. Sorry. This is, you can use the Safari dev tools to debug things that are running on Chrome on iOS. You, what you want is you want to be able to use the Chrome dev tools for a website that's running on Chrome on iOS, right?

• 28:48Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 28:49Wes Bos?

  Yes. Yeah, that's, so you can, you can, if you have an app, like an app open in Chrome on iOS, you can debug them remotely. But like, that's as good as just opening it in Safari and debugging. You don't actually get to use the Chrome dev tools, which would be nice. But I think the, the protocol between Safari dev tools and Chrome dev is not the same protocol. So it's kind of hard, hard to do that. We need Firebug again.

• 29:18Scott Tolinski?

  Yep, Firebug. Alright, last of the rendering engines is one that is not out yet. But it has gotten a lot of attention for good reason. It's called Ladybird. Started as like a project, it's a part of Serenity OS, which is like this weird kind of Unix core looking OS. It's a, I don't, I don't, I don't know too much about that project, to be honest, but the Ladybird, the whole Ladybird project is this open source, um, nonprofit of a new rendering engine from literal scratch. They are starting from fresh, building a rendering engine in the year of 2020, whatever.

• 30:00Wes Bos?

  I did not think that this would be possible.

• 30:02Scott Tolinski?

  Possible, yes, yes.

• 30:04Wes Bos?

  Unbelievable.

• 30:05Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. And if you want to get an idea about just how, what, like, you wonder how to, you know, why haven't we done this before? Well, it's like, they've been working on this for years now, and they have a 2026 alpha release target. So it is a big ol' undertaking to do something like this. And I'm cautiously optimistic, but at the same time, it's like, alright, you release this browser rendering engine that finally catches up in 2026, and then what? You're gonna be constantly adding features at a breakneck speed like the big boys are, and you're doing so as a nonprofit? Like, I mean, good luck, good luck. I, I am like, as a nerd, Ladybird for me, that sounds like a great time.

• 30:50Scott Tolinski?

  That sounds like a great, great time, but I'm skeptical, I think.

• 30:54Wes Bos?

  But for me, this feels like rebuilding something in Rust, you know? Where it's, it's not written in Rust, but like, my point is that somebody is building a new underlying, they're, they're building a JavaScript engine, CSS rendering engine, HTML parser, they're, they're building it all. And like, how much better would that be? Like, it doesn't, it seems like a huge job, given that, like, these other browsers have been around for 20 plus years. You have to support the entirety of HTML up to this point. It feels like, that feels very hard, but it seems like they're doing it. Like, I follow the Andreas Kling on Twitter.

• 31:38Wes Bos?

  And he's just posting like, oh, now we can render Google Maps. And it's like, what? That's, that's nuts that you can do that. And they're just re-implementing. They take the spec, like there's these web platform tests and they're just take the spec and, and try to implement all of the, the APIs. And that's huge. Like what happens if they actually finish it? Can they move? Well, maybe we should have them on because

• 32:03Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, absolutely.

• 32:04Wes Bos?

  Can you move so much faster when you don't have 20 years of baggage around how the rendering engine works? And like, he probably doesn't have code to support the marquee tag. The nice thing about HTML is that it's HTML you wrote 40 years ago or 30 years ago, still renders today. But what if he didn't have to support 30 year old HTML? Would that, would you, is it faster? It's, it's kind of exciting to me that, that this guy's building this.

• 32:32Scott Tolinski?

  Is it? There's seven people working on it right now, according to their, their site. I, I, we gotta get somebody from Lady Bird on because I'm so curious about this thing. You can build it yourself. So you can't download it currently, but you can build it. So if you can build it, you can try it out. Um, it says it's, you know, pre-alpha primarily for use in developers. I would imagine it's a, not like a, I don't know. I don't want to say it'd be a rough experience right now, but I'm sure it's not like, you're not setting up Chrome here, you know?

• 33:04Wes Bos?

  No, no.

• 33:05Scott Tolinski?

  This is a, a true, uh, raw project. I, I'm interested and I'm very hopeful, but like cautious that this actually succeeds. Cause that's cool.

• 33:14Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Well, some smart people building it, you know? Like there's some crazy projects out there. Like I always think about FFmpeg, about like how much of the world runs on FFmpeg. Like, you know, this low level library that has just made so much of the world possible. And, and Chrome, Chrome has also done that. You know, Firefox has, has done that, WebKit has done that. So like, what does this do to the world when they have a theoretically faster, more lightweight?

• 33:48Wes Bos?

  Browser engine, you know, like it's there's libweb rendering engine, libjs is JavaScript engine. They have a Wasm engine, a whole media engine core. Like, there's, there's quite a bit here.

• 34:00Scott Tolinski?

  There's, there's a bit here and I'm stoked. He said, I'm hopeful.

• 34:04Wes Bos?

  Cautiously stoked.

• 34:06Scott Tolinski?

  Cautiously stoked. That's the best way. This is, this is me about to drop in on a quarter pipe at the age of 40. Cautiously stoked. Um, usage statistics. Let's figure out what are, what are people actually using both? I, I, I know that the, in the real world, but like, what are people actually using, visiting our sites and stuff like that? Do, do we have some stats ready for that? Do you want me to guess? Do you, do you have it available?

• 34:33Wes Bos?

  Yeah, let's, let's start by, by taking a look at just like the world first. So you guess, if you're taking a look at, I'm using statcounter.com, the browser market share for April 2025 worldwide. Uh, what do you think the usage is?

• 34:52Scott Tolinski?

  Time has come to push that button.

• 34:54Wes Bos?

  And percentage wise?

• 34:56Scott Tolinski?

  2.2 for Firefox.

• 35:00Wes Bos?

  Oh, that was pretty close. Wow. 2.5% for Firefox. Good. Wow. Okay.

• 35:06Scott Tolinski?

  I have, I have a good reason why I know that, but because people are always like, I'm like, it's 2.5 whatever percentage usage.

• 35:12Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah.

• 35:13Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 35:14Wes Bos?

  But hold on, if you go, if you were to filter for US, how much do you think Firefox is?

• 35:20Scott Tolinski?

  Uh, for US? Oh, that's a tougher question.

• 35:25Wes Bos?

  You think it would be higher or lower?

• 35:27Scott Tolinski?

  I would say higher.

• 35:30Wes Bos?

  4%.

• 35:31Scott Tolinski?

  Okay. Yeah.

• 35:32Wes Bos?

  4.17%. All right. But tell me, what do you think Edge, Safari and Chrome split is?

• 35:39Scott Tolinski?

  I don't know. It might be like. Edge might be like 12% or something.

• 35:45Wes Bos?

  Edge is five.

• 35:47Scott Tolinski?

  Five percent, okay.

• 35:48Wes Bos?

  That's extremely low to me, given that it comes

• 35:52Scott Tolinski?

  It's not surprising to me.

• 35:53Wes Bos?

  by default on Windows machines, you know? Like, most computers in the world, is that, is that fair to say? Most computers in the world are, uh,

• 36:01Scott Tolinski?

  I don't, yeah, I would assume so.

• 36:02Wes Bos?

  Are Windows?

• 36:02Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, it does feel low, but then you have mobile users, right? Is there an edge mobile? I mean.

• 36:11Wes Bos?

  Yes, actually, if you filter for desktop, Edge goes up to 13%.

• 36:15Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 36:16Wes Bos?

  Which also shows that most people are not viewing the internet on a desktop computer, you know? Most people are consuming stuff through a mobile browser.

• 36:27Scott Tolinski?

  I would say Safari is at like 40%, maybe even higher.

• 36:31Wes Bos?

  This is very surprising. Safari is at 17%.

• 36:35Scott Tolinski?

  Okay.

• 36:36Wes Bos?

  Globally on all platforms, but if you were to go mobile, Safari only jumps up to 22%, which again, you think like,

• 36:44Scott Tolinski?

  All the iOS users.

• 36:45Wes Bos?

  If I were to think of people I know, I would say 90% of them have an iPhone. Maybe 95% of them.

• 36:51Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 36:51Wes Bos?

  And that's, and use Safari, but like, that's not the case for the world.

• 36:56Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I mean, and the rest is, is Chrome mostly. I mean, you have obviously like Samsung and, and those which are scraping it. The reason why I knew Firefox is because I did this talk on like, uh, can you use it today? And if Firefox supported it, it would always jump up the percentage by like 2% global usage, but like not more than that. So you'd be like, oh, it's at, it's at like 95%, but you can't use it on Firefox. So, you know?

• 37:21Wes Bos?

  Yeah, that's a bummer, hey? Like, Firefox has been like lagging on like, can some of the container query stuff, you know? And like, you're almost at a point now where it's like, I, I'm not saying don't support it, but that sucks. That's for such a small percentage of your users. You have to do it, but Chrome 66% worldwide usage, which is absolutely massive still. Makes me feel good because like, as much as people don't want the big Google to, to control everything, they're, they're one of the, the biggest engines. They are the biggest engine

• 38:01Wes Bos?

  right now. And if Chrome's market share starts to slip, um, that would really bum me out what that would mean for some of the resources behind Chrome. Even, even already, we've, I've heard it, like Adam Argel got laid off of Chrome for seemingly no good reason, other than just random reasons, which is such a bummer, you know, some of the top talent in web development right now, no longer working there. And that makes me kind of scared for, for a future of one of the biggest browsers.

• 38:33Scott Tolinski?

  Browsers in general. Yeah, I know. And as much as people like to rag on, on Google, Chrome is the, the best, best browser in many ways. Yes, it is a, it is a ram hog. If you have a lot of tabs open.

• 38:46Wes Bos?

  Just buy more RAM.

• 38:48Scott Tolinski?

  Just buy more RAM. Yes. Go to that, go to, go to the app store and download more RAM. Yes. Um, a funny story. Um, my, my, one of, one of my good friends, he, it was like, and his girlfriend's birthday, they'd been together for like three years or something. You know, you're thinking like maybe a romantic gesture for a birthday present. He got a RAM for her computer.

• 39:12Wes Bos?

  Oh my gosh.

• 39:13Scott Tolinski?

  And she's like, not techie at all. I just remember being like, what a move, man. And he was just like, she needed it. She needed the RAM.

• 39:21Wes Bos?

  That's hilarious.

• 39:22Scott Tolinski?

  She was like, great. Thank you for the RAM.

• 39:26Wes Bos?

  Yeah, that is not something you buy, buy your wife.

• 39:30Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, that's super funny. Um, DevTools experience, we've already kind of, uh, we've already kind of gone over this, but give me your DevTools experience ranked.

• 39:40Wes Bos?

  Yeah. It goes Edge, Firefox, Chrome. I might even put Firefox first. The DevTools are very good and I think they look the best. I'm gonna say again. Firefox, definitely the best dev tools, then Edge, then Chrome, then Safari at the end. Edge does a lot with the tabs and they basically just like reskinned the tabs. And when you have multiple tabs at the top, they'll just show you the icon, which I really like. You can put the tabs on the side if you want. It just feels a little bit better. Every now and then they freeze though, and I have to like delete my profile or something.

• 40:21Wes Bos?

  There's something weird going on there, but I did, I did, I was asking on Twitter how to like fix it. And somebody had a similar issue with Chrome. So I think it's a lower level issue. But I've been, been a big fan of the Chrome DevTools and they also added some like selector performance stuff to the DevTools. It's now been upstreamed and it exists in Chrome as well. But at the time, if you wanted to see, is this a slow selector? Because every time I use CSS has or like any sort of weird where is checkbox selector? You get a million people being like, that's slow, shouldn't use that.

• 41:02Wes Bos?

  And my big thing is always tools over rules, you know, measure it. Is it actually slow? Maybe. Let's, let's take a look at the, the stats there, Jonathan.

• 41:13Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Or what is your JavaScript implementation faster? I don't think so, buddy. Maybe it is, but just just in. Yeah, for me, it's, it's Chrome Firefox or Chrome Firefox and Safari for me. If I'm ranking them, I've never used Edge as dev tools. I don't know.

• 41:29Wes Bos?

  Oh, you got it.

• 41:30Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Every once in a while you gotta smack it with a mallet, but they're wonderful.

• 41:34Wes Bos?

  Yes. No, get, get off of Chrome. You've used Chrome many times. You know what it's like. You gotta either go full Brave or full Edge or Vivaldi, something else or Opera Air. Can you please use Opera Air for a week and report back?

• 41:50Scott Tolinski?

  I tried using Opera for a week and I couldn't get through the week. So I, it's not that Opera's bad. It's just like, oh, there's just like, I don't know. There's nothing there. Sorry, Opera people. It's fine. It's just like nothing to make me want to switch. Maybe Opera Air, maybe I need some mindfulness, you know? Tab experience for me.

• 42:10Scott Tolinski?

  I think that Arc has the best tab experience. Specifically, you command T, it opens a command palette. I start typing something, it opens the tab I already have open. So therefore, you're never like wondering what position the tab is at. You don't even have to see the tabs to know that you have one open. I start typing, you know, S, Y, and it opens up syntax. If I already have it open, it prevents you from opening a thousand tabs at once. It automatically closes them after a certain amount of days. So you don't end up with 10,000 tabs. So for me, that experience is the best. And I do hope that Dia emulates that to some extent. It doesn't look like they are right now, but I hope it does to some extent.

• 42:50Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I've never been a big like tab monster or whatever, you know, switching between them. I just, just use them. I aggressively close tabs. You know, there's some people that like are like saving tabs as like bookmarks. My wife is like that. She'll have 300 tabs open and she uses like, she opens a tab for every single tracking number that she has and like she'll just go back to that tab to see. I'm like, there's apps that will like send you a notification when it's about to be delivered. But she's a tab monster and I just, I just close them all the time. Every now and then, if it's, if I'm too overwhelmed, close it all, you know? I'll find it again if I need it.

• 43:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, Arc does that, but in a graceful way. And like, yeah, it feels, it feels a little bit different, which is why I like that. Containers and profiles, I do still think that Arc takes this one because this little interface of just swiping between them is just such a good experience.

• 43:48Wes Bos?

  And what do you, explain what you use containers and profiles for.

• 43:52Scott Tolinski?

  So like, here's a good one. I have my personal stuff, which is all my own Google logins, all my own stuff, whether that is my own personal like Reddit or Twitter or Blue Sky or whatever. It's all in this one profile. And then I swipe and then all of a sudden it's not only my bookmarks for all of the syntax related and sentry things, but everything is logged into, you know, my sentry email address for all of my Google stuff or even the syntax Twitter or social accounts. So just with that, like little swipe, I'm now able to be in an environment that is all logged into all of my work stuff or swipe and all of my personal stuff or swipe. And, uh, you know, whatever, I have different ones set up. So I have one for.

• 44:35Scott Tolinski?

  Century specific stuff, one for syntax specific stuff and one for personal specific stuff. And before in the past, I had them for level up tutorials or whatever.

• 44:44Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah. I used to love the profiles in Firefox because you could have multiple tabs open. So I could have like the syntax stuff open and then I could, in the next tab, I could have my own personal stuff open. And it was all in a single tab and they were color coded and you could group them together. Now on Edge, you have to use their like their profiles. And I basically have a syntax profile and I have my own personal profile. And then I have like a couple others for development and whatnot, especially like whenever I do like the saved credit card testing and whatnot, I like having a separate profile for that.

• 45:24Wes Bos?

  So it's not actually messing with my actual stuff. But it's, it sucks because you have to like reinstall all the same extensions for every single profile. And like, you gotta turn off all the like Microsoft Edge stuff that I talked about earlier again for the same profile. And like, it's another window that you have to have open. So I do not like the, the Edge profiles. I really wish I could go back to, maybe I'll go back to Firefox.

• 45:54Wes Bos?

  It's so hard because I, I do so many videos on like the like next gen stuff, like and whatever. And the reason why I initially left Firefox is I was just getting weird slo ness and blank white screens and I was just fed up with it. But I also like to be able to try out new APIs without switching my browser.

• 46:14Scott Tolinski?

  Cool. Um, do you have anything else on these browsers here? There's a lot of browsers. What's your favorite browser, folks? Do you believe that, that the statistics are wrong and more people are actually using Firefox? Uh, just let us know. What do you think? What do you think? What, what's the browser of the future? Do you think that AI browsing experiences and agentic flows for browsers will in fact take over? What will that look like? Which browser will show up and kick everybody's ass? Is Ladybird going, Ladybird, uh, Ladybird going to succeed and all of that stuff? I want to know what you think about the browser landscape. What do you use? What do you hate? All that good stuff. As always, Catch you in the next one.

• 46:55Wes Bos?

  Peace.

• 46:56Scott Tolinski?

  Peace.