Hands-On Windows 135 transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show

0:00:00 - Paul Thurrott
Coming up. Next on Hands-On Windows, we're going to take a look at three new web browsers for 2025. Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. Hello everybody, and welcome back to Hands-On Windows.

I'm Paul Thrott and it's been a while since we've looked at web browsers. We've been kind of obsessed with 24H2 and Copilot and all that stuff, but the last few months have been kind of interesting. We've seen a lot of new web browsers all of a sudden, and it has been a while. Some time ago, probably a year and a half ago or so, we looked at broadly at web browsers. You know the most popular web browsers some of you might not have known about. Just as a quick recap, obviously Chrome is the most popular web browser by far, still kicking, still going strong, et cetera. But they did just drop support for a popular browser extension standard that is going to impact, or already has impacted, a lot of extensions, including those that protect privacy and security. So this is an interesting opportunity for people that are not happy about that to maybe look at other browsers, right, and so I recommended Brave back at that time. I'm sure Brave is a great browser, but there's not much going on there since then Brave, like some of these other companies, has been working on AI integration on their search engine etc. But kind of a minimal effort on user experience, I would say, in the browser Microsoft Edge oddly not a browser I would normally recommend, but they've made some big strides over the past year in performance, especially they're rewriting the user interface to no longer just use raw JavaScript, so it's dramatically faster now. I have actually now been using Edge for several months against my better wisdom and, you know, with the right extensions, I strongly recommend things like Privacy, badger, adblock, etc. Actually, it works pretty well and it is incredibly fast, so that's going pretty well. Opera is a little bit of a mess in the sense that they have a lot going on, but Opera has that sidebar with apps and that's an interesting thing. We're going to look at that a little more closely later because sidebar apps, if you will, is kind of a growing feature in modern browsers now, and I find this to be particularly interesting.

Duckduckgo has their web browser. They have their AIGo has their web browser, they have their AI, they have their search engine, et cetera. They don't support extensions. I thought this might be the year DuckDuckGo is a browser, but right now it's kind of up in the air and I think we would have talked about Arc. I can't remember how long ago this was, but Arc was at the time, a new take on web browsers Chromium-based sidebar workspaces, kind of a command bar when you did Control-T instead of going to a new tab. A lot of learning, and people either fell in love with it immediately or ran screaming from it because it was too complicated. They're going off in a different direction.

So, to kind of start this year's crop of new browsers off, I'd like to start with something that actually very closely resembles Arc, and this is called Zen, and so Zen is a browser that, from a UI perspective, is that thing I just described with Arc, which is you have this sidebar with workspaces. You can have multiple workspaces, color coded, they can all have their own pinned and different types of tabs and so forth. If I type Control-T, it brings up this kind of command bar. Now, if I go to a place like the Cover your Tracks website, which you should all be using to make sure your browser is safe, it will, in fact, open in a new tab, but this is also a way to run commands right, so we can do different things from here, run different types of searches and so forth. So this is something that Arc did. In fact, it's kind of curious to me how closely this thing tracks to Arc in many ways, but there are differences. Zen is open source. Zen is based on Mozilla Firefox and its Gecko engine, not on Chromium like most third-party browsers. That's interesting in its own right. Mozilla Firefox and its Gecko engine, not on Chromium, like most third-party browsers. That's interesting in its own right.

Mozilla has jumped off a bit of a cliff in some ways. There was a kerfuffle this year about their terms of service, which then you know, they've done things that a lot of their customers or users don't necessarily like. So if you wanted something that was like is literally Firefox, but with, uh, some huge improvements, um, this is of interest, maybe just for that reason, but because it's using firefox and not chromium, it has, uh, you know, if you go into settings, if you're familiar with firefox, this will look similar. It uses the firefox extensions oops, I went to the wrong place there Instead of the right, the Chromium or Chrome extension. So you can use those. But that means uBlock Origin still works. You don't have to worry about that extension technology. I was talking about. That is still all there, and they have this really deep set of customization capabilities through mods, and so there's a lot of community mods that change this browser fairly dramatically. I don't have any installed here, but if you like to customize your browser, if you might've leaned into Opera maybe in the past for that type of thing, or Vivaldi is like that as well this is definitely something to look at. And if you're, if you worry about monoculture in the browser world and so forth, you're not a big fan of Chromium or not a big fan of Google, this might be right up your alley. So this is kind of interesting. I will close you.

And the second one is a light kind of minimalist version of Opera from Opera called Opera Air. It's pretty. I like the UI quite a bit. It supports different themes and different styles and different color schemes and all that kind of stuff. This just happened to light green, so I've got this here. It's kind of this goofy little star page that has all these little wellness links and so forth. That's part of it.

Part of the integration here is that they have this kind of take a break functionality, so you can have it, you can actually set this thing up. So every so often it will say, hey, maybe you should do some breathing exercises or meditation or whatever it might be. You know, you've been sitting in front of the computer for eight hours. Maybe it's time to. You know, take a break, right? I don't actually use it for that kind of thing. I appreciate it. I'm not against it. I think this might be smart for a lot of people.

But the thing I like is just I've grown to really like the way Opera works and part of it is the sidebar. So it looks different in this version of the browser because it's kind of this minimalist idea and I'm hiding the sidebar by default. But what you have over here are apps that run in the sidebar as opposed to tabs that run up here in the tab bar. So the distinction there is that these things can give you messages and notifications when something happens. So if it's an email app, you get a new email. It could be like, hey, you got a new email and then you can go look at it. The way I do that is I actually pin a tab, pin this one. This is not the one I would pin, but I pin email, calendar and some other apps, things, social media apps to my browser tab bar, like this, and that's how I keep track of this.

But of course that gets crowded and of course those things take up memory and resources and over time it slows down, et cetera. But these things don't sit there and run in memory, they just alert you when something happens. So messaging apps are a great example of something for this Slack, discord. I'm trying to think of all the services there and there that they've announced recently. But Facebook Messenger you can say here WhatsApp, so they don't have to sit here and take up resources. But because it's a backend service, when you do get a message or whatever notification, it can alert you. You can go to that thing and you're not cluttering up your tabs, right, and so you can kind of draw that distinction between the two. So I think that's actually very interesting.

Opera has all the Opera stuff in it, right. So Opera does support things like the automatic tracker blocking, ad blocking, et cetera. You still should install extensions for that. Frankly, it's not that good. But you can use the Chrome extensions as Chromium-based, et cetera. So it's basically everything you would expect from a web browser. It's got all the compatibility, performance et cetera of Chrome, chromium, whatever, and then this kind of sidebar thing which is actually pretty well developed and is growing pretty fast. I think that stuff is very, very interesting. I'll close you.

And the third one. This is one I just learned about and I need to figure this one out a little bit better. This might be the Goldilocks one, if you will. So this is a new browser, a fairly new browser, called Sidekick. Like most third-party browsers, it's based on Chromium, right, and so that's pluses and minuses, mostly pluses, but the pluses are that compatibility, the performance. It can work with the Chrome. It does, in fact, only work with the chrome. It does, in fact, only work with the chrome web store for extensions and themes. Um, by default it has the, the standard google chrome theme. It's light blue if you're using a uh, in light mode, etc. So you get all that stuff. But it also has that opera feature with the sidebar right, and so same, same story here.

So here you can actually see that I've pinned, I guess, an app. It's not a pin tab like this thing here. It's a pinned web app, in this case Gmail and Google Calendar, and I can go to my calendar, of course, right, but when I get. When there is an event that occurs, it will give me a little pop-up. I can also open this in kind of a side-by-side thing. It supports side-by-side viewing, like a lot of modern browsers do. So I can do this kind of thing, and the one that is a sidebar app will open in this kind of smaller window, which is kind of interesting.

The uniqueness here is that this browser supports multiple accounts for a lot of these types of apps. So if you have Slack I know Google works this way, several others you could right-click this and you can add an account. So in this case I actually have I think of it as one Slack account, but it's technically two, because I sign into a partner account and I could add that here. In the case of Google, it works similarly, although you actually have to have a plus account. This is like a paid subscription to have two different Google accounts, but I do. In addition to polythrottcom, which is Google Workspace, I have Thrott at Gmail, which is just normal Gmail, so I can switch between them right from here. I can have them both there Now.

I mean, google does support that here. Right, you can see how I can move into that here, but when you do that, it's a different session. It's a different in this case, browser tab, so it's a lot more seamless to do it this way. So same benefits as with Opera and Opera Air, where you get the sidebar apps so you can pre-up resources, pre-up UI space, et cetera. But there's so much going on here I just don't have the time, nor do I actually have the experience yet, to explain all of it to you quite yet. But as you add different services to this sidebar, or if you have different tabs open here, when you do search from this browser, it actually searches across all of those data sets, and so we're almost getting into an AI-like bit of functionality here where you can search across different services. I'm not going to do that because those services have personal data in them or whatever, but this is actually kind of a cool bit of functionality.

There's a lot of performance gain because they've cut out a lot of the Google integration from Chromium. Obviously, they claim up to 3X, but you don't get the tracking and all this stuff. This is the only browser that I've tested against Cover your tracks let's bring this up where this looks at your browser and determines whether it has effective blocking against trackers. They're tracking your identity and location across the Internet, but also trackers that come in the form of ads, in the form of images, which are really ads, and most browsers that I use Brave is one exception, this is one, too Do not have effective blocking built in. This one does right. So that's the first one I've seen since Brave. I think that does that. That's pretty good, that's a good score.

There are sessions where you can group tabs, so tab grouping, split view, like I said. There's a focus mode so you can turn off all the notifications. The multi-account support, like I said, if you liked, collections in Microsoft Edge, this thing has collections. It also has another proto AI feature called Tasks, where you can set it up to do multi-step actions on your behalf and then come back and report to you and say, okay, we need you to take the next step or we've done the job, whatever it might be. So there's a lot going on here.

To me, this is the most interesting of these. I really like the lightness and kind of minimalist effect of Opera Air, and I think Opera might get here with this kind of stuff, but these guys are here as well. It's Chromium, which I like. It's super fast and it's the type of thing where it's a browser you can just use it. You don't have to worry about a lot of the detailed features. But if you are someone who wants to really customize it or take advantage of these advanced features, this is a ton going on here. So this is.

I had not heard about this until about 24 hours before I recorded this. I think I'm gonna learn a lot more about it as we go forward, but this is very, very interesting to me, so it's something to look forward to. So this one again is called Sidekick. You can, I guess, google that or look it up online Opera Air or Opera, but Opera Air to me is the nicer of those two. And then Zen Browser.

If you are fans of Arc or fans of open source, slash Mozilla maybe a little disappointed in the direction that company is taking and want something a little different. So I didn't know about any of these until pretty recently. Opera Air, literally, was just released a few weeks ago as I record this, but these are all brand new for 2025. So something to consider if you like mixing it up or looking for something new and different. I'm kind of surprised there's that much to say, but there's a lot going on there, so that's good stuff. Hopefully you found this useful and interesting. We'll have a new episode of Hands-On Windows every Thursday. You can find out more at twittv slash H-O-W. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you especially to our Club Twit members. We appreciate you and love you so much. If you're watching on YouTube and you're suffering through all the ads, do consider subscribing. You can learn more about Club Twit at twittv slash club twit. Thank you, see you next time.