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Arc is almost 3 (4?) years old and was the darling child of dev influencers for the better part of 2 years. It's not a niche browser, especially amongst devs that are likely to work at Cloudflare.


It's definitely a niche browser. I think I heard of it once on HN over the past few years, and I'd be surprised if there was actually more than a few thousands of people using it.


Its subreddit has 52k members. There are probably hundreds of thousands of users. Still a niche browser, but it's pretty commonly used on Macs.


> Its subreddit has 52k members. There are probably hundreds of thousands of users.

I don't get your reasoning here, you shouldn't even expect more than a fraction of the reddit users to have even installed and tried the browser, let alone using it regularly.


Why would you join a subreddit for an obscure browser if you never even bothered to run it?


You vastly underestimate how many “just curious” lurkers there are on any subreddits !


You're asserting that they are curious enough about a free browser to join a subreddit, but not curious enough to download it?


I would be surprised if it were that low; the arcbrowser sub Reddit has 50 thousand members. Still, regardless of the actual figure, I think there's a broader point which avoids the need to agree on an absolute threshold: should cloudflare block access to websites using a blacklist or should it grant access using a whitelist? Especially since it's trivial to spoof your user agent.


I'm not defending Cloudflare on any way, blocking niche browsers is sad. I'm just saying that it doesn't make sense to say it's not a niche browser.


That's fair. I'm sure it's not as well-used/known as Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Safari. Probably not even Opera, although I'd be interested to see their respective "new users" numbers. I think it's in the same ballpark as Brave — definitely known, just not one of the big 5.


It is a niche browser with no hype going for it.




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