Ardia now runs on ArdiaCore, our own thin layer over Chrome’s framework, in place of CEF. Your tabs, profiles, passwords, bookmarks, history, extensions and sign-ins carry over as they are, session cookies included, and Chrome’s own pages and prompts say Ardia. It sits quieter when idle and uses less memory.
New
- Import keeps you signed in. Importing from Chrome, Brave, Edge, Arc, Dia, Helium, Firefox or Safari now brings your cookies, so sites still know you, plus addresses and cards from Chromium browsers and Safari’s export. macOS may ask for the other browser’s keychain item, as it does for passwords. At the end, Ardia lists that browser’s extensions with a link to each in the Chrome Web Store.
- The toolbar gets out of the way. With tabs on top, scrolling down a page tucks the toolbar into a thin strip that keeps the site’s name, and the page gets the room; scrolling up brings it back. Click the strip, or rest the pointer on it, to see the toolbar again. It’s on by default, in Settings › Tabs › Hide toolbar while scrolling.
- Onboarding shows the real app icons. Gmail, Slack, Notion and the rest show their own icons on a fresh install, not letters, and so do the tabs you pin there until their pages load.
Fixed
- Allowing the camera and microphone no longer crashes Ardia. On sites with their own permission button, such as video calls, clicking Allow before macOS had given Ardia the camera or microphone crashed the app in 0.2.21. Now the site’s prompt asks macOS for access and carries on, and a second click can’t answer the next prompt by mistake.
- Installing an extension doesn’t crash. The “added” bubble Chrome shows after an install could crash Ardia, most often when no window of that profile was open. It now appears over the page you’re on, or waits until a window of that profile comes forward.
- Google Meet pops out when you switch tabs. Leaving a call for another tab or the New Tab page now opens Meet’s own floating window with its controls, as in Dia, and coming back closes it. Before, nothing appeared. It follows your auto Picture in Picture setting.
- ⌘ with a trackpad scrolls instead of zooming. Resting a thumb on ⌘ while scrolling with two fingers zoomed the page, in 0.2.21 too, because the check that tells a trackpad from a mouse read the wrong part of macOS’s device list. A mouse wheel with ⌘ still zooms.
- Closing windows frees their memory. A window closed while its page was still being asked whether it could leave stayed alive, hidden, holding about 70 MB. After opening and closing 20 tabs, Ardia now uses 356 MB instead of 374 in 0.2.21.
- Ardia is quieter at rest and lighter on memory. Compared with 0.2.21 in our benchmarks: idle with one tab, it uses 0.12% CPU instead of 0.24%, and 279 MB of memory instead of 325 MB. Launch to a window with its page takes 542 ms instead of 576, and a new tab 100 ms instead of 105.
- Animations run once per frame. In 0.2.21 and earlier, a bug in the framework the interface is built on ran its timers, animation callbacks included, as fast as they were asked for, about 1,000 times a second instead of once per screen refresh. They now follow your display, so the app does far less work whenever something moves.
- The window redraws only what changed. Opening or closing a tab, a page loading, download progress and typing in the command bar redrew whole parts of the window that hadn’t changed. With music playing in another tab, the sidebar redrew itself every second; it no longer does, and launching no longer redraws every tab’s icon over and over.
- A tab moved to another window keeps its page. Dragging a window’s last tab onto another window, or moving a tab to a new window, could reload it or leave it blank, losing its Back history and anything you’d typed. It now arrives as it left.
- Extension popups act on the tab you’re looking at. An extension’s popup took itself, or a window you couldn’t see, for the current tab, so its buttons acted on the wrong page. It now sees the window it opened in and the page under it, as in Chrome, and closes when you switch tabs.
- Deleting a profile deletes its data. Deleting a profile right after opening it could leave its folder, cookies and history included, on your Mac until the next launch, and the ad blocker could load it back. Now the folder goes at once and stays gone.
- New windows open with their content. A new window showed up empty, with only its window buttons, for a few frames before its sidebar and page drew in. Now it appears whole, as Dia’s do, and a window you empty by dragging its last tab out leaves at once instead of fading out blank.
Smaller
- A tab torn off into its own window keeps its colour in the toolbar.
- Pages without a background of their own show the window’s card at the right shade, as in 0.2.21, not darker.
- Importing Firefox passwords from the import window works.
- Sites that check for Chrome see Chrome, as they do in Dia, so features they keep for Chrome turn on.
- Switching tabs goes straight from one page to the next, without a blank frame between them.
- The window’s close, minimise and zoom buttons stay put when you switch or close tabs.
- Sites on plain http show their icons in restored tabs, bookmarks and history.
- The blocked-ads count includes the scripts the ad blocker swaps for a harmless stand-in, not only the ones it stops outright.
- Private tabs that an extension or Open Link in Incognito Window asks for open in a private window, never in a normal one.
- Sign-in and payment popups open in a window of their own, at the size the site asked for, and ⌘W closes them.
- “Share this tab instead” in video calls works when you have more than one profile.
- A call’s pop-out window stays open when you cover the Ardia window, instead of being swapped for the video’s Picture in Picture.
- A page keeps its background after a reload instead of briefly showing the window behind it.
- When you open a downloaded file, macOS’s prompt says Ardia downloaded it, and Get Info shows where it came from.
- An extension’s welcome tab and options page open in your window, and installing one from the Chrome Web Store doesn’t add a download.
- The ad blocker’s own page no longer shows up in history or in address bar suggestions.
- A call in one pane of a split stays put when you click the other pane, and pops out only when you leave the split.
- A page you can’t see, behind the New Tab page or on another Space, waits until it’s shown to ask for a permission.
- When two calls share tabs at once, “Share this tab instead” moves only the call you clicked it in.
- Reopening a tab closed from its window, by an extension or by the page itself brings back its Back list.
- A tab woken from sleep loses its sleeping icon, and can sleep again later.
- The page menu drops Open in Reading Mode and Listen to this page, which need a Chrome panel Ardia doesn’t have.