New
- Ardia runs on Chromium 155, built the way Chrome ships it. The engine moves up from 154 and is now an official build with link-time and profile-guided optimisation, like Chrome’s own.
- The full uBlock Origin is built in. Ardia now ships uBlock Origin itself in place of uBlock Origin Lite, the way Helium does. Your allowed sites, your list choices and blocking-off carry over the first time it starts, and its filter lists keep themselves up to date.
- Clear, as in Arc. A “↓ Clear” at the end of the line above your tabs closes every unpinned tab at once; pinned tabs stay. The toast’s Undo puts them all back where they were, groups included, and ⇧⌘K does the same from the keyboard.
- The hidden sidebar is easier to catch. With the sidebar hidden, the peek stays out while the pointer is up to 24 pt past its edge, as in Arc, and throwing the pointer past the window’s left edge opens it too. Thanks, @narasaka.
- Small videos look sharper. A video shown larger than its source is upscaled on the GPU, with Apple’s super resolution at 720p and below, only in the tab you’re watching. “Video upscaling” in Settings › Tabs turns it off.
Faster
| 0.2.37 | 0.2.38 | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Launch to window on screen | 443 ms | 365 ms | −18 % |
| Launch to first page painted | 510 ms | 449 ms | −12 % |
| Tab switch to shown | 35 ms | 6 ms | −83 % |
| New tab to first paint | 109 ms | 96 ms | −12 % |
| New window to first paint | 112 ms | 100 ms | −11 % |
| Idle CPU, 20 tabs | 1.58 % | 0.38 % | −76 % |
| Idle wakeups, 20 tabs | 30 /s | 14 /s | −54 % |
| Memory, 20 tabs | 1,189 MB | 1,094 MB | −8 % |
Switching tabs moved most: a tab now shows in about 6 ms instead of 35.
- Your window and tabs come back sooner. The window you left in front appears the moment Ardia launches, before the rest of the interface loads, and the page in it paints soon after. New tabs, new windows and tab switches from the sidebar are quicker too.
- Ardia uses much less battery. Background tabs past the five most recent freeze, as in Chrome, and quiet ones wake less often; tabs with a live connection, playing audio or allowed to notify you never freeze. Pages that offer passkey sign-in no longer keep Bluetooth searching for a phone, a page left open in another profile rests until you switch to it, and pages draw their JavaScript animation at 60 frames a second on 120 Hz screens while scrolling, typing, video and CSS animation stay at full speed.
Fixed
- Extension shortcuts work again. A shortcut an extension sets, or one you set in chrome://extensions/shortcuts, did nothing in 0.2.37 and earlier. It now runs the extension’s command or opens its popup, while Ardia’s own keys like ⌘T, ⌘W and ⌘Q stay Ardia’s in every window and on every keyboard layout.
- Every shortcut in Settings can be rebound. ⌘1–⌘9, the tab switcher, Quit, Close Window, Full Screen, the Edit items and the rest either weren’t listed or couldn’t be changed, and some kept firing on their old key after you rebound them. All of them take your key now.
- Keyboard focus stays where you left it. Esc closes Find on page again, and Enter steps to the next match. Switching tabs, profiles or back to a split puts the caret back in the field you were typing in, and in the command bar the pointer only highlights a row: the arrow keys choose, as in Dia.
- Tabs drag from their icon. Pressing a pinned tile or a tab on its site icon and moving didn’t pick it up; it only worked when the press happened to land beside the icon, so dragging a tile out felt like it needed a long hold. It now lifts on the first move, wherever you grab it.
- Tab and Backspace work in site search. Typing a site like google.com and pressing Tab now switches the command bar to “Search Google”, even while the address is still being completed, as in Chrome. Backspace in the empty field leaves site search and puts the address back. Before, Tab only selected the text and Backspace did nothing.
- Enter adds the extension. In the “Add extension?” dialog, Enter now presses Add Extension and Esc cancels, as in Chrome; before, both keys went to the page underneath. The same goes for Ardia’s other extension dialogs.
- The sidebar’s media player only shows media you can hear. X’s feed, which autoplays muted videos, put a player card in the sidebar while you scrolled. The card now waits for a video or song that plays with sound; Settings › Tabs › “Show media controls in the sidebar” turns it off.
- Fewer ways for a page to fool you. A page from another site can’t paint before the address bar shows it, a blank tab can’t pose as another address, and the Cast picker drops the page out of full screen first. Extensions Google flags as malware get turned off again, and the
ardiacommand starts switched off. - New windows open as Ardia windows, and a link from another app loads once. A window a page or an extension opens is now a real Ardia window, and a link opened from another app while Ardia starts is fetched once instead of twice.
Smaller
- The download is 109 MB instead of 187, and the app 315 MB instead of 447: Ardia no longer ships the parts of Chrome it never loads.
- The lamb game runs at a steady 120 fps.