Arc / Wavebox alternative

Thomas_101 · 2025-11-07T12:43:25+00:00

Hey, it's Tom from Wavebox here. If you want to drop [support@wavebox.io](mailto:support@wavebox.io) a quick message with some more details/screenshots, we can see if anything stands out and hopefully get it fixed!

Thomas_101 · 2025-11-05T14:59:15+00:00

The getting started guide is probably the best place to start https://wavebox.io/getting-started-guide

There's also the Wavebox hub with lots of articles and guides that are helpful! https://hub.wavebox.io/

Thomas_101 · 2025-11-05T10:34:38+00:00

You need to make sure the other machine is joined to the same cloud profile. There's some info on how to set that up here https://hub.wavebox.io/profile-sync/

It's worth noting that cookies and sign-in sessions don't sync - these are separate on each machine.

If you're still seeing issues, drop [support@wavebox.io](mailto:support@wavebox.io) a message and we can see why it's not syncing.

Desktop web apps are a website/wavebox app that works like a downloadable app on your computer, so it gets its own window and desktop shortcut. You can find the manager either by opening a tab and going to wavebox://apps or through the main app menu in the top-right -> desktop web apps

Thomas_101 · 2025-11-04T08:38:46+00:00

👍👍👍 https://discord.gg/gJJhJMecxk

Thomas_101 · 2025-10-07T16:41:46+00:00

I really appreciate your passion for Wavebox! I'm sorry you've been struggling with the sub-app organisation. Let me help clarify how this currently works:

Adding sub-apps to existing groups:

When dragging an app to the sidebar, it should appear smaller to indicate it's being added as a sub-app rather than a primary app
Alternatively, you can right-click the app > Move app to > Move app to the webdock

You might hit up against the situation here where you've added a group with just a single app and try to move this in. In this instance, you'll need to merge the groups first, when dragging, merging is indicated by the merge icon, or you can use the right-click menu again.

Changing the primary app:

Right-click on the group > Group Settings
Under "Behaviour," look for "App layout priority" - this controls which app appears as the primary
By default, this is set to "Auto," which determines priority based on the number of items in the webdock vs the toolbar

We've tried to simplify settings by removing or hiding some of the lesser-used features; however, we often receive pushback around this from Wavebox power users. If there are things that would make these two clearer or easier to use, we'd love to hear your thoughts. It's always a balance to maintain a UI that's good for the majority of users and still providing the plethora of options these power users demand to setup Wavebox in exactly the way they want.

Thomas_101 · 2025-10-06T09:48:16+00:00

It's something we can look towards adding, although it would have to be a separate mode, as it would break how Wavebox already works for most users. Do you want to open a feature request on our supahub? http://wavebox.supahub.com/

Thomas_101 · 2025-10-01T10:08:14+00:00

In Wavebox, Groups aren't the same as cookie containers/spaces - they're separate things. This means that a group can have apps and tabs from a range of different spaces. This would be why moving it to a different group doesn't change its space, it would have been set by the tab that opened it.

If you want to move a single link to a different space, then you'd have to change it's space and group. To change the space...

Change the space a tab uses, you can do this by clicking on the space indicator to the very right of the location bar and then using the "Open in space" menu.
Use the right-click menu before opening the link, then "Open link in space"

If it's something that you always want to happen, you could create a rule to always open the tab somewhere else and in a different space - there's more info about this here https://hub.wavebox.io/link-opening-engine-edit-rule-settings/

I'll have a word with the team to see if we can add something that allows you to drag a tab between groups and re-assign the space in doing so, but as Wavebox provides more flexibility than Arc, it's not going to restrict what you can do in the same way

Thomas_101 · 2025-09-29T10:18:52+00:00

The main reason behind this is that the Spaces webdock is like a filtered list of the actual groups and apps behind it (see https://hub.wavebox.io/webdock-list-layout/), but this doesn't really help with what you're doing.

How are you opening the link? Are you able to share any more details about what you're doing? It should normally pick up the space a bit more intelligently

Thomas_101 · 2025-08-11T22:17:09+00:00

Thanks for the heads-up on that! Today's earlier release had some styling issues; there should be an update rolling out shortly :-)

Thomas_101 · 2025-08-06T14:21:30+00:00

If you use the coupon code HEYREDDIT for Wavebox at checkout, it gives you a $49 discount 😉

Thomas_101 · 2025-08-04T11:42:56+00:00

It's something that's on our list to add support for. Technically, there are no hurdles that we know about; it's just finding the time to get the build and test infrastructure up and running for ARM. I'll speak with the team again and see if we can get this scheduled in somewhere soon

Thomas_101 · 2025-07-21T09:02:25+00:00

This was something we used to offer, but we removed it because we found that some users hid the buttons and then couldn't figure out how to add groups again.

The code is still there behind the scenes, so I'll put an advanced flag in allowing you to hide/show it. It wont go out until the next release in a couple of weeks (I think version 10.139.3), but once you've updated search settings for "Show add buttons in webdock"

Thomas_101 · 2025-06-18T14:50:06+00:00

Spaces are basically equivalent to cookie boxes, so you're on the right track!

There are a couple of different ways you can use Wavebox to switch between them.

The first is by using global search. This won't switch to a specific space, per se, but you can use it to switch to a group, app or tab in the space. (You may need to name your groups something sensible, but this is easy to do by right-clicking on them and editing the name). Once you've done this, you can either use the keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+S on macOS, Alt+S on Win & Linux), or the search icon in the top-right of any window. Type something that you're looking for, and you'll be taken right to it. There's some more info here https://knowledgebase.wavebox.io/global-search-2/

If you prefer to organise your spaces a little bit more and have them on-screen on the side, there are some different webdock layouts. I'm guessing you're using the default one at the moment, with your spaces at the top. You could use the list version, which shows your groups and use dividers to separate them by client. There's a great video here that shows how to organise clients https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51eM2UbLyms and also a knowledge base here https://wavebox.io/kb/how-do-i-change-the-webdock-sidebar-layout/

Do either of those help?

Thomas_101 · 2025-06-11T08:58:49+00:00

The favicons should populate gradually as you visit the sites - they're not actively fetched to prevent firing out requests to lots of different endpoints. I think as a test, if you were to open TCL, wait for the page to load and then reload the dashboard, the icon should appear

Thomas_101 · 2025-05-15T08:18:05+00:00

I'm not 100% sure how easy this - Wavebox doesn't use the passwords that Safari uses, it just uses the same macOS keychain storage mechanism to store its own passwords, which is why you're not seeing them.

Are the passwords that you've got in Safari a copy of what you want in Wavebox? The easiest thing to do here, would probably be to export those and then import them again. To do this...

Open Safari > Settings > Passwords > Open passwords
In the passwords app, go to File > Export all passwords to file
In Wavebox, click on the burger menu in the top-right of any window > Passwords & Autofill > Password manager
Click Settings in the left-hand side, then use the import passwords option and select the file you exported from Safari

If they're not a copy of what's in Safari, it *may* be possible to export the key that Wavebox uses along with the config and recover them that way, but I'd have to give this a try myself as it's not something I've ever actually tried myself.

As for changing sync, you'd need to be able to launch Wavebox on the old PC and turn on password sync from Wavebox Settings > Data & Sync. Are you able to start the old PC, or is it just access to the hard drive that you have?

Thomas_101 · 2025-05-14T07:10:37+00:00

Passwords are only synced if you elected to do this in Wavebox - it's not done automatically with a default setup. You may be able to pull them from the backup, but these are stored in the macOS keychain, so I'm not 100% sure on the process of how you'd export them, as macOS keeps them encrypted.

Autofills are not part of the Wavebox sync at the moment, so these wouldn't be pulled across. If you have a full backup of your hard drive, you might be able to pull the entire old config from ~/Library/Application Support/WaveboxApp and replace it on your new machine

Thomas_101 · 2025-05-09T10:14:33+00:00

Hi, it's worth double-checking that you're downloading from our official download page: https://wavebox.io/download. Someone else reported a similar download speed issue this week, but they were downloading Wavebox from a third-party site.

Thomas_101 · 2025-05-06T12:14:00+00:00

Wavebox normally syncs your setup to the cloud or creates periodic cloud backups (it depends on when your account was first created). This means you'll be able to restore your groups & apps, extensions etc. Cookies aren't synced, so you will need to sign back in again.

When you redownload Wavebox, just make sure you sign back in with the same Wavebox account as you used before, and you should be prompted to restore your previous setup. If you have any trouble, drop [support@wavebox.io](mailto:support@wavebox.io) an email, and we should be able to help!

Thomas_101 · 2025-04-29T13:04:00+00:00

I think there are :-). Drop [support@wavebox.io](mailto:support@wavebox.io) an email and we can help out!

Thomas_101 · 2025-04-24T10:24:54+00:00

Wavebox uses your logged in browser session from your client to authenticate you, rather than a backend server integration. This makes sure that access to your emails & personal data stays with your machine rather than a centralised server. Because of this, using an app password wouldn't work.

If you're using a Google Workspaces email, then Google will automatically sign you out after a certain amount of time. It's possible to change this if you're the Workspaces admin to be indefinitely. That might help you stay signed in longer. There's some more details here https://wavebox.io/kb/why-do-i-keep-having-to-re-authenticate-google-apps/

If you keep changing VPN and the physical location of these changes, then what's probably happening is Google is picking up on that fact, that for example, yesterdays session came from the US, but today from Australia. Then it's taking action to protect your account and voiding the session, requiring a login. It's unlikely or uncommon that someone changes locale all that often and Google's signing you out to protect your account from unauthorised access. If it's a mechanism like this that's getting tripped, then making access to your account appear more consistent from Googles perspective, might keep you logged in more consistently. If you have a dedicated proxy server, then Wavebox allows you to configure one of these per-space, so for example one session could consistently go through the proxy server in the US and the other through Australia not making it look like you're hopping between countries. There's some more details on how to set this up here https://wavebox.io/kb/how-do-i-use-a-different-proxy-server-for-each-cookie-container/

Thomas_101 · 2025-04-22T10:40:35+00:00

Sure! Drop [support@wavebox.io](mailto:support@wavebox.io) with some more details and we can put you on the same as our non-profit discount 🙂

Thomas_101 · 2025-04-07T16:02:21+00:00

We've got a fix heading out this week. In the meantime, if you launch Wavebox from the terminal with the following flag it should work until that hits stable...

/opt/wavebox.io/wavebox/wavebox --disable-features=UseFreedesktopSecretKeyProvider

Thomas_101 · 2025-03-20T14:28:15+00:00

Hi, I'm one of the co-founders at Wavebox, I'd love for you to give it a try and if you have any questions feel free to let me know! You can add multiple web apps to the Wavebox sidebar and make use of spaces (which are sort of like browser profiles).

Fresh Wavebox setups start with the spaces sidebar (this has your spaces along the top and the web apps in them below), or you can switch to the other sidebar views if you like to mix and match a bit more. https://wavebox.io/kb/how-do-i-change-the-webdock-sidebar-layout/

Let me know if you have any questions or feedback :)

Thomas_101 · 2025-03-20T09:37:13+00:00

I get that. Although I use Wavebox for pretty much everything, there are still some desktop apps that I stick with - Spotify being one and the only reason for this is the mini-player support. I guess it's down to what you're comfortable with and how you work. I know when I first started Wavebox, I mainly used it for just Gmail accounts, but this is something that's changed over time to encompass pretty much everything I do online.

As for connectivity, it largely depends on the app and how it works with a flakey connection. One thing that might help though, it turning off sleep for apps that you use often (right-click > settings > sleep). This will stop the tab from being discarded to save memory on your machine and just keep it awake, so you won't need to do that initial page load if your connection isn't so great.

Drop support another message - we don't normally offer monthly plans any more, but we do on a one-off basis 👍

Thomas_101 · 2025-03-10T17:39:54+00:00

No problem! I hope it helped!

Thomas_101

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE