Meet Flow, a Fresh New Browser for Linux

If you miss Arc’s design and want something similar on Linux — but open source and without the AI baggage — Flow Browser is worth a look.

The FOSS Force Linux App of the Week — Flow Browser

I’m always looking for new web browsers to try out. Most of the time, I tend to avoid Chromium-based browsers for three reasons: I don’t much care for the basic layout, poor tab management, and I prefer more security.

Those are the three criteria on which I generally base my browser selection, and for some time, my browser of choice has been Opera.

I know, I know… proprietary (hiss, hiss).

Flow is open source: released under GPLv3.

That’s why, when I came across Flow Browser, my interest was immediately piqued.

Flow is a modern web browser that focuses on privacy, with a clean, minimalistic design, plenty of speed, an intuitive interface, and all the respect for privacy that you might need. The Flow feature set includes:

• Privacy-focused browsing
• Built-in protections
• Clean, minimalistic user interface
• Chrome extension support
• Multiple profile support
• Wayland and X11 support
• PDF viewing
• Tab archiving/sleep after a user-defined interval (default is 12 hours)
• Profiles
• Keyboard shortcuts
• External app support

I installed Flow on Pop!_OS running the COSMIC desktop on top of Wayland and found it to be remarkably well done. It’s stable, fast, and clean.

Even better… it has vertical tabs built in.

Huzzah!

First Thoughts on Flow

If there’s one thing that really drew me to Flow, it’s that the UI takes a page from the no longer developed (and never available for Linux) Arc Browser, which I found to be the best of the best of proprietary browsers. I was actually disappointed when The Browser Company dropped Arc for a more generic browser that looks every bit like Chrome, with the addition of some AI funk.

No, thank you.

To my relief, Flow has no built-in AI, and when you first run Flow, it asks what privacy setting you want to apply. You can choose from Private, Balanced, and Personalized. Keep in mind that — at least in this iteration — you only get one chance to configure your privacy option, as there’s nothing in Settings to allow you to do this. However, you can enable/disable content blocking by selecting General in the Settings screen.

When Flow doesn’t have any open tabs, it looks like a blank slate, which is really refreshing. There are no ads, no news, no nothing… It’s just there, ready for you to browse.

Installing Flow

For Linux, Flow is mainly available as a Flatpak app (there is an AppImage version available), so before you install it, you need to make sure your Linux machine is set up and ready for installing Flatpaks from Flathub.

Once you have that taken care of, you can install Flow with the command:

flatpak install flathub com.flow_browser.flow

After the installation is completed, if you don’t see Flow listed in your desktop menu, log out and log back in, and it’ll be there.

Using Flow

Flow is a web browser; what more do you need to know?

Okay, let’s talk about the Flow workflow.

When you first use Flow, you get to set up your first Workspace. You get to name it, theme it, and give it an icon. You can then add more Workspaces by clicking the gear icon at the bottom left corner, navigating to Spaces, clicking Create Space, and walking through the simple wizard.

I tend to set up spaces for things like Writing, Shopping, Social Media, and News. One of the cool things about Flow (which is a nod to Arc) is that you can customize the theme of each Space. Why is this important? Simple: it allows you to immediately know which Space you’re working in.

One thing to keep in mind is that Flow is new — it’s been around for less than a year. That means there will be issues. I’ve found switching between Spaces can be a bit hit or miss. Case in point, after being unable to switch between spaces, I had to delete all but the initial space and re-create them. I chalk this up to infancy, but I certainly hope that issue will be fixed. Currently, Flow is on version 0.10.2. When this browser finally reaches general availability, I would imagine it’ll be rock solid.

I’m hoping, once Flow reaches 1.0 status, I’ll be able to make it my daily browser, because it shows a lot of promise. Unlike many other browsers, Flow doesn’t throw a kitchen sink of features at you. Instead, it’s clean, minimal, fast, and well-designed. This browser could easily become the default for many Linux distributions… as long as the developer keeps the updates flowing.