I'm sorry but couldn't find the information. Is this built on top of chrome(chromium)? Do you have plans to release it as open-source given the market you are targeting is a small one and (rightfully) a paranoid one.
Show HN: Web browser to help programmers think clearly
141–150 of 234 posts
Re: Show HN: Web browser to help programmers think clearly
#142Love it, this is the most innovative thing in the browser space for a long while. It's baffling to me how boring most 'new' browsers are - most propositions are 'like X but with less friction on these 2 or 3 things'. I hate that it's only for Mac so far, but glad to see others are on the way. I've been thinking about picking up a cheap older mac for development work, though, and this is one more reason in favor.
I'm surprised to see you so excited about this. Have you used tiling window managers? What does this and a rofi or similar component not have, or a gnome3 script? Not as convenient, yeah. The big concern I would have if I were these guys is their magic is their UI, apparently, and they've given it away. If they truly have something good, it's some Electron windows inside a gui kit. Not to understate the work, but the…
I've been griping about the tedium of trying to organize tabs (and to a lesser extent bookmarks) for a long time. I typically have hundreds of tabs open and my sanity maintenance method is to keep their number under 256. They're somewhat organized with tab groups but the overhead of managing them is a huge pain point for me. So the visual categorization and search looks like a huge win. I don't care that much about the other stuff tbh :)
Visual organizational tools are very important to me. Even if I'm in the IDE and thinking in code, when I jump tot eh browser for something I want the experience to visual and low-friction, so I don't have to push brower things onto my mental stack, which will slow me down when I want to switch back to the IDE.
I'm very good at remembering where things are, I can pick up a book I haven't touched in months and remember the page I was on, or the last sentence I read to find my place with a few seconds. On the other hand, large scale sorting and rearranging tasks are miserable drudgery so I have a lot of stacks and my bookshelves are, ah, suboptimal.
Re: Show HN: Web browser to help programmers think clearly
#143What I really want is a browser that displays information in a clear, unified format that I can customize to my liking. I want this browser to disregard all visual HTML and CSS rendering, and rather instrument a headless browser to gather the navigation and content from sites. I want to be able to easily make my own instrumentation for sites that do not yet work on this browser. I’m want to allow some branding in the…
I also wanted some things similar to like that (although without any site branding either). Some web pages don't work properly with CSS disabled. There is ARIA, although it isn't perfect either (and as far as I could tell when I checked, formatting such as bold, fixpitch, etc doesn't seem to work properly with ARIA; this is determined by writing a short HTML file and then viewing the accessible tree (I don't know if I made any kind of mistake)). So, rather I think the way to do is to use a combination of the HTML, CSS, and ARIA to produce a kind of "augmented HTML" which can then be displayed. (If it contains only simple HTML without layout or CSS or whatever, then the same HTML could usually be used.) (ARIA can be used to e.g. find out what is a checkbox etc, so that the renderer can render that element as a checkbox and ignore any CSS and HTML and other stuff that it tries to use to make it fancy.)
Supporting the Gemini protocol and text/gemini file format is also good to have, but that is separate.
Stuff such as a table of contents window can also be implemented (by looking for the relevant HTML commands in the document which denote headings, sections, etc). (I think I have seen one web browser that can do such a thing for Gemini and Markdown but not HTML. However, it would be possible to do with HTML too (although a bit more complicated).)
You could also add such thing as local annotations, form data save/recall, etc. (These would be controllable only by the local user. There would be no HTML or JavaScript commands for documents to control them.)
I mean that, to make a better web browser: remove half of the stuff, implement the other half of the stuff differently, and then add some stuff.
Re: Show HN: Web browser to help programmers think clearly
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
And I am saying Bitwarden is not tied to a web browser - it has a desktop client.
You assume most people have the patience to copy paste passwords from Bitwarden rather than the ease of Lastpass - just doesn't work for 99% of the population.
Ease of Lastpass is the same as ease of Bitwarden, both have extension for browsers :)
Re: Show HN: Web browser to help programmers think clearly
#145As a consultant using a client macbook that is heavily neutered by its security and safety protocols... I'm wishing that I were able to install this. Excited to try it in the future.
Re: Show HN: Web browser to help programmers think clearly
#146What I really want is a browser that displays information in a clear, unified format that I can customize to my liking. I want this browser to disregard all visual HTML and CSS rendering, and rather instrument a headless browser to gather the navigation and content from sites. I want to be able to easily make my own instrumentation for sites that do not yet work on this browser. I’m want to allow some branding in the…
I've thought often that one could write robust automation engines that boil any SaaS app down into a few functions:
search(terms?: string) -> Promise
expandItem(itemId: string) -> Promise # gets more details for the given item (e.g. a thread) and any child items (e.g. messages within the thread)
...
One could build this for Gmail using https://inboxsdk.github.io/ , and other apps ranging from Slack to Google Calendar to Dropbox to your issue tracker du jour with screen scraping, treating each message or ticket or document as an item. Not an easy task as you'd be fighting against the current of rapidly-iterating frontend teams changing class names and structures as they see fit, but doable. The possibilities of how to collate and visualize this data would be endless!
Re: Show HN: Web browser to help programmers think clearly
#147Some of these features would be great built into a window manager. I'd love to be able to handle open windows the way you handle open pages.
If you have awesomewm you can already build things like this
Albeit with a bit of scripting
I combined the floating mode with the tiling mode to make one window draggable and shrinkable.
Let me know what tilingwm you use (just comment i’ll check later) , I’ll try to find a tutorial to help with it.
You can already do this with firefox and chrome , just need a bit of scripting
Re: Show HN: Web browser to help programmers think clearly
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't address your specific desire (uniform rendering of existing HTML), but the Gemini protocol seems to align with your desire for a simpler internet. It's worth a look if you aren't already familiar. https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
I like the idea of Gemini but the reality is 'here's a list of random servers which could be anything but at least our user interface is from the 1980s'. I like how it's lighter than the web, but I don't see how it's 'heavier than Gopher' as suggested (and I have been watching the Gemini project for a few months now). I was on the internet well before the web and I used Gopher all the time. It was great by the standa…
These are not problems with the Gemini protocol itself.
The Gemini clients that I have seen do usually allow the user to change the colours, as far as I can tell. (This is usually better than the document specifying the colours, in my opinion.)
Gemini does have a write protocol (I think it is to change "gemini:" at the beginning of the request to "titan:", add some URI parameters for the size and MIME type of the data (I think it might have been better to put those things on the next line (I am not really sure), but well, now it is what it is), and then the data to be written starting on the next line). However, for some kind of things, other protocols would be better.
For interactive fiction/text adventures (or other interactive applications), Telnet/SSH will be better than Gemini, I think. For message forums, NNTP will be better.
Gemini does have the advantage that the file format is easily readable/writable even if only treated as plain text, you do not need a software to interpret it, but that you can also use a program to interpret it too if wanted and if you do then it is still simple.
I would also propose a unencrypted variant. The differences are: The URI scheme is "insecure-gemini" for the unencrypted variant, and 6x responses are not allowed (if a client certificate is needed, it should issue a 3x to redirect to the encrypted version and then the encrypted response will be 6x).
Re: Show HN: Web browser to help programmers think clearly
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why, there's Linux.
I agree Linux is great—and I shall continue to use the OS. But the online ads are even more exhausting than desktop-bound ads no matter which browser, no matter which ad blocker, no matter which OS. Not just ads but those annoying “cookie” banners … And let me just say: God help those who frequent TikTok… Their minds will be mush 2.0.
Enable EasyList cookie filter for your Ad Blocker (uBlock Origin in Firefox highly recommended). This has drastically cut down number of banners I see.