Show HN: Web browser to help programmers think clearly

We’re focused on making a web browser for programmers to improve their workflow. It helps you look up docs and search information. You can toggle it on with a hotkey and it can overlay on your IDE. Tabs are grouped by domain for easy organization. The history data structure is a tree which shows how pages are back-linked to each other and to spatial workspaces. Both open tabs and pages in your workspaces are just pointers to a node in your history tree!

You can watch a 2 minute video walkthrough here https://www.loom.com/share/93c7c0012f514c37b58a42fa65badc88 or download it from our website

How did we end up here?

Initially we wanted to make a citation manager because myself and a friend had an unconnected workflow moving research articles from Chrome -> Zotero -> Emacs org-mode. After talking to some other PhDs/postdocs the takeaway was that everyone has very different ways of doing research. This would mean that it would be impossible to make a citation manager that everyone would want to use.

Later, a friend in industry mentioned that he had a hard time finding ‘cloud documents’ as part of his job. We then considered making a spotlight application to find and organize these documents. It turns out that this already been done and it seems that people actually just pull up their documents once at the beginning of the day anyway.

We now think that the main problem is that web browsers are actually not currently suited for doing research. The current mixing of research type browsing with web-documents creates a mess and makes people think they want a ‘cloud file search’.

What’s different?

Instead of an add-on solution to Chrome which would create more noise, we are creating a fully functioning, organized way of managing information overload and keeping you on task as you go through your work day.

What’s next?

We are fixing up our Linux and Windows versions for public use.

> Did you code the engine from scratch…

We’re using Electron with all the UI done with HTML. The criticism against Electron is that you don’t need to bundle a fully functional web browser to distribute a your app but distributing a fully functional web browser is one of our goals! The other options were using CEF or actually recompiling Chromium. To have a sensible workflow with Chromium you would want to hook into it with a scripting language so you can develop the chrome [0] without recompiling. Electron already has done this with the BrowserView API accessible with javascript! We’ve already run into limitations of the Electron framework so we will be considering extending it or doing our own thing when it makes sense.

> What's your sustainability…

I really like the JetBrains perpetual fallback license so something like that at a price point of $50 makes sense. If we can provide some useful paid services that run on a server then we could make the browser free.

> Do you have any estimate on how long…

I’ll look into it! If it’s no harder than signing/notarizing the app for macOS distribution then the main work to be done is fix some bugs and make sure the windows play nicely with the host OS. This could be done in less than a month from now!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_user_interface#User_...

[0] https://github.com/hyferg/bonsai-browser-public