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Min: A fast, minimal browser that protects your privacy

minbrowser.org

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Re: Min: A fast, minimal browser that protects your privacy

#51

Post by reaperducer »

benrapscallion wrote: post #44

FWIW, I love Lynx on my Mac, especially for ad-heavy websites. I miss the "in browser" services that brow.sh [1] used to provide. [1] https://www.brow.sh

I love Lynx on my Mac

I love Lynx, too. I connect my retro computers to the internet through my Mac. Unfortunately, Lynx has bugs that you can't see on modern machines that show up on old, low speed connections.

For example, when connecting to a web site, it displays a whole bunch of connection status information that I just don't care about. Enough that it's intrusive.

Connecting to this web site, it displays ALL of the following:

  Getting https://news.ycombinator.com/
  Looking up news.ycombinator.com
  Making HTTPS connection to news.ycombinator.com
  SSL callback:ok, preverify_ok=1, ssl_okay=0
  Verified connection to news.ycombinator.com (cert=news.ycombinator.com)
  Certificate issued by: /C=US/O=DigiCert Inc/CN=DigiCert TLS RSA SHA256 2020 CA1
  Secure 256-bit TLSv1.2 (ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384) HTTP connection
  HTTP request.
  HTTP request sent; waiting for response.
  Read 1.5 KiB of data, 5.3 KiB/sec.
  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
On a modern computer, all that flashes by so quickly that you never see it. On a retro computer at 300 baud, it takes FOREVER, and you have to sit through it for EVERY page.

I've tried every Lynx flag and configuration listed, and none of them actually work. I think the notification suppression feature broke, but nobody noticed it because we've grown accustomed to high speed connections.

Re: Min: A fast, minimal browser that protects your privacy

#52

Post by RubyRidgeRandy »

I tried this out for a little bit. Looks very clean.

I had these issues and suggestions:

- Set min to dark mode, but it made no difference. Restarted to no avail.

- Set all ads to be blocked, still saw a lot of ads on reddit, youtube, others.

- Design wise, I think the app should default to having borders between tabs.

- There should be more white space at the top to drag the window around. The app opened maximized and when I went to drag it on windows I could only click the the URL bar because there is only a little bit of padding inbetween it and the top of the window.

- I have a large monitor and the when you click on the url bar when you have multiple tabs open, it expands to the full window width so the text you were looking at moves all the way to the left, very nitpicky I know, but I think this is not a great design choice and maybe the text should stay where it is when changing sites.

Re: Min: A fast, minimal browser that protects your privacy

#53

Post by kspacewalk2 »

Terretta wrote: post #49
d12bb wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyway, use firefox or librewolf. Stop enabling the chromium monopoly! Or Safari of course, it's really a great browser if one's on the Mac.

> Or Safari of course, it's really a great browser if one's on the Mac. The venerable iCab or new Orion from Kagi shows what's possible here. https://www.icab.de/ https://browser.kagi.com/ Kagi's Orion runs Firefox and Chrome extensions, including on iOS, and of course works with Kagi search, which is enough better that it's worth switching from Google/Bing/DDG. --- EDIT to add, on iCab, it's been updated as of 2020,…

>Kagi search, which is enough better that it's worth switching from Google/Bing/DDG.

But highly unlikely to be better enough to justify paying a subscription for it (for most people, anyway), so it's always going to be confined to a small niche of users.

Re: Min: A fast, minimal browser that protects your privacy

#55

Post by therealmarv »

Stay away if you value your security. Nothing personally against Electron but a browser is (or can be) exposed to all kinds of sites which do not have your best interest in mind. You really want always the latest security updates and a browser with a strong security concept (sandbox, encapsulation, taking advantage OS security etc) which is not the aim of Electron afaik.

Re: Min: A fast, minimal browser that protects your privacy

#56

Post by the_third_wave »

moffkalast wrote: post #25
latexr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Electron, WebKit, nope. Electron uses Chromium. Which uses Blink, not WebKit.

Well the worst part of Firefox is arguably Gecko. If one could make a browser with Firefox's backend and instead render with Blink that would be pretty dope.

It is Blink which drives the monoculture more than Chrome/Chromium since it is there that standards are made or broken (or flouted). What is needed is competition in this space, a new browser 'engine' to compete with Blink (Chrome/Chromium/Brave/Vivaldi/Edge/etc.), Gecko (Firefox/Seamonkey/etc) and Webkit (Safari/Epiphany/anything on iThings).

Maybe Servo can be rescued from oblivion? Get Mozilla to dump their activist-CEO (who is more concerned with her own remuneration and virtue signalling than with the development of their core product), use the funds thus saved to hire back all those developers which were let go under her reign and get Servo back on track. Blink is the one layout engine to rule them all after all...

   Ash Blink durbatulûk
   ash Blink gimbatul,
   Ash Blink thrakatulûk
   agh Google-ishi krimpatul

Re: Min: A fast, minimal browser that protects your privacy

#58

Post by jefftk »

DoctorOW wrote: post #48
nateb2022 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a fork of Electron. It is an Electron-based app, and as such the Electron project maintains the core functionality of the browser and Min just presents a unified interface and feature set.

They didn't say "fork of Electron", rather Electron is essentially "Chromium - browser UI" so they are saying there is a simplification to be made in an app that is "Chromium - browser UI + browser UI"

> They didn't say "fork of Electron"

Flagging that the phrase "this should be a fork of Chromium, not Electron" is ambiguous between "this shouldn't be a fork of Electron" and "this shouldn't be Electron".

Re: Min: A fast, minimal browser that protects your privacy

#60

Post by sodapopcan »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #41

I installed it (yes you can install this right away, the download button doesn't lead you to some signup form!) and played with it a bit. It's beautiful, but I feel that chrome has a better beauty/functionality tradeoff. Some differences vs chrome I noted: — no favicons — no addressbar — no skeuomorphic tabs All these things make it look more beautiful and elegant then chrome, but less functional.

I love this browser in theory, but these were my problems with it exactly and they all really hurt usability.

Favicons are ultra functional—when I'm looking for a tab most of the time I'm looking for the favicon, not the title. Otherwise, I'm moving my mouse to the rough area it I know that it is and having tabs that fill up as much of the width as possible kills this as I'm opening more and more tabs and they shrink exponentially.

And why no option to show the addressbar? I feel disoriented when I can't glance up and see where I am. The worst part is to see the addressbar, it hides the page, so you can never see the page and the addressbar together in context.

I was really excited about this browser but unfortunately those were all hard show-stoppers.

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