One of the best interactive designs of the future I keep wishing were fleshed out is Eagle Mode.
Lessons from building multiplayer browsers
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Re: Lessons from building multiplayer browsers
#12I would be curious what you think of the idea of Sail and Muddy being... small. Technically complex, but small in the mind of the user. Not lacking in features (you talked about that), but 'feeling small/bounded, and therefore with small divergence' to the user. Does that... fit at all with your mental model of them? I ask because I feel like Linear, Vercel, Figma, Notion, hell even Airtable... landed 'big' (felt lik…
Yeah I think that framing fits. The technical complexity in Sail and Muddy was real, but hidden in a way that didn’t translate into perceived user value. We had some theories for how it could land big, but none strongly resonated. It wasn’t just “put websites in another app.” We were hoping multiplayer would do something similar to what Notion and Airtable did. In my mind, those products “land big” because they feel…
Not sure if this fits, but I think that the browser as a portal to the web of all information invites you into a space of so many possibilities, so many user interfaces and experiences that any change to the portal itself in that context exists alongside the sea of other (to the person at least) similar variants, and must necessarily feel small. Also because the browser has perhaps succeeded as a category because it was the thing that got out of the way for all of that content, and so you weren’t just competing with browsers for user mindshare and differentiation, you are competing with the entire Internet. Because peoples’ experience of the browser is not really of the browser as a product. It is what it accesses to. And there may be reasons outside of lack of imagination that all major browsers have converged on essentially the same pattern. Just an idea
Re: Lessons from building multiplayer browsers
#13i'd use a 2D canvas browser. not sure why anyone would need live multiplayer for their browser, just let them save canvas state to file and share it. that's how it works with Blancs. https://blancs.io
Re: Lessons from building multiplayer browsers
#14I finally wrote something about my time at sail/muddy, the last startup I was at, where we were trying to build a multiplayer browser, and a few lessons that stayed with me. I mostly just hope it’s interesting to people thinking about new ambitious interfaces right now. with AI.
Very interesting stuff. Are any builds of Sail still available for use?
Re: Lessons from building multiplayer browsers
#15This post is a gem. I wanted to build something like this for 10 years but shied away until last year because your journey seemed exactly what would happen going down that road in a world not ready yet.
I started with regular valve inspired "playtesting" with users on prototypes which showed:
- Power users love canvas and multiplayer but only need it in distinct product or company phases which last a few weeks or months max, outside these phases they need that maybe once every one or two weeks which is not enough to stick to a new browser - outside of the usage, they feel burdened by mental overhead of collaboration or canvas features and much prefer simplicity - the world does not need another closed source browser, VC is fundamentally incompatible with what is needed, so any step after joining yc was doomed from the start
Re: Lessons from building multiplayer browsers
#16[deleted]
Re: Lessons from building multiplayer browsers
#17One of the best interactive designs of the future I keep wishing were fleshed out is Eagle Mode . : https://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/
Hey, it's a lot like the one from Jurassic Park!
Re: Lessons from building multiplayer browsers
#18I wonder what yc co hyperbeam has to say about this? Are they still in that space?
Re: Lessons from building multiplayer browsers
#19quite interesting! I had approached this via a completely different direction back during lockdown as well (haha on the top comment), and it was an extremely similar experience to what they described. It's a really fun side project but won't have many use-cases then the occasional amusement (which I personally really like, but learnt that things like that don't sell easily)
Re: Lessons from building multiplayer browsers
#20I also built a canvas-based, multiplayer product during the pandemic (ohyay). The product was social-event focused (classes, festivals, etc.) so we focused on multiplayer audio-video experiences rather than general purpose browsing. One of my favorite memories was when someone used our collaborative YouTube playback to set up a karaoke room. WebRTC added a little latency, but it was close enough to work.
Are we doppelgängers? :)
I built a multiplayer system in 2020 that let you explore a 2D map with a little avatar, and “go into” experiences you’d find on the map where there’d be a video chat with whoever happened to be on that page at the time. Kind of like an “overworld and dungeon” model except nothing to install. It was amazingly serendipitous.
The platform hosted 2020’s online Burning Man & we did lots more - corporate events, parties..
It was a time of amazing experimentation & creativity. Humans do amazing creative things under constraints.
Would love to learn more about what you built!