Show HN: Javelin Browser

Adblock and readability feature integration is great! As a developer, could I ask you how you are implementing the readability feature? Is this done client side?

That doesn't solve the original problem. It's just indirection from it... You still don't know what's going on in the background.

Awesome browser. But why use "gorgeous" as a descriptor? It's become such a meaningless term in tech, even when Jobs was still peddling it about.

It seems trivial, but seeing that word often is a red flag for an uninspired product. You guys have done great work, so I'm surprised your marketing isn't as great as the browser. Best of luck

Bug reports for the developer nubela:

Swipe from the left to open the menu, then scroll down, so that part of the text is cut off, then swipe to the left to close the menu part of the way, but drag your finger back right before the menu closes. If you now scroll, the cut-off text is still visible, creating weird visual artifacts. This goes away when you close the menu completely and reopen it.

When I edit the title and URL of a bookmark, the buttons are “Cancel” and “Edit”. I think “Save” would work better. I feel like what I am doing is already “editing”, since I chose “Edit” to get here.

I tried to set Javelin as the default browser, but when the browser list popped up, by reflex I hit Just Once instead of Always. But Javelin still said “Javelin is now your default browser”. (Then I realized what had happened and went back and did it again.) If possible, Javelin should detect when the user clicked the wrong button. If that is not possible, maybe you should show a small picture of the Always button before showing the dialog, to remind the user to hit that button.

In the page describing the Pro features, one of them is choosing your homepage. But I can already do that in the free version. It works when I go to Settings > Change homepage.

Javelin doesn’t support a blank homepage. I tried setting the homepage to nothing (“”) or to “about:blank”, but either way, the homepage just becomes “Webpage not available”. The error shows because Javelin is automatically adding an “http://” before “about:blank” – “about:” pages should have no protocol.

I tried to press and hold on the icons (the eye icon and share icon) in the toolbar to see a tooltip describing what they do. However, those icons don’t have tooltips. I would have liked to have been able to see a “Reading Mode” tooltip when I pressed and held on the eye icon instead of having to actually press it to find out. The icons in the toolbar for reading mode have the same problem.

When there are no tabs, I see a message “Javelin Browser, flies.” The message confused me a bit because it is ungrammatical. It should be either “Javelin Browser flies.” or “Javelin Browser – it flies.”

I couldn’t get Javelin Sync to work at all. I authorized it for my Google account and saw the message saying I have been sent an email. But my bookmarks are still the default Javelin ones (minus the ones I manually deleted); none of them are my Chrome for Android bookmarks. This is still the case even after I “Sync bookmarks now” – though since that command gives no feedback, I couldn’t tell whether it worked. (I didn’t install the desktop Chrome extension linked in the email because I don’t want that home page, but the email said my device was already synced, so that shouldn’t make a difference.) So either your Sync is broken or there is another step that you forgot to mention, like “wait one hour” or “restart your phone” or something.

In the menu on the left, the checkboxes look a little weird, because it is a blue checkmark on a turquoise background. I can see it, but I think they would look better if you made the check-marks very light gray, a color closer to the text but still distinct from it.

When I logged into a site, I got two dialog boxes asking me to save the password. The first was a generic Android one like in Google Chrome. I clicked Not Now, and then Javelin showed its colorful one at the bottom. You should hide the default one so that only the Javelin one shows.

I couldn’t figure out how to activate the “Fullscreen Browsing” that you show in one of your website’s screenshots. I tried scrolling through web pages, and I looked at all the settings, but I never had the Action Bar and the soft buttons displaying but transparent like in the screenshot. The soft buttons are always visible. I can hide the Action Bar completely with that setting, but then I can’t open it all from within the app, and that’s different from the screenshot anyway. It’s not described as a Pro feature on the Enable Javelin Pro page either. You should make it more obvious how to enable that mode, or remove the screenshot if that feature is now gone.

This is a big list of bugs, many tiny ones and some big ones, but I’m still trying out Javelin for now – you haven’t driven me back to Chrome yet. I am especially interested in your Adblock and full-screen features (so it’s too bad I can’t figure out how to use full-screen). I wish you luck with developing your browser.

Agreed. The only thing that will get me personally to switch browser at this stage is more security/privacy. But I'm not everyone - I have plenty of friends who are fine with spraying their lives all over the webs. Have forwarded your link.