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Launch HN: SigmaOS (YC S21) – A MacOS web browser designed for faster work

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Re: Launch HN: SigmaOS (YC S21) – A MacOS web browser designed for faster work

#151

Post by have_faith »

This is a very hard sell. As a potential user I'm being asked to abandon my free browser that I trust and exchange it for something that costs money where I would lose access if I stopped paying. I think conceptually what you're building has a niche worth pursuing (productivity focused, project based navigation of the web) but it's going to take a lot of thought to make that more compelling than installing free extensions on an existing browser.

On reflection if the core functionality (organising projects/bookmarks as a key part of the browser experience) was made into a paid browser extension I'd be more likely to consider using it.

Re: Launch HN: SigmaOS (YC S21) – A MacOS web browser designed for faster work

#152

Post by nullspace »

sauravmitra wrote: post #144
nullspace wrote: post #139

The negativity in this thread is extremely distasteful. :/ Just want to say, I think what can differentiate this from other browsers + extensions will come down to how well-integrated all of it is. Tab fatigue for work browsers is real and if this helps solve that, then it's worth it. From what I see on your landing page, the UX / workflow looks extremely attractive. Couple of things, a) I do think the $15 per month…

Thanks! We're still workshopping the pricing model, but do give the free trial a go and let us know what you think! There's the standard web inspector at the moment. What would you like to see for dev tools?

Heh! I don't have Big Sur on my work laptop yet :)

So, I'll give it a shot as soon as I can upgrade. The standard chrome dev should be good enough, if that's what it is.

Re: Launch HN: SigmaOS (YC S21) – A MacOS web browser designed for faster work

#153

Post by xrisk »

gruez wrote: post #143
xrisk wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably more like $5000. Have you considered how insanely complicated browsers are? It’s a miracle they’re free.

Well the reality is that there are two browser engines that are free and open source. If they built their own that was better than the incumbents (eg. from performance/privacy point of view), then I might consider it. But I'm not paying $5000 for a chrome reskin, just like I won't pay $5000 for a debian reskin.

I’m saying it’s a miracle that Chrome/FF is free.

Re: Launch HN: SigmaOS (YC S21) – A MacOS web browser designed for faster work

#154

Post by sauravmitra »

nullspace wrote: post #152
sauravmitra wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! We're still workshopping the pricing model, but do give the free trial a go and let us know what you think! There's the standard web inspector at the moment. What would you like to see for dev tools?

Heh! I don't have Big Sur on my work laptop yet :) So, I'll give it a shot as soon as I can upgrade. The standard chrome dev should be good enough, if that's what it is.

Ah, shame! Hope you update soon :)

It's standard Safari dev as SigmaOS is based on WebKit.

Re: Launch HN: SigmaOS (YC S21) – A MacOS web browser designed for faster work

#155

Post by sauravmitra »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #150
sauravmitra wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, sorry about that! Hopefully you give it a try when you update eventually :)

I will. Thank you for doing a great job anyway. I don't actually feel angry or demand anything from you, although I might sound this way. I just expressed my thoughts which many people obviously share. May I, however, ask if there is a serious reason to require Big Sur instead of supporting Catalina, Mojave and High Sierra also? I understand you probably don't want to waste resources on actually supporting them but p…

We're using SwiftUI and WebKit features that were added quite recently (MacOS doesn't get nearly as much love from Apple as iOS). This keeps our product iteration cycle quite high, and the worry is having to implement cumbersome solutions if supporting previous OSs.

I'll have to look into it again to see if I can go back just a bit maybe and assess how much time it would take to support those versions.

We're a pretty small team :)

Re: Launch HN: SigmaOS (YC S21) – A MacOS web browser designed for faster work

#156

Post by throwaway1777 »

codetrotter wrote: post #128
smoldesu wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they shouldn't charge $15/month for a product that's incomplete. The only reason I'm not the target audience here is because I won't use a subscription-based browser, much less one that has fewer features than my current browser. I respect people who build software, but you have to get pricing right if you want people to care. > I wonder what it is about hacker news that brings out this incessant negativity in…

> Maybe they shouldn't charge $15/month for a product that's incomplete How do you expect them to ever finish the browser if they don't have any income from working on it?

Let me tell you about a thing called Ycombinator. They help you raise this thing called venture capital for exactly this purpose…

Re: Launch HN: SigmaOS (YC S21) – A MacOS web browser designed for faster work

#157

Post by asimpletune »

codetrotter wrote: post #128
smoldesu wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they shouldn't charge $15/month for a product that's incomplete. The only reason I'm not the target audience here is because I won't use a subscription-based browser, much less one that has fewer features than my current browser. I respect people who build software, but you have to get pricing right if you want people to care. > I wonder what it is about hacker news that brings out this incessant negativity in…

> Maybe they shouldn't charge $15/month for a product that's incomplete How do you expect them to ever finish the browser if they don't have any income from working on it?

That’s what investors are for, ostensibly, no?

Another way to phrase this is how can you expect people to buy something at a price below it’s value?

Actually, haha, I just realized there’s an answer. Because they’ll expense it at work.

Re: Launch HN: SigmaOS (YC S21) – A MacOS web browser designed for faster work

#158

Post by entropie »

smoldesu wrote: post #108
mynameisvlad wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apart from the snooze and done features, tell me one thing that this browser achieves that isn't already available through free, open-source, trustworthy extensions whose code I can see and audit. Is there a Spotlight/Alfred extension for Chrome/ium/Firefox? I haven't seen that UX in a browser yet.

Yes. Vivaldi has one that can be invoked with F2, by default.

I was curious. F2 does nothing for me.

Re: Launch HN: SigmaOS (YC S21) – A MacOS web browser designed for faster work

#159

Post by sauravmitra »

Matthias1 wrote: post #135

Since a couple of comments have made the comparison to Vivaldi, I thought I'd chime in, having used Vivaldi as my primary browser for 3-4 years now. Vivaldi's extreme customizability and rich feature sets makes it possible to mimic the functionality described here. (I love organizing tabs vertically on the left, something only Vivaldi was doing.) In another comment, the original poster mentioned that the keyboard sho…

Thanks for the extensive feedback! Really appreciate it.

We'll have to check out how we're marketing it. It's interesting. I'm a developer who'd call himself a power-user (my .vimrc is fly as fuck), but I'd much rather a product that streamlines the experience as long as it does it well. Which is what we want users to give us feedback on :D

Yes, you can actually have todos for arbitrary text content and you can add your current page to the context of the todo. That way, you know where you were when you created the todo in the first place, which can be quite useful.

Re: Launch HN: SigmaOS (YC S21) – A MacOS web browser designed for faster work

#160

Post by ftio »

Having watched the demo video, I think this looks interesting. A lot of the (overly nasty) comments here are talking about the pricing for this from a consumer/individual perspective. Frankly, they're right: I think that, for individuals, the benefit over using a vanilla browser is pretty limited.

What piqued my interest in the demo are the 'multiplayer' features like super-fast sharing. Today, Sigma seems mildly simpler/faster at that than vanilla browsers, but I think there is a lot of room for growth and innovation here: browsers are mostly 'single player', but work is not.

OP, if I were you, I'd be leaning heavily into the more collaborative/social features of this thing and pivoting your GTM efforts toward companies rather than targeting individuals. I think there's merit to some of the comments here that $15/mo for an individual user is expensive. My advice: make it free or insanely cheap for individuals, but limit the collaborative features to paid business users.

You're a Slack replacement, not a browser replacement.

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