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Launch HN: Muddy (YC S19) – Multiplayer browser for getting work done

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Launch HN: Muddy (YC S19) – Multiplayer browser for getting work done

#51

Post by lele0108 »

Harmohit wrote: post #41
lele0108 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right. We came in letting hosts open experience stores in Airbnbs (try on an Oculus at a hosts home). Difficult to attribute our sales so we moved on. COVID hit and we had the itch to look at the browser in a different light. Building a browser seemed intimidating...but it was quarantine. Long story short, built a few different ideas and here we are :)

Building a browser does seem intimidating! What technical considerations made you finally take it seriously? Any advice for folks trying to do the same or taking on another intimidating project?

Started just by building Chromium and Brave and poking around in there and making small changes.

Chromium is huge but has terrific documentation (once you find the current copy) and Google hosted code search. Digging through crbug.com often helped point us in the right direction.

2 unlocks that made us confident to pursue this project:

1) Repeatable way of patching Chromium and keeping up with upstream changes 2) Writing UI in web technology instead of C++ Views toolkit.

Re: Launch HN: Muddy (YC S19) – Multiplayer browser for getting work done

#53

Post by ekhar01 »

This is so cool. Much respect. I am curious what tech stack you are writing this with? Is it electron or maybe lower level?

It might also be cool if it could automatically import sheets or google docs if I were to drag a csv or .txt file in and just magically open the project up. I hate having to upload via google drive

Re: Launch HN: Muddy (YC S19) – Multiplayer browser for getting work done

#54

Post by joloooo »

This is awesome. What are your thoughts on Office365 tools and Muddy? We don't use Google docs and would love to have a similar experience. That said, I could probably manage certain teams to move away from our MSFT reliance with this flow.

Really excited to try this out and follow along.

Re: Launch HN: Muddy (YC S19) – Multiplayer browser for getting work done

#55

Post by csmeyer »

Curious to give this a try, how would you compare it to Arc? I used Arc for a while but eventually just ditched it for going back to chrome

(Also, landing page nit, but the kerning on the H1 is pretty wide, and the kerning in the wordmark is a bit tight IMO.)

Re: Launch HN: Muddy (YC S19) – Multiplayer browser for getting work done

#56

Post by csmeyer »

csmeyer wrote: post #55

Curious to give this a try, how would you compare it to Arc? I used Arc for a while but eventually just ditched it for going back to chrome (Also, landing page nit, but the kerning on the H1 is pretty wide, and the kerning in the wordmark is a bit tight IMO.)

OK, I tried it out. First thing I did was type a website into the big bar at the top and got an upsell modal for an AI thing... I get the need to make money but this was not a good first experience for me

Re: Launch HN: Muddy (YC S19) – Multiplayer browser for getting work done

#57

Post by lele0108 »

ekhar01 wrote: post #53

This is so cool. Much respect. I am curious what tech stack you are writing this with? Is it electron or maybe lower level? It might also be cool if it could automatically import sheets or google docs if I were to drag a csv or .txt file in and just magically open the project up. I hate having to upload via google drive

Electron isn't meant for building a browser and has perf / other limitations. We went with a full Chromium backing with some patches to allow us to write our UI in web tech.

Looking to explore such automations in the near future -- important to us that it feels great to create new files in Muddy (and have Muddy do any of the busywork we are used to)

Re: Launch HN: Muddy (YC S19) – Multiplayer browser for getting work done

#58

Post by lele0108 »

csmeyer wrote: post #56
csmeyer wrote: post #55

Curious to give this a try, how would you compare it to Arc? I used Arc for a while but eventually just ditched it for going back to chrome (Also, landing page nit, but the kerning on the H1 is pretty wide, and the kerning in the wordmark is a bit tight IMO.)

OK, I tried it out. First thing I did was type a website into the big bar at the top and got an upsell modal for an AI thing... I get the need to make money but this was not a good first experience for me

Sorry! This is a bad ranking of our search bar and "Ask Muddy" should not always be the first suggestion. Fixing this in our next update.

If you hit any of the other results, it will open the site for you

Compared to Arc -- Muddy is focused on making getting things done together better rather than infinite customization. It's a different set of tradeoffs but with a similar rethinking of the browsing experience.

Re: Launch HN: Muddy (YC S19) – Multiplayer browser for getting work done

#59

Post by mike_hearn »

lele0108 wrote: post #30
nikunjk wrote: post #21

Congrats on the launch - seems like a neat product. A few questions: 1) It seems like you iterated on a bunch of ideas that landed in this - what were some interesting features that the team was really interested in that you ended up killing? 2) What were the most non-intuitive hard technical challenges? 3) Have you successfully ended up having someone give up on Slack to use this?

1. Spatial canvas based browser (we called it Sail). Had people who loved it but their team refused to learn it. Spatial tools are just incredibly niche and difficult to get started (besides Google Maps). 2. Auto updating across Mac and Windows (in 2024!!). Google Omaha is hard to setup, Sparkle is jank on Windows. Throw in binary delta support and it's an oof. 3. Our team builds Muddy on Muddy and ditched Slack when…

Yeah auto update on Windows is a mess. One way to get it is to use MSIX, in which case Windows will delta update your app for you, even when it's not running (Chrome style) but without the need for special servers. Unfortunately old Windows versions have a lot of bugs. My company sells a product that makes all that easy to deal with and works around the bugs but it was a hard slog to get it all working well.

Sparkle on Mac is great though.

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