9 ms·
Show HN: Min – web browser with better search and built-in ad blocking
- cha5m 11y agoSerious props to you for making a web browser. That is legitimately impressive. However I feel like most people won't be willing to sacrifice the feature support, stability and security that a larger browser can provide for a potentially better experience. If this was made by a single person you should really do a write up about the development process. I think many people would also be interested in that.
- lucideer 11y agoIt's built on Electron[0] which is built on Chromium, so it's very much building on the work of a larger browser and just adding a (seemingly) very different UI experience. [0] http://electron.atom.io/ http://electron.atom.io/
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- amelius 11y ago> ... built on ... built on ... Well, considering the dependencies, it is impressive that it still is lightweight :)
- PeCaN 11y agoIt's "lightweight" in terms of UI, not in terms of speed or (especially) file size. The user experience is not bloated and it stays out of your way, but it is very much not a small program. Electron-based anything is huge, on the order of ~100MB.
- xaduha 11y agoYou're trying to praise something, but it ends up as an insult of sorts, because you haven't made a slightest effort to figure out what's before you.
- cha5m 11y agoWell he commented that it was made with chromium, which I think probably sorts out the three issues that I mentioned. I would install it, but I am on my windows partition.
- idle_zealot 11y agoIt builds for Windows.
- mike-cardwell 11y ago"Tabs you haven’t looked at in a while dim, so you can focus on what you’re working on" - I like the sound of this. Is anyone aware of a Firefox addon which does the same?
- danielhellier 11y agoAnd on that note, anyone aware if a Chrome extension does this?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- dreen 11y agoThe Great Suspender, which actually suspends the processes of these tabs, very useful if you have lots of tabs https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...
- degenerate 11y agoYes it suspends the process, but doesn't visually indicate this by fading/sorting the tabs for you. At least, not the version I used a year ago. (edit: it does now!)
- noxToken 11y agoIt visually indicates it by replacing the site's favicon with the app's icon. If you see blocky face, your tab has been suspended.
- dreen 10y agoFor me it fades the favicon slightly http://i.imgur.com/y1xSEtF.png http://i.imgur.com/y1xSEtF.png To be fair the suspend feature is the killer here
- cha5m 11y ago
- gkya 11y agoFor a truly minimalistic browser with support for modern HTML and a serious orientation towards security, see xombrero at https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/xombrero https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/xombrero . It provides fine-grained whitelisting for plugins, js and cookies, and options for enabling/disabling many other security/privacy-critical features, like 3rd party cookies, referrers, etc. The same guys also have made AdSuck, which blocks ads at the DNS level. These tools do not have the eye-candy that Min has though. Kudos for the design, it's indeed lovely.
- ryan-c 11y agoXombrero seems to be unmaintained and has severe security problems. It's HTTPS implementation is vulnerable to MitM script injection. See my post here: https://rya.nc/https-script.html https://rya.nc/https-script.html
- dpfu 11y agoFor a truly truly minimal browser (albeit without support for modern HTML) check out the Dillo browser [1], in active development since 1999 [2]! If all you need is to render HTML, it's tiny and fast. It supports HTTPS and no JavaScript (so you don't need NoScript for that ;) [1] http://www.dillo.org http://www.dillo.org [2] http://hg.dillo.org/dillo/raw-file/default/ChangeLog http://hg.dillo.org/dillo/raw-file/default/ChangeLog
- vmorgulis 11y agoIMHO the truly one because of it's render engine (not webkit/gecko/blink-based).
- Sir_Cmpwn 11y agoI found uzbl after I told a friend about xombrero: http://www.uzbl.org/ http://www.uzbl.org/
- ymse 11y agoI really enjoyed "dwb" until the author abandoned it late 2014. Now they seem to have picked up development again(!): http://portix.bitbucket.org/dwb/ http://portix.bitbucket.org/dwb/ It's fully keyboard driven (to the extent possible) and has a decent amount of extensions, including ad blocking and a great requestpolicy manager for controlling 3rd party requests.
- yoavm 11y agoWhen I hover the "Download" button, a message saying "OS X 10.10 is required" appears, but when I click the button I get a .deb file. Did I miss OS X switching to Apt? EDIT: This seems to happen only with the bottom download button, and only on my desktop (Firefox, Arch Linux). On my phone the button says it's available for Ubuntu too. I guess it's just a bug with recognizing the user-agent string or something.
- FussyZeus 11y agoLooks like they fixed this. For the top button anyway.
- justinlardinois 11y agoThe bottom button still seems to have the problem.
- calgoo 11y agoA web browser in a web browser :) Is that like a Turing test for web browsers? Something like compiling your language in your own language.
- Retr0spectrum 11y agoWhere does it say it's a web browser in a web browser?
- Mahn 11y agoIt's built on chromium and atom, but written in JavaScript and CSS, so technically I guess you could say that it's a browser in a browser.
- wagglycocks 11y agoIt's apparently written in Javascript, which is all the rage these days.
- egeozcan 11y agoI'd like to have this, only with no tabs support but with access to extensions of chrome. That would be perfect.
- amelius 11y agoAm I the only one who thinks that "tabs" should really be handled by the window manager, rather than by the application?
- mikegerwitz 11y agoI don't think so: I have a number of programs that support tabs or multiple groups of windows in some form, including my editors (Emacs/Vim), browser (GNU IceCat), and terminal multiplexer (GNU screen). It can be argued that each of those are window managers in their own right, but what this does is provide distinct points of context that I can switch between and ignore. I also use a tiling window manager (Xmonad); it would not be realistic for my window manager to handle tabbing, as that would prevent me from tiling my browser. I also have dozens (sometimes hundreds) of tabs open in my browser, which I arrange hierarchically using the Tree Style Tab addon, which I find incredibly useful and essential to how I use and understand the Web (...and my train of thought as to how I got 10 levels deep into Wikipedia and various other sites while trying to research something completely unrelated...). I'm not saying that this rationale works for everyone; this is what works for me, and I like it.
- a3n 11y ago> I also use a tiling window manager (Xmonad); it would not be realistic for my window manager to handle tabbing, as that would prevent me from tiling my browser. But you could tile your browsers that have what would have been in your tabs. Except then you'd have a lot of heavyweight browser instances running. Too bad a browser instance isn't more like a tab, using common resources provided by a browser master process with no UI.
- amelius 11y ago> Except then you'd have a lot of heavyweight browser instances running. On any decent OS, browsers will all share their executable code in memory. So I'm not sure what exactly the problem is.
- 11y ago
- wcummings 11y agoI've been using eww (the emacs web browser) for reading docs, I highly recommend it. DDG is the default search engine. Plus you can display the docs right next to your code :)
- vblord 11y agoI will say it's awesome that someone has the time/ability to make a web browser... even if it doesn't support everything yet. I do have a general question for the programmers out there... just to see what people's stance is on the topic. If a programmer builds something and wants to make money off of it, one very common way is using ads. I was wondering if programmers are for or against a tool like this that integrates ad blocking. I have no bias either way, I was just curious.
- cha5m 11y agoI mean tons of programmers make things for free just because. There is tons of software out there made by people who will never earn a cent off it.
- RodericDay 11y agoI think advertising is immoral and predatory, so I'm very okay with ad-blocking.
- dev1n 11y agoWhat options are there for product discovery outside of advertising? Just asking in general as I find most ads predatory as well. I've never really had a good answer for this question.
- vblord 11y agoDo you know if cross promotion networks are blocked as well with ad-blockers?
- username223 11y agoIt's not easy, but you can try to build a personal/company reputation for making quality stuff. For one example, Jeff Vogel[1] has been making a living writing old-school RPGs for decades. He did so by finding an underserved market and treating his customers well. For another, Cold Cold World[2] makes packs that some climbers swear by, and recommend to others; they may do some advertising, but I've never seen it. You won't become a billionaire this way, but you can do just fine. [1] http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/ http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/ [2] http://www.coldcoldworldpacks.com http://www.coldcoldworldpacks.com
- aakilfernandes 11y agoDoes Min (along with Brave) do ad blocking at a different layer than plugins? Is there any advantage to having the browser do it instead of something like uBlock Origin in chrome?
- gorhill 11y agoIn Min, it's still javascript[1]. Also, by the look of it, the current implementation in Min is very inefficient: for every network request, all the filters will be evaluated to check for a match. Statistically, on average the majority of network requests are no match, and in the current implementation, no match means having iterated through all the filters, thus a significant overhead added to every single network request. Furthermore, the evaluation of wildcard-based filters is itself quite inefficient: every time a wildcard-based filter is evaluated, an array of substrings is created and discarded. [1] https://github.com/PalmerAL/min/blob/master/ext/abp-filter-parser-modified/abp-filter-parser.js https://github.com/PalmerAL/min/blob/master/ext/abp-filter-p...
- minbrowser 11y agoThanks for the suggestions! How does uBlock avoid checking every filter? It looks like it splits filters into buckets, and only checks one bucket of filters, but I'm not understanding how the filters are split up.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- skykooler 11y agoI notice that the way tabs are displayed is by drawing the top in some color from the page, and showing the active tab in a lighter shade of that color. The issue is, sometimes the color is white, so the active tab doesn't stand out - I wonder if it could switch to a darker color in that case?
- minbrowser 11y agoFiled https://github.com/PalmerAL/min/issues/20 https://github.com/PalmerAL/min/issues/20 about this.
- skykooler 11y agoThank you!
- moondowner 11y agoNice to see deb packages.
- lobster_johnson 11y agoHaven't looked at it yet, but a tip for the OP: After clicking the download link, the page displays a message describing how to get around the Mac security check. There's an easier way: Right-click on the Min app in Finder and select Open. This time the Mac security dialog will show an Open button, allowing you to override the security check. No need to go into System Preferences.
- CameronBanga 11y agoOr ideally support OS X code signing. :) OP, I'm guessing you're reading. If you need help with that, feel free to email (addy in profile). Sweet project, just wish it had proper signing.
- minbrowser 11y agoOK, thanks, I'll change that.
- phusion 11y agoRequires OSX or Ubuntu? Damn it, well, it looks interesting...
- quarterto 11y agoIt's using Electron, so there shouldn't be much of a barrier to a Windows version (or other Linux)
- yashafromrussia 11y agoI really like the direction this browser is going in. I noticed I cannot go back/next using a mouse or keyboard (though i can imagine one would be able to swipe to do that).
- noobie 11y agoEh, On Ubuntu 15.10 backspace doesn't work and there are no buttons to navigate, no way to close a tab as well. Am I missing something? Edit: Ctrl + W closes the current tab.
- rrggrr 11y agoI really like this a lot. Let me open tabs in the background.
- tedmiston 11y agoThis is really cool. A couple years ago, when some browsers still had tabbed windows as an option that could be disabled, I tried browsing with only one tab at a time and found it quite refreshing. Does anyone know of a browser today with a similar "feature"?
- minbrowser 11y agoMin has this feature, actually. Go to the view menu, and there is an option labeled "focus mode" that limits you to one tab.
- emmet 11y agoAm I the only one having real trouble with navigation? I can't figure out how to go back, and closing a tab is cmd-w which requires me to be in that tab? Odd setup.