7 ms·

Ghost Browser

37 points by nichodges 10y ago

gggggggg 10y ago
Google cache view http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://ghostbrowser.com/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://... edit: Not sure why this got a down vote. Site is offline. Cache view will help.
Nullabillity 10y ago
But... can't Chrome can already do this?
- blntechie 10y ago
  I guess no? You can open one normal window and another incognito window with their own session stores. I can see how this browser can be useful in few scenarios and jobs but pretty much niche for most.
  - Nullabillity 10y ago
    You can also create an arbitrary number of "User" windows, that also have their own session stores.
    - creshal 10y ago
      Much more cumbersome, however.
  - bambax 10y ago
    I set up a merchant account on Amazon, distinct from my main user Amazon account, and it's a big big pain to have to switch between the two (or sometimes not remembering under which account I'm logged in and spending time understanding why something doesn't work).
- progval 10y ago
  In different windows, not colored tabs of the same window.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Some of the functionality, through multiple user profiles. I've used that for sites which don't otherwise offer multiuser functionality, but there's a bit too much independence between Chrome profiles -- I'd rather not have to individually install (and configure/customise) my usual Chrome extensions for each of my many multiple personalities. OTOH, this makes profiles an easy way to check to see if any of your extensions is causing site breakage.
batiudrami 10y ago
This seems like quite a niche feature to build and market a browser around.
mrmondo 10y ago
The sites dead but I hope this isn't just another javascript application based on another browser. Edit: got to it via google cache, looks like it's just based on chromium, didn't check to see if it had more JavaScript in it though as it didn't do anything to interest me. I'd love to see a completely newly written browser in Go, C or Swift that is written from the ground up with security and privacy as it's key concern followed by speed. It'd need to be quite modular by design so that security components could easily be upgraded over time and so that new web technologies could be added as they appear. Multi-process, addon (if any) sand boxing and local to-a-directory synchronisation would be wonderful.
- Thainbbdl 10y ago
  Like servo ? https://servo.org/ https://servo.org/
  - mrmondo 10y ago
    sorry for delayed reply - yes, just like servo aims to be, obviously at present servo is _very_ _very_ alpha and doesn't really work for most things, but I think the foundation is sensible.
- hrjet 10y ago
  We are building one in Java https://github.com/UprootLabs/gngr https://github.com/UprootLabs/gngr
sankha93 10y ago
Firefox Nightly has Container Tabs [1] which have different sessions even though they are a part of the same widow. Also the tabs are colour coded to show that they are different containers. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/tanvi/2016/06/16/contextual-identities-on-the-web/ https://blog.mozilla.org/tanvi/2016/06/16/contextual-identit...
- mrweasel 10y ago
  Isn't Firefox limited to three predefined groups? Work, Personal and Banking?
  - Sylos 10y ago
    It's four groups, the fourth one is Shopping. The feature isn't done yet, though, so a way to add your own groups could still come.
- jahnu 10y ago
  Would it be possible to create a container for every site I start at in a fresh tab. E.g. I open a tab, go to example.com and that stores all cookies and cached images and so on from that point on in a container that get's opened every time I start at example.com. So you have one container for every start point.
  - Sylos 10y ago
    Possible in principle? Sure. Possible with the current state of the implementation? Definitely no. It's currently not even possible to create your own containers, and instead there's 4 pre-defined ones. But the Tor Browser has something which comes kind of close to / goes beyond what you what you want. Basically, what they do, is that they have a separate container per domain. So, if you are on www.example.com, and the Facebook-Like-Button on that page sets its Tracking Cookie, then this Tracking Cookie is tied to both facebook.com and example.com. So, if you then browse to www.yetanotherexample.org, then the Facebook-Like-button on www.yetanotherexample.org won't be able to see that Tracking Cookie, because the Cookie is only in the example.com-container. I figure that this doesn't solve what you want solved, but it shows that it's definitely possible from a technical viewpoint, and then having a small script which instead creates a container in the way that you described, that should be trivial and easily doable from an extension. More information to Tor Browser's implementation can be found here: https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#identifier-linkability https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#ident...
tener 10y ago
Nicely done but claims like this: > Increase productivity 200% or more are dodgy. Where did they get this number from?
- dingo_bat 10y ago
  LOL. I guess they are saying number of windows reduced by 50% or more :D
- yiyus 10y ago
  That is exactly where I stopped reading. I cannot take it seriously.
- jomamaxx 10y ago
  They obviously got the number from nowhere. Their marketing seems to be targeted towards informercial/low information people. Not the HN crowd who demand 'authenticity' ... 'authenticity' in quotes :)
  - sleepychu 10y ago
    Pesky accuracy!
dredmorbius 10y ago
June 3, 2016 archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20160603220849/http://ghostbrowser.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160603220849/http://ghostbrows...
red_admiral 10y ago
A chromium derivative whose key selling point is that it makes something a bit easier which the base version can already do, but you need to sign up for one of their "limited beta invites"? Hmm ... totally doesn't sound like snake oil.
- apatters 10y ago
  How do you do this with Chrome? At least the impression I got from the cached copy of the site is that you can basically have multiple windows which each have a different... something that is similar to a profile in Chrome. That sounds handy. Chrome really ought to support it imo.
  - red_admiral 10y ago
    On the settings tab there's a "people" section where you can add different people (profiles), each one gets its own cookie jar and extensions. You can give each one a separate icon and browser theme and on windows, you can create desktop/start icons that link to specific profiles (or use the --profile-directory command line switch). My set-up is a main profile for regular browsing with uBlock on and ALL social trackers removed and a separate facebook profile with very permissive adblocking (you can force ads to show if you like, but you can't see the rest of the pages I visit). Different profile tabs cannot live in the same window, but on the plus side you can set a different theme for each window so you don't accidentally try and open facebook in the wrong one. Also once you have two profiles set up, you can right-click a link in any browser window and there'll be an "open as" option to open it with a different profile which is very convenient.
marknadal 10y ago
RE: "Error establishing a database connection", oh jolly - I did a whole talk on this. http://video.webcamp.si/wc2016_nadal_the_frontend_backend_without_devops/ http://video.webcamp.si/wc2016_nadal_the_frontend_backend_wi... RE: Ghost. The landing page looks gorgeous, great job! Not being able to download the browser is kind of silly - especially when it is an app (not a service) that is built ontop of Chromium.
danso 10y ago
Just out of curiousity: how many people here use Google Chrome's multiple-user feature? Non-techie people generally don't know about it, but I'm surprised I don't see it being used by the (few) webdevs I know personally. I have a Chrome user account attached to my main Gmail account. I've created another Chrome user account that's tied to my school email, so that I can keep school-related things isolated to that account. But I can operate both Chrome account simulataneously without issue or conflict; I just set the theme of my school-focused browser to match the school colors. It takes very little effort and so I wonder what's the point of using a separate niche browser? The multiple Chrome user system is especially useful for web development. I'm not a fan of having 20 webdevs plugins (such as React's special debugger) running on everything that I visit. So I make a new Chrome user just for dev plugins, with the devtools configured exactly as I need them. Sometimes when I'm debugging a live site, I need a stock browser experience (I.e. No Adblock)...so that gets its own Chrome user. You don't have to set up a new Google account to create a Chrome user; that's only necessary if you want your plugins/settings to be stored in the cloud. Otherwise it's literally a 3-click process to create new users and switch between them.
- moontear 10y ago
  Pretty much the same process plus a profile for my wife ;-) Chrome makes it really easy to switch users. For IE development I have to use a workaround with Sysinternals "runas" and multiple Windows user profiles - at least the same workaround works with other programs as well e.g. Outlook.
- adpirz 10y ago
  This is exactly my setup for my work / personal. We run Google Apps, so I have my Google work email and a different theme then my personal account. Makes it easy to distinguish. I also recently discovered that you can edit the name under the people toolbar, so you can even label it as "personal" and "work". Good tip on the creating local users though, will definitely do that for webdev!
- Sylos 10y ago
  I occasionally use Firefox's equivalent feature for creating a stock browser to troubleshoot things, but I'm not a webdev, so that's usually rather to troubleshoot whether my array of tracking protection, cookie blocker etc. addons is causing the webpage to irreparably break, or if it's just the webpage that is broken (or both). For general use, I just don't have separate enough use-cases to weigh up against the organizational overhead. Most of my entertainment-stuff happens in RSS Readers anyways and the rest is pretty much just programming-related, so can all stay together in one browser profile...
wiredfool 10y ago
Is there a way, using something like the virtualization api on OS X, to have a fully separate browser with no write access to the file system? Looking for something like incognito mode, but with stronger sandboxing, but without some of the flash api restrictions that it has.
- jomamaxx 10y ago
  Chrome in incogneto mode generally does not write to disk. It's in memory only cache as far as Im aware. And of course, apps in the browser definintely cannot access the disk.
andreineculau 10y ago
In 2016, a browser that needs not only an account registration, but a registration disguised as a "beta invite" (i.e. will send you download links to your email) is nothing but a bad joke and a waste of time.
robin_reala 10y ago
Ghost Browser is built on Chromium so it already works like your favorite browser I wonder how they got a Firefox compatibility mode into Chromium?
sleepychu 10y ago
Is this a different browser (fork?) or is it a chrome extension?
joebergeron 10y ago
>> "Stop wrestling with multiple browsers." Is this a problem many people actually have? Genuinely curious, don't mean to belittle their efforts. Although, do we need a brand new browser? How does it compare in terms of performance?
bobajeff 10y ago
With the name I thought this was going to be a browser focused on privacy and removing digital fingerprints. What a disappointing waste of good name and trademark.
rvern 10y ago
You can get the same functionality in Firefox by setting privacy.userContext.enabled to true in about:config. Enjoy. (More information: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Contextual_Identity_Project/Containers. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Contextual_Identity_Projec...)

37 points by nichodges 10y ago

Google cache view http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://ghostbrowser.com/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://... edit: Not sure why this got a down vote. Site is offline. Cache view will help.

Nullabillity 10y ago

But... can't Chrome can already do this?

blntechie 10y ago
I guess no? You can open one normal window and another incognito window with their own session stores. I can see how this browser can be useful in few scenarios and jobs but pretty much niche for most.
- Nullabillity 10y ago
  You can also create an arbitrary number of "User" windows, that also have their own session stores.
  - creshal 10y ago
    Much more cumbersome, however.
- bambax 10y ago
  I set up a merchant account on Amazon, distinct from my main user Amazon account, and it's a big big pain to have to switch between the two (or sometimes not remembering under which account I'm logged in and spending time understanding why something doesn't work).
progval 10y ago
In different windows, not colored tabs of the same window.
dredmorbius 10y ago
Some of the functionality, through multiple user profiles. I've used that for sites which don't otherwise offer multiuser functionality, but there's a bit too much independence between Chrome profiles -- I'd rather not have to individually install (and configure/customise) my usual Chrome extensions for each of my many multiple personalities. OTOH, this makes profiles an easy way to check to see if any of your extensions is causing site breakage.

batiudrami 10y ago

This seems like quite a niche feature to build and market a browser around.

mrmondo 10y ago

The sites dead but I hope this isn't just another javascript application based on another browser. Edit: got to it via google cache, looks like it's just based on chromium, didn't check to see if it had more JavaScript in it though as it didn't do anything to interest me. I'd love to see a completely newly written browser in Go, C or Swift that is written from the ground up with security and privacy as it's key concern followed by speed. It'd need to be quite modular by design so that security components could easily be upgraded over time and so that new web technologies could be added as they appear. Multi-process, addon (if any) sand boxing and local to-a-directory synchronisation would be wonderful.

Thainbbdl 10y ago
Like servo ? https://servo.org/ https://servo.org/
- mrmondo 10y ago
  sorry for delayed reply - yes, just like servo aims to be, obviously at present servo is _very_ _very_ alpha and doesn't really work for most things, but I think the foundation is sensible.
hrjet 10y ago
We are building one in Java https://github.com/UprootLabs/gngr https://github.com/UprootLabs/gngr

sankha93 10y ago

Firefox Nightly has Container Tabs [1] which have different sessions even though they are a part of the same widow. Also the tabs are colour coded to show that they are different containers. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/tanvi/2016/06/16/contextual-identities-on-the-web/ https://blog.mozilla.org/tanvi/2016/06/16/contextual-identit...

mrweasel 10y ago
Isn't Firefox limited to three predefined groups? Work, Personal and Banking?
- Sylos 10y ago
  It's four groups, the fourth one is Shopping. The feature isn't done yet, though, so a way to add your own groups could still come.
jahnu 10y ago
Would it be possible to create a container for every site I start at in a fresh tab. E.g. I open a tab, go to example.com and that stores all cookies and cached images and so on from that point on in a container that get's opened every time I start at example.com. So you have one container for every start point.
- Sylos 10y ago
  Possible in principle? Sure. Possible with the current state of the implementation? Definitely no. It's currently not even possible to create your own containers, and instead there's 4 pre-defined ones. But the Tor Browser has something which comes kind of close to / goes beyond what you what you want. Basically, what they do, is that they have a separate container per domain. So, if you are on www.example.com, and the Facebook-Like-Button on that page sets its Tracking Cookie, then this Tracking Cookie is tied to both facebook.com and example.com. So, if you then browse to www.yetanotherexample.org, then the Facebook-Like-button on www.yetanotherexample.org won't be able to see that Tracking Cookie, because the Cookie is only in the example.com-container. I figure that this doesn't solve what you want solved, but it shows that it's definitely possible from a technical viewpoint, and then having a small script which instead creates a container in the way that you described, that should be trivial and easily doable from an extension. More information to Tor Browser's implementation can be found here: https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#identifier-linkability https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#ident...

tener 10y ago

Nicely done but claims like this: > Increase productivity 200% or more are dodgy. Where did they get this number from?

dingo_bat 10y ago
LOL. I guess they are saying number of windows reduced by 50% or more :D
yiyus 10y ago
That is exactly where I stopped reading. I cannot take it seriously.
jomamaxx 10y ago
They obviously got the number from nowhere. Their marketing seems to be targeted towards informercial/low information people. Not the HN crowd who demand 'authenticity' ... 'authenticity' in quotes :)
- sleepychu 10y ago
  Pesky accuracy!

dredmorbius 10y ago

June 3, 2016 archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20160603220849/http://ghostbrowser.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160603220849/http://ghostbrows...

red_admiral 10y ago

A chromium derivative whose key selling point is that it makes something a bit easier which the base version can already do, but you need to sign up for one of their "limited beta invites"? Hmm ... totally doesn't sound like snake oil.

apatters 10y ago
How do you do this with Chrome? At least the impression I got from the cached copy of the site is that you can basically have multiple windows which each have a different... something that is similar to a profile in Chrome. That sounds handy. Chrome really ought to support it imo.
- red_admiral 10y ago
  On the settings tab there's a "people" section where you can add different people (profiles), each one gets its own cookie jar and extensions. You can give each one a separate icon and browser theme and on windows, you can create desktop/start icons that link to specific profiles (or use the --profile-directory command line switch). My set-up is a main profile for regular browsing with uBlock on and ALL social trackers removed and a separate facebook profile with very permissive adblocking (you can force ads to show if you like, but you can't see the rest of the pages I visit). Different profile tabs cannot live in the same window, but on the plus side you can set a different theme for each window so you don't accidentally try and open facebook in the wrong one. Also once you have two profiles set up, you can right-click a link in any browser window and there'll be an "open as" option to open it with a different profile which is very convenient.

marknadal 10y ago

RE: "Error establishing a database connection", oh jolly - I did a whole talk on this. http://video.webcamp.si/wc2016_nadal_the_frontend_backend_without_devops/ http://video.webcamp.si/wc2016_nadal_the_frontend_backend_wi... RE: Ghost. The landing page looks gorgeous, great job! Not being able to download the browser is kind of silly - especially when it is an app (not a service) that is built ontop of Chromium.

danso 10y ago

Just out of curiousity: how many people here use Google Chrome's multiple-user feature? Non-techie people generally don't know about it, but I'm surprised I don't see it being used by the (few) webdevs I know personally. I have a Chrome user account attached to my main Gmail account. I've created another Chrome user account that's tied to my school email, so that I can keep school-related things isolated to that account. But I can operate both Chrome account simulataneously without issue or conflict; I just set the theme of my school-focused browser to match the school colors. It takes very little effort and so I wonder what's the point of using a separate niche browser? The multiple Chrome user system is especially useful for web development. I'm not a fan of having 20 webdevs plugins (such as React's special debugger) running on everything that I visit. So I make a new Chrome user just for dev plugins, with the devtools configured exactly as I need them. Sometimes when I'm debugging a live site, I need a stock browser experience (I.e. No Adblock)...so that gets its own Chrome user. You don't have to set up a new Google account to create a Chrome user; that's only necessary if you want your plugins/settings to be stored in the cloud. Otherwise it's literally a 3-click process to create new users and switch between them.

moontear 10y ago
Pretty much the same process plus a profile for my wife ;-) Chrome makes it really easy to switch users. For IE development I have to use a workaround with Sysinternals "runas" and multiple Windows user profiles - at least the same workaround works with other programs as well e.g. Outlook.
adpirz 10y ago
This is exactly my setup for my work / personal. We run Google Apps, so I have my Google work email and a different theme then my personal account. Makes it easy to distinguish. I also recently discovered that you can edit the name under the people toolbar, so you can even label it as "personal" and "work". Good tip on the creating local users though, will definitely do that for webdev!
Sylos 10y ago
I occasionally use Firefox's equivalent feature for creating a stock browser to troubleshoot things, but I'm not a webdev, so that's usually rather to troubleshoot whether my array of tracking protection, cookie blocker etc. addons is causing the webpage to irreparably break, or if it's just the webpage that is broken (or both). For general use, I just don't have separate enough use-cases to weigh up against the organizational overhead. Most of my entertainment-stuff happens in RSS Readers anyways and the rest is pretty much just programming-related, so can all stay together in one browser profile...

wiredfool 10y ago

Is there a way, using something like the virtualization api on OS X, to have a fully separate browser with no write access to the file system? Looking for something like incognito mode, but with stronger sandboxing, but without some of the flash api restrictions that it has.

jomamaxx 10y ago
Chrome in incogneto mode generally does not write to disk. It's in memory only cache as far as Im aware. And of course, apps in the browser definintely cannot access the disk.

andreineculau 10y ago

In 2016, a browser that needs not only an account registration, but a registration disguised as a "beta invite" (i.e. will send you download links to your email) is nothing but a bad joke and a waste of time.

robin_reala 10y ago

Ghost Browser is built on Chromium so it already works like your favorite browser I wonder how they got a Firefox compatibility mode into Chromium?

sleepychu 10y ago

Is this a different browser (fork?) or is it a chrome extension?

joebergeron 10y ago

>> "Stop wrestling with multiple browsers." Is this a problem many people actually have? Genuinely curious, don't mean to belittle their efforts. Although, do we need a brand new browser? How does it compare in terms of performance?

bobajeff 10y ago

With the name I thought this was going to be a browser focused on privacy and removing digital fingerprints. What a disappointing waste of good name and trademark.

rvern 10y ago

You can get the same functionality in Firefox by setting privacy.userContext.enabled to true in about:config. Enjoy. (More information: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Contextual_Identity_Project/Containers. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Contextual_Identity_Projec...)