
Ghost Browser - nichodges
http://ghostbrowser.com/
======
danso
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.

~~~
jazoom
Or you could just do 1 click on the Chrome plugin that disables all other
plugins. 1 click re-enables them all later.

Sorry, I don't remember what it's called and I'm not at my computer at the
moment.

And thank you for bringing this up. I never thought of doing it your way. I
might just start.

------
gggggggg
Google cache view
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://ghostbrowser.com/)

edit: Not sure why this got a down vote. Site is offline. Cache view will
help.

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sankha93
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-
identit...](https://blog.mozilla.org/tanvi/2016/06/16/contextual-identities-
on-the-web/)

~~~
jahnu
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
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/#ident...](https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#identifier-
linkability)

------
andreineculau
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.

------
red_admiral
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
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
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.

------
tener
Nicely done but claims like this:

> Increase productivity 200% or more

are dodgy. Where did they get this number from?

~~~
jomamaxx
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
Pesky accuracy!

------
robin_reala
_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?

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mrmondo
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
Like servo ? [https://servo.org/](https://servo.org/)

~~~
mrmondo
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.

------
rvern
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_Projec...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Contextual_Identity_Project/Containers.))

------
marknadal
RE: "Error establishing a database connection", oh jolly - I did a whole talk
on this.
[http://video.webcamp.si/wc2016_nadal_the_frontend_backend_wi...](http://video.webcamp.si/wc2016_nadal_the_frontend_backend_without_devops/)

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.

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

~~~
blntechie
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
You can also create an arbitrary number of "User" windows, that also have
their own session stores.

~~~
creshal
Much more cumbersome, however.

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wiredfool
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
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.

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dredmorbius
June 3, 2016 archive:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20160603220849/http://ghostbrows...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160603220849/http://ghostbrowser.com/)

------
joebergeron
>> "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?

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

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bobajeff
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.

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

