
Show HN: Homepage, a fast browser that gets you organized - sguo35
https://www.homepage.so/
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sguo35
Hi HN,

My cofounder Deven Navani (dnavani) and I have spent the past couple months
working on Homepage: a fast browser that gets you organized.

We're both software engineers and students and we have a lot of tabs open when
we work. We realized that it's really hard to find the tabs you want quickly
once you've got enough, since Chrome's UX isn't suited for a lot of tabs
(imagine using Finder with horizontal file listing!). Even worse, your laptop
starts slowing down to the point that scrolling can develop noticeable
latency.

Homepage solves this by displaying your tabs vertically, like in Finder, and
letting you drag and drop them into folders. Simple addition, but makes life
with 50+ tabs much easier.

We also realized that the main reason your computer slows down with many tabs
open is because of disk paging. Browsers and CPUs are blazing fast when they
don't have to wait on your SSD/HDD to give them data, but as soon as disk
paging kicks in performance drops off a cliff. That's why we built a caching
system that automatically unloads tabs you haven't used in a while, so no
matter how many tabs you have your experience stays performant.

We also use the same Rust-based ad blocking engine Brave does, so even pages
with many ad elements should load quickly.

All your browsing data is stored locally - no clouds involved here :)

Give it a shot - we'd really appreciate your feedback. Both my and Deven's
emails are in our bios.

Some fun technical trivia:

\- Our tab cache is built on an LRU cache (turns out those coding interview
questions do come up eventually!)

\- We've managed to get to what you see now in 3 months of work in our spare
time every day. We chose to build on Electron since it let us build and
experiment with features and the UI much more quickly, and the extra RAM usage
compared to the RAM used by web pages is minimal.

