
From Two Guys Building Their own Browser - dominik-space
https://medium.com/spacebrowser/from-two-guys-building-their-own-browser-3aa56787982f
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gwbas1c
IMO: Get to the point early! establish what's different / special / unique
about your browser. All you need is 1-2 paragraphs early in your story.

I made it to "Rebranding and the early days of Space Browser" and stopped
reading. Why? The article is autobiographical without establishing enough
context to keep me interested in you. (In other cases, if you or your product
was well known, something autobiographical without establishing context is
okay.)

BTW: It's worth trying to disambiguate, early on, if you're building your own
HTML rendering engine, or just reusing something else.

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ilaksh
It's just a little bit disingenuous to describe it as "building your own
browser".

Because a browser has so many features at this point that it basically
contains an operating system. So to duplicate that its just necessary to start
with some existing browser and tweak it.

Out of the thousands of features that enable me to browse across diverse
websites, what percentage of those features did you implement in your "new"
browser?

What does it actually do that is different from WebKit?

~~~
gen3
I don't see how it's disingenuous. They made a browser the same way google
chrome started (from WebKit), or WebKit started (khtml), or the way opera and
Vivaldi currently are (chrome).

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GreaterFool
Had a quick look. None of this looks like features for power users. How are
"spaces" different than having multiple open windows?

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dominik-space
They do not need the same amount of memory than different windows would need,
since we use an intelligente caching system.

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gruez
Can you elaborate more on this? My understanding is that on modern browsers,
most of the memory usage comes from the tab's contents (pages), or extensions.
In both cases they don't scale up with the number of windows.

~~~
arghwhat
A lot of browser memory consumption comes with overheads from their multi-
process models.

However, that aside, it makes no difference whether you have a window, tab, or
"space".

~~~
dleslie
The multi process model was an improvement. In days past browsers were single
process, and suffered from:

\- JavaScript on one page dragging down all tabs

\- Memory leaks

\- JavaScript exploits that crossed tabs

And so on.

Multi process browsing is fantastic.

~~~
arghwhat
We still have all but the first issue, and that one has nothing to do with
multi- _process_ browsing, just multi-threaded processing.

So all we really won was performance regressions (the IPC is expensive) and
significantly increased resource consumption.

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clouddrover
> _Usually the tabs just lay there and cost you a lot of memory. And forget to
> find this one tab you were looking for. It’s impossible. The time has come
> for a change._

I use bookmarks.

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PabloOnTech
I understand why you’re going for mobile, but I think the market would be way
bigger if you would go for desktop. Nice concept though.

~~~
CodeWriter23
I’m thinking along the same lines, because I would never attempt to navigate
the Tab Sea of Doom on a tablet, with a standard browser like Safari or
Chrome.

I’m going to give this a try anyway. Maybe the utility of having reference
materials on a third screen, that I can glance at without obfuscating my
editor behind a browser window will net some productivity gain. When I need
copy/paste and codepen-type solutions, I’ll fire the link over to my MBP.

~~~
dominik-space
Sounds good. Let me know how we are doing!

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monkin
I can't test it, but maybe it's already there... :)

But if I need to add websites to spaces by hand it's not for me as a power
user. Make something that will know what websites I often visit and place them
automatically in certain spaces. You don't need to stop here! You can go
further with this, so if I open 30 tabs of PornHub it will create Adult space
for me so I don't need to worry. ;)

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jchook
> Will our project ever reach a critical number of people?

To me UI improvements are quite low on the totem pole of “things I wish my
browser did/didn’t do”

For one, we still don’t have sufficient privacy on any major browser. Even
Chromium, FireFox, and Brave don’t cut it.

> Power Users

Second, scriptability, headless, and Unix-like pipeline integrations without
having to use headless chrome and puppeteer. With Phantom gone, it seems we
have no choice.

iOS-only WebKit with a neat tab interface doesn’t strike me as a “power user”
browser.

~~~
gwbas1c
> iOS-only WebKit with a neat tab interface doesn’t strike me as a “power
> user” browser.

But it's a great way to experiment with different UIs.

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LeonardoRusta
Great blog post! Like it! When is your browser launching?

~~~
dominik-space
We are live on Product Hunt today! Check it out here:
[https://www.producthunt.com/posts/space-
browser](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/space-browser).

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mosdl
Remember Flock? These never work out - its hard to make any money and people
will often revert to the defaults.

~~~
AmVess
The list of discontinued and abandoned browsers is longer than the list of
active browsers...I'm not sure why someone would want to develop a new one in
this day and age when the market for them as settled.

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abeisgreat
The list of discontinued and abandoned businesses is longer than the list of
active businesses...I'm not sure why someone would want to develop a new one
in this day and age when the market for them as settled.

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uk31
Was expecting them to actually be writing a web browser engine though with the
current web standards you would need huge team of seasoned devs a several
years if not decades of work to do this, missleading title. Basically they are
wrapping webkit in a new UI. Boring...

~~~
budu3
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man
stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit
belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust
and sweat and blood - Theodore Roosevelt

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devnonymous
Looks spiffy ! Too bad I can't try it out, what with being a linux user and
all. I like the time traveling aspect and the visualization of it all. Kudos
on the launch. Wish you guys the best.

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ilaksh
Is this an indication that mobile browsers need support for extensions?

Maybe if companies won't add that then it's a symptom that we need to combat
their browser monopolies somehow.

~~~
dec0dedab0de
Maybe by using Firefox for Android?

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jscholes
> we unsuccessfully tried to approach bars with a Netflix like subscription
> for drinks.

... wow. Glad you dodged a MoviePass-style bullet on this one.

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saeedjabbar
@dominik-space just reached out to you on twitter.

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dominik-space
Thanks! Saw it :)

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mister_hn
if you don't use Chromium, what's the back engine then? Gecko? WebKit?

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gen3
Since it is an ios app, it has to use safari (webkit).

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dominik-space
Exactly, we build on top of WKWebview.

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Pirolita
Why is their age something to mention?

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gargarplex
Asymmetric advantage in their favor

If it sucks “they’re just 20” If it’s interesting, they’re precocious

imho if you’re using age as downside protection you’ve already lost

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merlinsbrain
Seems like a bold move to me regardless if the engineers are 20 or 50 or 90.

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gargarplex
Being really young is a good story – except that by 20, it invites comparisons
to Stripe's 19-year-old founder.

Being really old is a good story – everyone likes to see someone 60+ still
fighting[developing], especially because there is a pervasive fear of age
discrimination here.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

EDIT: I 100% guarantee that even if this project is not successful, if these
fellows continue plugging away in the industry, they are going to ship
something really awesome.

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sixbrx
Any plans for an Android version?

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CodeWriter23
@dominik-space there’s a typo in the link to spacebroswser.io at the end of
your article. A trailing . is in the href attribute and it doesn’t open on my
iPad unless I edit the link.

~~~
dominik-space
Oh, thanks for reaching out! Just fixed it!

