Show HN: Min – web browser with better search and built-in ad blocking
palmeral.github.io
palmeral.github.io
These tools do not have the eye-candy that Min has though. Kudos for the design, it's indeed lovely.
See my post here: https://rya.nc/https-script.html
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 [2] http://hg.dillo.org/dillo/raw-file/default/ChangeLog
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.
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.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...
http://i.imgur.com/y1xSEtF.png
To be fair the suspend feature is the killer here
#TabsToolbar tab:not([selected="true"]) {
background: pink !important;
transition-property: background-color !important;
transition-duration: 15s !important;
transition-delay: 5s !important;
}
#TabsToolbar .tabbrowser-tab:hover:not([selected]) { ... }
You could argue that you should rely on extensions if you are power user, but then with the trend that Chrome has set (and now Firefox follows) of extensions being small web apps packaged with an icon, there's not a lot extensions can do to fundamentally change how browser tabs works. Whether tabs become smarter and more functionally rich depends almost exclusively on whether Google, Mozilla or Microsoft decide to experiment it.
Grouping/Ungrouping tabs, to my understanding of what you mean, existed in Firefox and was just removed from the browser and pushed into an add-on. It's called "Group Tabs" and I use it extensively. Or I could have this mistaken for 'bundling similar tabs'. I'm not sure on the semantic difference you mean between the two.
Multiple browser windows seems redundant with multiple tabs or the Group Tabs mentioned above.
I use a Firefox addon called FireGestures. Not for the mouse gestures that it is primarily designed for - but because one of the wheel gestures: "[Popup] List All Tabs"
Basically it allows me to hold down right click and use my scroll wheel to switch tabs from anywhere in my browser window. So I hide the tabs up top and get more screen estate! A win-win scenario!
It looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/Wz5Jx9p.png
> Multiple browser windows seems redundant with multiple tabs or the Group Tabs mentioned above.
Surely it's the complete opposite: if you have multiple windows, then why do you need Group Tabs?
Yep! Hold right-click and use my scroll wheel from anywhere in the browser window. So not the userChrome (tab area, bookmarks bar) or off-screen (my OS desktop).
I have another program that is "tab aware" bound to a different hotkey: I can press alt+space and begin typing in the Title name of a tab to open that tab from truly anywhere on the screen. It could be nice to be able to have "global hotkeys" for a browser that does the same thing.
>Surely it's the complete opposite: if you have multiple windows, then why do you need Group Tabs?
One is passing off handling multiple groups to the Operating System (handle multiple instances of your browser) while the other is the browser handling multiple groups of tabs. Different ways of handling the same thing with trivially different workflows (alt-tabbing and hoping you alt-tab to the right instance of your browser or {Ctrl+Shift+E / Rebound Hotkey} for tab groups and selecting the proper group that you can name.
Being able to name my tab groups instead of having 19 different instances of "Firefox.exe" helps when trying to find the proper group rather than the proper window.
Multiple windows lets you split screen estate though! But IIRC there are add-ons to let you split the browser screen to render 2/3/4 tabs at once for that use case.
They have their pros/cons but have a lot of overlap and redundancy.
Bartab Plus can actually completely unload a tab after X amount of minutes / hours. The tab is dimmed and comes back / reloads automatically when you click on it.
This along with tab groups - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-pa... allows you to have hundreds of tabs at your fingertips across any number of groups, without paying the performance impact of having them all actually loaded at once.
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.
Well, considering the dependencies, it is impressive that it still is lightweight :)
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.
I would install it, but I am on my windows partition.
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.
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.
On any decent OS, browsers will all share their executable code in memory. So I'm not sure what exactly the problem is.
Informal experiment, Linux Mint:
- 0.7G mem used, no FF, 1TBird, 1 URXVT
- 1.1G with 1 FF an one tab
- 1.2G with 10 FF, one tab each
- 1.2G with 1FF and ten empty tabs
- 1.37G with 1FF and 17 active tabs.I'm curious why you think having your window manager handle tabs would prevent you from "tiling" your browser. I use i3 with a web browser that doesn't support tabbed browsing (surf). For basic web browsing I just throw a bunch of surf windows into an i3 tabbed container, but for more complex tasks I can tile my browser however I want. I can place complex tiling arrangements inside of the tabbed container that I use for regular web browsing, and I can place that tabbed container inside of another tiling arrangement.
Hierarchical tabs is a thing that I miss in i3, and someday I'll write a patch. Thats a reasonable complaint, but also one that would be a non-issue if everyone magically agreed that window management should be the domain of a single global window manager, because then you would have hierarchical vertical tabs, and you could use them for more than just your web browser (for example you might put a terminal window within your web browser tab hierarchy to group it with the browser tabs that are contextually related to it).
For example, I have this arrangement on one of my monitors:
.---------.------.
| | A |
| Browser |-------
| | B |
`---------`------`
The browser area is tabbed, and only shows one page at a time, the terminals tile.
Since my i3 isn't configured for this setup it took some finessing to get things into position, but it was intuitive, at least for someone that's been using these keybindings for some months. If I used this layout often I could save the layout and make a keybinding to automatically put windows in position.
I don't know how Xmonad handles tabs, it seems more focused on a pure-tiling experience.
Your layout is essentially what I'm referring to.
I now understand what you're saying; yes, I use Xmonad exclusively for tiling, but from my understanding it does support some degree of tabbing.
i3 looks very interesting, though; I think I might have to research it a bit.
Thanks for the discussion. :)
EDIT: Okay, I've spent about 15m reading documentation and playing with it a little bit, and I'm sold. On the WM, that is; I'm not so sure about dropping tabs in browsers just yet, but I can see how you'd want that, and how it might even work well.
...so damn you; I'm going to be very tired in the morning playing around with this thing!
I'm not a "keep all the tabs open forever" person, so having the ability to shift this to the O/S would be great. Can see why this would be sub-optimal for someone who regularly has 30+ plus tabs open at once.
(That's how I work and I still hit the wrong window a lot, so take this advice with a heaping bowl of salt)
I have not tried any tabless setups yet, though. For a browser I use iceweasel/firefox with pentadactyl, so I can hit `b` and switch tabs by number or search by tab title.
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-p...
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.
You won't become a billionaire this way, but you can do just fine.
[1] http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/ [2] http://www.coldcoldworldpacks.com
Think of it like going to the doctor for "disease discovery". You go to the doctor to get healed, and you should probably go for checkups. You certainly you don't expect doctors to go around peddling their wares to you 24/7.
One thing to keep in mind is that even if a user is using ad blocking, it doesn't necessarily make him worthless to your business. Users still share, invite friends, and help drive traffic to your product. And they're especially valuable if there's a network effect to your product.
Edit: Ctrl + W closes the current tab.
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.
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.
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"?