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Ghost Browser

ghostbrowser.com

37 pointsnichodges46 comments

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.

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.

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!

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...

I use the equivalent thing on Firefox. Partly so I can use or not use different groups of addons quickly and easily, but also so I can be logged into the same websites multiple times on different accounts.

well I dont use Chrome's multiple user feature. May be because I dont usually play with multiple account and when I sometime need to open other account, then I just open an incognito mode window and just check it from there.

Well all I wanted to say that there are not many people who will need such browser in real life, and some people already have some workaround, which they prefer. and probably others will download and use this. (just my view)

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.

I use maybe a dozen Chrome user accounts. Personal Gmail, agency Gmail, and accounts for clients. Client accounts include saved credentials for Gmail, analytics, webmaster tools, social media, WP admin, etc. The client Gmail accounts are generally "stub" accounts for admin use. When I need to update a WP site or change a gravatar pic, I just open the Chrome user from the People menu.

I use it all the time. Life without it would be intolerable. I'm not sure why the others don't have something similar.

Google cache view http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

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

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...

Isn't Firefox limited to three predefined groups? Work, Personal and Banking?

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.

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.

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...

I think Brave (Chromium based) has a similar feature called Partition Tabs or something.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nicely done but claims like this:

> Increase productivity 200% or more

are dodgy. Where did they get this number from?

LOL. I guess they are saying number of windows reduced by 50% or more :D

That is exactly where I stopped reading. I cannot take it seriously.

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 :)

Pesky accuracy!

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?

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.

Like servo ? https://servo.org/

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.

We are building one in Java https://github.com/UprootLabs/gngr

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...)

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...

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.

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

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.

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

Much more cumbersome, however.

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).

In different windows, not colored tabs of the same window.

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.

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.

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.

June 3, 2016 archive:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160603220849/http://ghostbrows...

>> "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?

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

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.

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

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