Colibri: A Browser Without Tabs | Hacker News Reader

Colibri: A Browser Without Tabs

colibri.opqr.co

23 pointsfbelzile31 comments

A browser that first wants your email address, and then sends your entire browsing history to its maker. No thanks.

> Our servers automatically record certain information about how you use our Services (we refer to this information as “Log Data”), including both Account holders and non-Account holders. This Log Data may include information such as your computer‘s Internet Protocol (“IP”) address, browser type, browser version, the pages that you visit, the time and date of your visit, the time spent on those pages and other statistics.

> We may use your personal information to contact you with newsletters, marketing or promotional materials and other information.

Feels like a corporate op. Good marketing, pretty website, objectively worse software, and they spy on + sell your data. No real investment from their side other than marketing talent.

Can't imagine a single use case for when I'd prefer a tabless browser.

I also can't remember seeing literally anyone complain when browsers start adopting tabs, even though people complain about anything.

> I also can't remember seeing literally anyone complain when browsers start adopting tabs, even though people complain about anything.

Not complain per se, but people were commenting how tabs were a crutch for poor top level window management, and how their WM of choice had had tabs for ages. I'd say they aren't wrong about them being a crutch, but I guess crutches are useful at times.

Have WMs gottten any better at tab management? I know Windows added Sets recently, but I don't think adoption has been great. KDE and GNOME still don't. OSX has it against its entire paradigm.

You'd specifically see it with tiling window managers like i3. I can put any container node of the window tree in tabbed, stacked, tiled horizontal or tiled vertical mode. So, I can have tabs of any mix of programs, I can change the mode to see all tabs at the same time, each tab can have subtabs or windows organized in any way I see fit, I can fullscreen any level, etc.

The handling of those tabs also fit with the rest of the window management, like putting marks on a container so new windows appear at whatever place in the window tree I wish (like having a shell to my left and all windows I'm invoking having them appear organized in an arbitrary manner in a window container to my right), etc.

I can keep going, but if you're not familiar with tiling window managers, I feel like probably none of what I'm saying is making any sense...

I'm familiar with i3, but I feel as if the other features of i3 (configuration via text file in home directory (don't worry, the EBNF is in the header and the examples are annotated!), minimalist presentation, keyboard-first interaction (I still have a printed hotkey chart...)) are likely to stymie adoption even further than Sets, which are simply obscure.

Those other "features" are just conventions that come with being on a *nix OS. They're aren't unique to i3. But regarding adoption, of course power-tools (for power-users) don't get wide adoption. That's just how things are, since the majority doesn't have the time to put into learning how to use such tools.

This thread is about there being a use for a tab-less browser. That doesn't necessitate wide adoption.

(Not that I'm saying that a tab-less browser is of particular use, since one can just ignore tabs in a tabbed-browser.)

Yup. My one beef about the mobile browser Firefox Focus is that it doesn't have tabs.

It does have - if you open something in a new tab there is a big dot in the bottom right

Not seeing it. Is it possible you're referring to Firefox and not Firefox Focus? Or maybe the Android version of Firefox Focus has that feature and the iOS version doesn't?

It does - long tap a link and you can open in a new tab.

By googling the issue I see that tabs in Firefox Focus are an Android feature only.

I use the Fluid app to create tabless views into web apps. Great for Slack, unless you use it for calls. https://www.fluidapp.com

Well worth the $5, imo.

But, no I see no point in this tabless browser.

For anyone who doesn't want to download something extra and is willing to DIY the launch shortcut, you can do this with Firefox (and Chrome too I believe).

1. Go to about:config and set browser.ssb.enabled to true.

2. Restart Firefox

3. Click ... in the address bar and then "use this site in app mode"

4. Launch directly from command line or shortcut: firefox -ssb "https://news.ycombinator.com"

Looks like ff's single-site browsers can't run extensions, which means they're not really useful for me. Every site I'd want to app-ify is also one I want to modify extensively.

A few years ago, Mozilla had a tabless browser based on Servo. It was actually pretty cool.

I hate tabs. They make little sense using a tiling window manager like i3 that has built-in support for tabbed window layout.

Tabs have always bothered me. You have the OS, which has its own mechanism for launching and switching between applications. And then one of those applications (the browser) launches and switches between applications within it.

It’s always felt to me like that should be unified.

This seems incredibly dumb? I feel like I'm missing something obvious. A common behavior I have is to google something and then open 5 separate results as separate tabs. How would I do that here?

At the bare minimum this landing page needs a lot of work. I come away from it feeling like this is some out of season april fools joke about moving browsers back into the 90s.

Edit: Looking at some of the linked articles its been around since at least 2016... almost 5 years, probably more. This is all they have to show?

dont worry bout it, just give them your email address so you can use your new browser

I have many questions about this.

1. Is it Chromium-based?

2. I see that it references storing links "on the server." Does that mean it doesn't store this data locally, or have the option to do so?

3. What is OPQR and where is it based out of?

I would recommend trying 'surf' for those who want to try a browser without tabs, without also needing an email address/privacy violations that this one requires.

Don't really like that it requires an email to download. Seems like it's not under active development either, since the last news was posted in 2018.

Anyone know more about this?

I downloaded it and played with it for a minute. Browser without tabs still opens things in new windows, and I don't see any better alternative to following multiple links, so there doesn't appear to be anything new here. Am I missing something?

The Releases page has the most recent release in September of this year, but it definitely seems light on dev.

An account seems mandatory to even download or use this browser, and that combined with what appears to be a lack of any compelling advantage above the existing mainstream browsers means it probably won't see much adoption. Even the site doesn't have a dedicated features page but simply a carousel that highlights "Links", "Lists" and "Feeds" with very little details, and apart from Feeds, the other two don't seem very interesting or unusual.

Oh and lack of tabs is probably not a selling point for the vast majority of users. And no mention of whether it is open source.

I'd use something like this as one use case would be to just have profiles and logins isolated to sites I maintain. However, lost me at needing an account and wanting my entire browsing history wtf?.

Also noticed today that Edge started offering vertical tabs that can collapse to favicon size.

I don't understand how the images that are presented on the landing page relate to a browser. Where is the proposed alternative browsing interface? I don't see a URL, nor how to browse multiple websites simultaneously.

Is this a parody?

But why?

For you to give them your email address

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