Beam has raised $9.5M to reinvent the browser
sifted.eu
sifted.eu
> Has anything he’s built really improved people’s lives?
> To hear Leca describe it, the development of Beam is as much an effort to improve the web browsing experience as it is a spiritual quest for meaning.
> “The only reason I’m doing this is to be working for the greater good,” Leca said. “Is this something I can explain to my kid and be proud of the fact that it’s not just a stupid business to make money?”
This reads like a parody of SV hubris. It's a startup to slap note-taking onto a browser shell. It's not curing cancer. I do believe that creating software can be a deeply meaningful experience, and that software can change people's lives for the better in real ways. But... this is a VC-funded startup for a browser shell.
> “What do I have for all these hours I spent on the internet?” he said. “Nothing. I’ve got three bookmarks and a few notes here and everything else is basically lost.”
It's crazy to me that the author thought that and their solution was "I should make it easier to take notes" and not "I should spend less time fucking around on the Internet mindlessly consuming media."
The knowledge base should be primarily in your head. If your mind doesn't feel like a knowledge base to you, it's because we're all so busy jamming new data into it that we never slow down and take the time to reflect and process what we've already consumed.
How do you know that is the target audience? To me it's people who are research focused, which doesn't necessarily mean they're fucking around at all. Academics, scientists, etc, often spend a ton of time reading papers and researching things + taking notes. You're making a big assumption here.
it explains why you can become disappointed
Personally, I had never even considered taxidermy on a pet. It'd feel too much like having a relative stuffed and put on display which somehow feels disrespectful.
But then, there are things like Lenin and Mao being on display. Way off topic now so I will stop.
I agree generally, then there is also a case to be made about writing down notes as a way to memorize the information. Particularly useful when starting on a new subject and could be great for teaching.
There is also information that isn’t worth memorizing but worth annotating. Shopping for instance.
I would appreciate a 2-way annotation system, where existing notes would appear when visiting a page and where pages would appear when visiting organized notes.
If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you.
Oscar WildeBrowsers are already huge beasts, but I feel like their large feature set mostly benefit the cloud services than the user. I am not advocating for even bigger browser, but I would welcome a better local-first integration with surrounding apps.
As of now, extensions are pretty limited in what they can do around the browser UI.
On desktop, extensions can merely add icons to a toolbar and inject content to the current page. Vertical sidebars are gone.
On mobile, it’s even more limited to adding actions to a menu and some background tasks.
Browsers escaped from the crazy and sometimes fragile extension system that could interact with the browser chrome, maybe for the better, but nowadays, they are mostly sandbox screen readers or huge cloud only monoliths à la chromeOS.
Unrelated to the article, but I often vaguely remember that I did read something on internet, and want to be sure of what I did read, but google search is not powerful enough to find the thing I already seen.
I wish I had a search engine for every content I browsed, watched, heard, but I don't care about the content I didn't read yet.
You want something like ArchiveBox[1].
I have worked on software for treating cancer, and I have worked for Mozilla. And boy, let me tell you, the latter sure felt like it had a much bigger impact on the world.
Let me tell you a little bit about medical software. It is incredibly hard and expensive to get data. It usually involves finding enough people who are dying in a particular way (already hard), and managing to collect comparable data from each (i.e., with the same process: even harder). There is never enough of it to do the statistics you want. Once you have some, and you maybe come up with some way to do some step of the treatment process slightly better, there are a lot of hurdles and it takes a very long time before anything you did can actually be used on a patient. Rightfully so. People's lives are at stake.
With cancer in particular, maybe after a decade in the field you might know if what you did had a positive impact on treatment outcomes. Maybe. That's the best-case scenario. For me, I don't even know if any line of code I ever wrote was actually used to treat a real patient. Oh, yeah, and those dying people whose data you used to come up with and test your idea? Yeah, you could not do anything for them. They got whatever treatments were the best available at the time, and good luck. If they were great treatments, you probably would not have been working on the problem. So that sucks.
Meanwhile, at a browser company, I was able to write a patch and within a month or three it was deployed to over a hundred million people. Software projects I worked on are currently used to encode and decode a non-trivial fraction of the bits on the internet. They are deployed on every Android handset and every iPhone (not just in Firefox), so that's a few billion devices. Every time you make a Zoom call or use probably almost any other video conferencing service, you are using at least one, if not several, of those projects. I understand people are doing a lot of video conferencing these days. Maybe even some telemedicine calls between radiation oncologists and their patients.
So, uh, yeah. I feel like that had more impact. Not to discourage anyone from trying to cure cancer. It's incredibly hard.
P.S., "cancer" is actually a thousand different diseases with a thousand different causes and requires many different treatments. There will never be a "cure for cancer".
Not to far down that list is probably Lotus Notes
Lotus Notes is awful. It’s Exchange, but worse. They wanted it to be an “open” platform for applications to be built on top of but failed to win over hearts and minds (and especially not hearts...).
Doing the work researching a cure for cancer is much more practical with 1 Mozilla.
If tomorrow we found the cure for cancer, and your work contributed even the slightest amount to it, that’s what you would be telling people at parties, not that you also worked at Mozilla (assuming you’ve done equivalent work in both fields).
My solution was to make the Productivity Owl. It’s not for everyone, but if you need an extremely strict browser extension to change your browsing habits I think it’s useful. (also free and open source)
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/productivity-owl/e...
> The knowledge base should be primarily in your head
This is exactly the same thing as saying "you shouldn't need search engines, you should be able to find it yourself." But Google proved that if you can change the way people find information, you can literally change the world. It is precisely in building new tools, new fundamental primitives by which we interact with information, that we can make the biggest impact.
It remains to be seen if he can execute, but the idea of decentralized, personal knowledge databases sounds like it could be one of those indispensable tools in the future.
I think he’s earned some benefit of doubt.
Making it easier to store and recall useful information, without using your brain, is a good thing that has fuelled progress in recent decades.
The impermanence of the internet requires you to store useful information in your brain (you can't guarantee that it will be stored for when you need it), when really it would be better stored externally.
The fact that the internet is impermanent encourages you to treat it as something you need to siphon information from (jam all the data into your head), rather than a safe store that you can depend on.
Dead links abound: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embed...
Scary warnings: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embed...
This choice (under Gary Kovacs, IIRC) has effectively made it a poor choice for _anyone_ to build on top of Mozilla's browser engine without forking the entirety of the mozilla tree. You'd need to have a very good business justification for attempting it.
Since Chrome is essentially a superset of Chromium, it's been obvious how to build your own equivalent of Chrome (and first-party supported!). There is no "Firefoxium" version of Firefox, and I'd expect developers would need to go to great lengths to keep their code up-to-date on top of mozilla-central.
Creating a new gecko-based product is not very hard, even if you will hit some cases of the platform depending on firefox that you'll have to workaround or borrow.
Creating a full new blink-based product is as difficult actually. Most chromium derivatives take the simpler road of forking chromium, not building a new blink-based browser (eg. Brave maintains a pile of patches).
I don't understand why you would expect a "firefoxium": there is no such thing because there is no proprietary version of the open source Firefox. If you fork Firefox, you're in the same boat as people forking chromium in terms of complexity.
geckoview is also such a product, well hidden behind the android glue :)
Heck, Apple's car will be a Kia.
A well capitalized competitor who only aspires to reach a strong enough position to eventually be paid by the dominant player. This clear and irrefutable evidence of a severely unhealthy market and a textbook case of the impact of monopoly power on consumers. Where's the choice if pretty much all the competitors are aiming to attract Google's business and comply with their vision for the internet?
Statistically, you won't. You're quite likely to be a small to medium sized business owner, or a decently paid independent developer, and that's perfectly fine. But there's no need to convince people to aim for the top and nothing else
The OP comment is pointing out that to survive and thrive in the browser market an entrant has to seek revenue from its dominant competitor. That is not simply a reality of some businesses being big and some businesses being large. That is anti-competitive.
All the pressure to protect the advertising industry and disseminate advertising will still be present.
This is also the primary reason why I've given up on all these note taking apps. Once you get too much data in them, they just become totally unmanageable.
There's a real problem here to be solved, but I just don't see how you make tangible progress on this one without having something much closer to strong AI.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/16/20917386/google-clips-de...
What's difficult sometimes is finding the right keywords for your problem. If you're really stumped, and copy/pasting the stack trace doesn't help, then figuring out what to search is a problem in itself.
Show HN: Dendron – a roam like open source markdown note taking app (dendron.so) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23890035
I'll be looking into some of the stuff discussed there sometime.
Myself and developers I've worked with suffer from this. Information is easily searchable so we never bother to memorize the function signature for things like substring(). Is it the (start index, end index) or the (start index, length)? This repeated googling of the same question (sometimes on a daily basis) is draining.
I have a belief that this phenomenon is one reason HN bashes on tech interviews. Developers find that they actually have very little retained knowledge when placed in front of a whiteboard. They are dependent on Google and SO.
I don't think taking notes in this NEW browser will alleviate this problem. Instead of Google you now depend on notes. Personally I recommend Mastery Learning[1]. It involves more effort but produces much more confident developers.
When confronted with a new technology suggestion, don't forget to ask "What problem does this solve?" Maybe there is a low-tech solution that's better suited.
As a teenager I was memorizing PHP function parameters for fun and I rarely had to jump to the docs. Even now that I have a family and my brain doesn't want to work, I rarely reach for GO or SO to do something. I mainly rely on static typing and jump to definition in the IDE.
Every once in a while I forget something stupid (eg. I forgot how to floor in JS once and I was stuck with either doing >>0 or google how to Math.floor) but I can't say I would want to store this kind of information anywhere: It's too sporadic and it's incomplete; just keep the documentation of the tools you're using nearby if you need it.
That said, I see the benefits for KB and I use them all the time. I agree with you, doing it in the browser won't change things much.
Just record your desktop, storage and encoding are cheap.
i really wish people like this would just come out and say "yea i am successful and i am going to keep pushing because i think i can do better." is that really so bad?
1. My culture tells me that success and fulfillment comes from doing X.
2. Get really good at X.
3. Still feel unhappy and unfulfilled.
4. Do not reflect on why that didn't leave me fulfilled. Do not critique my culture.
5. "Maybe if I get really good at X. I'll just X better than anyone has ever X'd before. That'll do it."
I have certainly fallen into this trap many times. I am problably currently occupying it on multiple axes. But I've at least learned to escape it in at least a couple of ways.
I think one of the key problems facing our culture is mistrust, and the only way I know to remedy that at the individual level is to just... trust more. I accept that sometimes I'll get burned. I'd rather have that happen than to contribute to a society where everyone is untrustworthy because they know they are not being trusted anyway.
I don't want people to feel that they may as well do the crime if they're gonna do the time (be mistrusted) anyway.
edit: Just to extend this thought, I see statements about "improving lives" as laziness or lack of clarity about the value they bring to users. If all you can say about your note-taking app is that it "improves lives", you need to dig deeper to explain how it improves things.
Software does change lives, and building the social awareness of this implication is important. Chastising those who mention social implications in their software pitches doesn't help to make consideration of social impact a normal part of software development.
does software change peoples lives? absolutely. should we be encouraging people to participate and build software that can legitimately achieve this? absolutely. is there a pervasiveness in tech to constantly frame, no matter what technology is being worked on, in the light of "changing lives"? in my opinion, yes. I see it constantly in the tech industry, and at this point it is essentially a marketing gimmick. im saying I find it irritating that the tech industry is unable to market themselves and their technologies without this blanket statement.
Try looking at it the other way around. Every time someone claims they want to "change lives" we don't need to heap on criticism.
This is probably a simplification of how it works, but taking this description at its word, Beam will just start assigning outsize relevance to sticky high-engagement sites like Youtube and Twitter. Hope it's more impressive than that!
https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/panels/notes/
(I wish there was a way to synchronize it with Joplin, which is where all my notes already live)
For example, they offered payments through the Chrome Webstore for years. Late last year, they announced they were pulling the plug on payments, effective February 1.
They gave scant instructions on how to migrate your users, and they declined to provide you with the email addresses of said users, so that you might be able to contact them.
They didn't make explicit what would happen if you failed to migrate people in time (would they lose access to your extension, have free access forever, have it uninstalled from their browser?).
They also declined to notify the users that Google payments were going away and that they should expect paid extensions to have a new payment system and upcoming migration.
They also have new extension review rules all the time, and they occasionally nuke your extension for no good reason. [1]
It's nice to be able to reach people on Chrome, but it comes at a substantial cost.
1: https://beelinereader.medium.com/google-yanked-my-chrome-ext...
Browser extension, solo developer (me), solving the same problem
Fun fact: I actually know the guy featured in your first customer testimonial. I met Alan years ago at a hackathon, where he helped me build one of the earliest versions of what has become my startup. Great guy!
Even the footer and "Join the beta" CTA only loads after the generic slogan.
Hopefully this isn't an indication of their design and web dev sensibilities. Which are critical for browser development. This is some basic work you do before doing PR rounds.
Edit: found a blog post with their 'vision', with content that would work better as homepage https://getonbeam.medium.com/beam-bright-paper-1ca4ae41ae0b
Maybe the issue is that we assume betas are a way of establishing a customer base instead of establishing a product?
they're already gaming their own algorithm
The answer appears to be WebKit: https://startuparound.com/read/1603209607.9733047/Beam-is-bu...
> and is working on a Mac app for now
Indeed. And $9.5M is a bit too much money for a mac app, IMO.
Hmm, I don't know if this is worth making a whole new browser. I use bookmarks for this, and if I'm really interested in posterity I use the OneNote browser plugin to add it to my notes. I know this experience could be a bit more integrated but it feels pretty smooth already, not like something that slows me down.
One thing I'm much more interested in in a new browser is breaking the Chromium monopoly. I hope he will take Gecko for his engine so it might get some more traction.
I think what Beam proposed here is very similar. Or may be he even got the idea from HN :)
I just hope he won't sell the company when it kicks off
https://historio.us/ https://pinboard.in/
Their note taking leaves something to be desired, so perhaps Beam could provide some value add in this area.
And why is the guy who built a career out of making products which, by his own admission, are detrimental society, be the one to build products to supposedly help society. He should stick to his own crony capitalist bubble and let the real value producers do the socially useful work. If a crony capitalist wants to switch sides and do good work, they'd better start on the right foot by bootstrapping it with their own money.
It's too easy to make amends using other people's money. These entrepreneurs' win-win mindset is the root of the problem. It's not enough that they get a ton of money playing some phony shell game, they also want to have the moral high ground pretending to be the good guys.
It is the advantage of having a weapon that you can use that damages your competitor but not you. Chrome started out that way[1] as a way to attack Microsoft (and to some extent Firefox)
When you see things like Tim Cook saying he will "end" Facebook, you might reasonably ask, "Wait how could he possibly do that? He doesn't control the web." And you would be right, with the exception of understanding that Facebook makes its money on data extraction[2], and a lot of Facebook users are also Apple device users. So on the Apple device Apple can build a browser that lets their users access Facebook while taking away as much data as possible from Facebook. This damages Facebook revenue, forces them to invest in counter measures, and doesn't change Apple's revenue model hardly at all.
As a result, from a business perspective, I think Apple could justify investment here in a browser that puts forward a point of view that makes it harder for Google and Facebook to make money.
[1] FWIW I worked at Google when Chrome was launched and understand that there was the 'open standards' narrative but there was also a pretty obvious 'hurts Microsoft/Apple' narrative. So the technical reasons to invest aside, my opinion is that the real reason any large enterprise invests in anything is because they have a reason to believe it will make their business stronger, more difficult to attack, more profitable, or with luck all three.
[2] I think the term 'surveillance capital' a bit too inflammatory.
Chrome - we own the world so use our browser with its proprietary extensions and only works completely if you hand over a Google account.
Firefox - we try to follow standards and be good to users as long as we don't piss off the people who are paying our salaries too much.
Edge - So much faster and better than Chrome all you need to do is let us know all about you and what your doing and use our services that give us more 'stickyness' over your use of our browser.
Safari - Oh hey, we need a web browser so uh, here is a web browser.
Brave - Crypto currency is the best, oh here's a browser.
Chromium/Konquerer/etc/etc - Opensource is the best! Only we don't do what all the other browsers do, and half the time you'll find the web page is rendering weird but you can fix the code and send us a PR and we'll look at it and contemplate it.
Sure that is a cynical view, just trying to share what it feels like that to me.
It is also the browser that has the best battery life on a Mac.
Also I find it to have the fastest UI.
I've never logged into a Chrome browser with my Google account. What am I missing? I know you do have to log in if you want to purchase certain Chrome extensions, but now that Google killed their payment infrastructure, this seems not to be an issue anymore.
...
What it doesn't take into account is that the reason I only think 90% the same things as someone else is that I've accidentally or consciously avoided going down certain rabbit holes that are likely to break your brain. This concept that 'there are no dangerous thoughts' is directly at odds with, "there are some things you can't unsee". If you believe both things at once, then you're fooling yourself.
We protect our lizard brain from stuff that is rationally objectionable all the time so that we don't horrible things in the spur of the moment.
A lie is best concealed between two truths, and cults of every kind know that they have to find common ground with you. And on the internet there isn't a door for you to hide behind and "don't make eye contact" doesn't work as well. And then you add social networking algorithms that build the cult for you. You don't even have to decide to build a cult to end up running one.
(Wasn’t there a startup a while ago that let you add notes to any website, and they were visible to all... but it was horribly abused?)
I also doubt that the state of the art of ML can achieve his vision of taking meaningful notes from websites.
It reminds me of a Mac program that a work colleague used, Devon Agent, that consumed the web content that he browsed and indexed it along with local content.
There also used to be a functionally simpler Recoll plugin for Firefox that indexed web text. I really should look to see if that has migrated into the new plugins model.
From a nordic perspective:
- We could have gotten our vaccines quicker outside of the EU.
- Insane amounts of our tax money is spent on idotic programs, often favoring France and Germany.
Somehow, an EU membership seems a lot lot less appealing now.
You reaction is typical of small, rich nordic countries unfortunately.
I liked StumbleUpon, and I think there's a place for it. Perhaps not as its own browser.
I've noticed this trend a decent amount, where news articles don't link to the very product/study/whatever they're actually talking about. Very frustrating.
Before Google, bookmarks were necessary if you ever wanted to find your way back to a website. Now, all you need is some dim memory of a website to find it with Google. Currently, I only use bookmarks like I used to use fast-dial — to quickly navigate to websites without having to Google for them (or for internal work URLs that are not crawlable). The bookmarks bar has become a built-in concise portal for my various go-to sites.
So if the original purpose of bookmarks has been achieved, what is the real problem here? I remember the many hours I used to spend organizing my bookmarks into tidy folders, like a personal Wikipedia of topical links. Many of these sites were blogs that were deprecated by the migration to social media and aggregators. My topical folders are now my Twitter feed and subreddits. So the idea of bookmarks as the “organization of specific topical data” is now outsourced to others.
And yet still, I have a nagging feeling that there is something missing from our experience of the Internet, and that some aspect of the concept of bookmarks reveals that problem.
Beam suggests that it is marking some piece of information as important — not marking a URL, but marking information itself. As information has grown exponentially, I do often find myself feeling like I’m drowning in a sea of important information, because my mind can only remember so much. There’s a nagging feeling that I’m losing important information, and I know that although I can (and do) bookmark URLs, I haven’t used a non-toolbar bookmark in years.
I find myself utilizing various hacks when I find a piece of information I think it important and don’t want to lose: I send myself a link via Slack, or sometimes by text message. How often do I actually revisit those links? Maybe once or twice in years
So there’s the problem identified in behavior: bookmarking or otherwise saving URLs, but never actually visiting those links. Am I the only one who does this? Probably not. When I add a bookmark, it is always accompanied by a sense of futility, but I do it anyways! When I leave a tab open to reference later, I know I’ll probably just close it later without a glance. But I still do it.
The true problem underlying this futile behavior is obvious and agreed upon: information overload. But we can be more precise: information overload that makes all information ephemeral, when some information should be permanent.
When I read an article about Beam, what I want is not only the article itself, but a kind of rap-genius of meta-information I’ve previously marked as important running alongside it. I’d see information about other browsers. I’d see quick summaries of the dead social-bookmarking sites and why they failed. I’d see pithy HN comments about why some people seem to get VC money thrown at them.
It would be like this HN comments section, but the only person commenting would be myself with full recall of everything I’d ever read, happily chirping away at every paragraph, line, and word. It would be a genius version of myself with a photographic memory.
So there it is: the real problem — we are not geniuses with perfect memory. But it would be pretty cool if we were.
If there were a GPT-X continually fine-tuned on everything I had ever read (with meta-data about how long I had read and whether I found it important), then I think it would be possible to at least solve part of this problem — that of not having a perfect memory. But ML has a long way to go until it is capable of producing genius, let alone intelligence.
This is to say that Beam has taken on a problem much harder than “bookmarks”, and it is going to take more than a few million to solve.
On this particular point I disagree, though I love the rest of your writeup. The information was always there, somewhere; you just couldn't really access it. Google and other aggregators have made it possible for us to operate "one level higher". I don't have to remember exactly what Bayes theorem is and how it can be used, I can just remember the type of problem Bayes is excellent at solving, and rely on the internet to bring me quickly up to speed. It _has_ made us all geniuses, but we take it for granted because we've gotten so used to it that it seems obvious.
I think what Beam is attempting here is a similar leap in technology, and it should be interesting to see if they succeed and change our relationship with information. It definitely feels like something is missing, because the internet is too unreliable; if a video is deleted or a link is broken, you're out of luck.