We Need Better Browsers: How I Ditched Chrome

A wait list you try a browser....ummm no thanks. Touting things like ungoogled, and curated plugins that don't steal data, but never once do I see what data the browser phones home with, or what data they're collecting and selling about you.

Perhaps that's the reason for the wait-list, don't want to overwhelm the telemetry collection servers.

This is not a typical "how I wanted my privacy back" story, this is an advertisement for a new browser Synth.

It's shitck is that it does total surveillance on your browsing habits and builds "AI" to suggest personalized content and search results. The website lacks any technical details, but I think they may do all this locally, without sending any data to remote servers. But there is also sync feature, so the remote servers are involved.

There are other minor features which are pretty cool, like vertical tab bar and page archiving support.

Oh, and you cannot download this browser yet, you need to get on waitlist. It is not clear which platforms will it run on.

Hey! I wrote this blog post and happy to answer any questions.

I was expecting some of the immediate privacy reactions. Privacy was a key reason I set out to build it. We have to build trust on this part and eventually will -- we're just getting started and are still and private beta (making a decent browser turned out to be remarkably hard).

To make it beyond clear, there will never be any selling or sharing of data with any third-parties. Before we open the app to more users we will make this resoundingly clear in the privacy policy and terms. We localize as much as possible and make it very obvious when something is being stored on our servers (currently only truncated URLs of your likes/bookmarks and explicit "store for me" type interactions).

Finally, most of this browser will be made open source (less some of the ML and domain specific solutions). The innovation here for me is moving whole browser stack into web tech so that more people can hack on and create better browsing experiences. Getting to parity++ was the first major difficult step and the milestone we just reached.

It's still super early and we're learning a lot! I really do appreciate your skepticism and feedback. We will do everything we need to earn your trust.

Looks like an interesting prototype. The problem is, though, is it just a funky UI on top of Webkit/Blink and V8? There's no real innovation under the hood, here - although some of the GUI features look nice.