I hate that it's only for Mac so far, but glad to see others are on the way. I've been thinking about picking up a cheap older mac for development work, though, and this is one more reason in favor.
Will definitely have to give this a try when it makes its way to other operating systems.
You might find The Humane Representation of Thought[1] by Bret Victor[2] useful, where he demonstrates by example, how existing tools/software (generally speaking) doesn't utilize all the 'superpowers' that we acquired via evolution.
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[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agOdP2Bmieg
Edit - grammatical fixes
know you're referring to browser, but an OS - I think Oberon - had desktop as much larger than screen leading to ability to zoom around and create piles of windows
If you like visual layouts like the one offered then OK, but not me, I think it's distracting and unnecessary.
BTW the headline is blown af
wat? I responded to this:
> this is the most innovative thing in the browser space for a long while
I simply mentioned how there have been some other browsers for a while that have an equivalent feature set, therefore this isn't so innovative.
The fucking snowflakes. Where every opinion must be cherished and never argued with.
Your tone makes it seem like you just want to toot your own horn and not like you want to actually have a conversation about the topic.
Maybe you could’ve said “there is this other application that I’ve been using that’s been out for a while and has innovated the browser in similar ways, check it out”
Do whatever you want, I just think you might promote healthier conversations if you don’t come across as pedantic. Unless you’re a troll or proud of your tone, either way, thanks for your time.
It's always good to have more players in this game and to me what they are trying to do seems more approachable than the examples you showed.
I agree with your overall points but this but stood out to me because it's not clear if Bonsai uses its own rendering engine of it is just another reskin of Blink / Chromium. What we really need is more competition with browsers which use their own rendering engines. Or at the very least, more browsers using Gecko (Firefox). If this is another Chromium-based browser then it's still definitely good to see some new ideas in UI but we don't really see much other benefit having more players in the game.
What worries me the most is that this is closed source but presented as if it is open source. Their binaries are stored on Github but there's literally nothing in the repo aside a README (https://github.com/hyferg/bonsai-browser-public). This is of particular concern given the sensitive content that people use browsers for these days (banking, shopping, research on potentially sensitive topics, etc). It would be trivial for a malicious browser to do some real damage to people and there's no way to prove this browser's intentions are sincere given how little information (ie "none") is published about its developers or even the code.
Our website got 1TB of traffic yesterday (which it turns out I have to pay for) and thats without hosting the binary on our site!
I'm mainly using Firefox, but it's really becoming a resource hog and making my laptop fan spin more violently. I have a lot of tabs open.
But innovation in how to manage lots of tabs is welcome and this is what these guys seem to address too.
the message wasn't about me or you, it was about browser space
I'm confused why the thread got so much upvotes, and a lot of comments made me more confused. Not trying to be rude, but I don't really understand the usefulness ..
The big concern I would have if I were these guys is their magic is their UI, apparently, and they've given it away. If they truly have something good, it's some Electron windows inside a gui kit. Not to understate the work, but the work is ahead of them, too.
Visual organizational tools are very important to me. Even if I'm in the IDE and thinking in code, when I jump tot eh browser for something I want the experience to visual and low-friction, so I don't have to push brower things onto my mental stack, which will slow me down when I want to switch back to the IDE.
I'm very good at remembering where things are, I can pick up a book I haven't touched in months and remember the page I was on, or the last sentence I read to find my place with a few seconds. On the other hand, large scale sorting and rearranging tasks are miserable drudgery so I have a lot of stacks and my bookshelves are, ah, suboptimal.
That, combined with relatively small units of work (most of my kanban cards are in the 0.25-2.0 day range) means that I can just go on tab closing sprees frequently.
I ended up liking this approach because having a zillion open tabs introduces a subtle stress and anxiety that's sort of like when I visit a hoarder.
Sort of like when I'm being a hoarder, for me... :-( Gotta try and learn something like your approach. (I'll do that as soon as I can get around to it, i.e. when I'm done with all the procrastinating that's piling up on my to-do lists.)
On any Ubuntu/debian system this is pretty trivial try using apt install. You've i3 which is an old popular program with a big community. You use it with scripts like dmenu. It's definitely more of a "hacker" setup that your parents probably aren't going to want to use, but if what you are doing is focusing on a few documents, it's hard to beat. It's a lot more complete than floating single windows over your pane of code. The Bonsai implementation is slow in comparison.
There are lots of others like bspwm (even more hardcore), but my favorite anyone can use this tiling window manager is easily pop_os's from System76. When I have to use Windows or Mac and I don't have that functionality it is annoying.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUrvF0Y9AUg
This functionality really should just be built into the OS. The mac equivalent hacks have slowly gotten incorporated into official releases over the years (side by side windows), but they seem to pop up and then die, like Spectacle. If these guys want to do more than just browser documents, what they've got to build is essentially a cross platform tiling window manager. Not easy.
I think the closest you could come to hacking this together is with qtile (py) and you could get pretty close functionality wise.
I've been using Rectangle for ~1.5 years now, and it's been pretty stable and gets regular updates and patches.