Bonsai Browser is now open source | Hacker News Reader

Bonsai Browser is now open source

github.com

146 pointspps62 comments

Browser innovation is a big deal. There are very few "real" (usable daily) browsers with interesting UX concepts due to the complexity of embedding a browser engine and keeping it up to date (yes, including with Electron).

So this is great, even if only from that perspective! Maybe as a base to work from.

I'm not sure I agree with all of the design concepts, but I'll definitely call it interesting - finally something legitimately new! That's great to see, specially in this (somewhat surprisingly) stagnant field.

(Source: Tried to find some way to get a version of Chromium with tree style tabs. All options I found were bad. )

> (Source: Tried to find some way to get a version of Chromium with tree style tabs. All options I found were bad. )

Give Firefox a try! Revolutionary features such as: Extensions can actually change the browser chrome! TreeStyleTabs is a extension I can't live without, another one is "container tabs" to separate things a bit more. Ad blocking extensions also will continue working in Firefox, compared to Chrome which are slowly limiting their usefulness.

Firefox also has that tags feature (advertised on Bonsai’s home page) baked in too.

I used it multiple times a day as it’s ridiculously handy.

I had to look it up, but I guess this is what you are referring to:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/categorizing-bookmarks-...

Yeah. It’s really easy to use set and intuitive to use. The only caveat is you still need to bookmark the site. But that makes a lot of sense when you think about it (how else are you going to catalogue the sites?).

> Ad blocking extensions also will continue working in Firefox, compared to Chrome which are slowly limiting their usefulness.

What do you mean?

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/chrome-extens...

There are many issues with the proposed Manifest V3, but the relevant part is that extensions will no longer be able to have full control over requests, so ad/tracking blockers will be less efficient at their job. From EFF:

> As the name suggests, the new declarativeNetRequest API is declarative. Today, extensions can intercept every request that a web page makes, and decide what to do with each one on the fly. But a declarative API requires developers to define what their extension will do with specific requests ahead of time, choosing from a limited set of rules implemented by the browser. Gone is the ability to run sophisticated functions that decide what to do with each individual request. If your extension needs to process requests in a way that isn’t covered by the existing rules, you just can’t do it.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/googles-manifest-v3-st...

I'm a Firefox user because it has tree style tabs (Sidebery). I used to make a point out of using it for browser diversity but Mozilla has lost all of my good will and more.

Just because I'm curious, which browser has TreeStyleTabs (or similar) and also more good will than Mozilla? I can't figure out what you would be using today, if not Firefox. For me, Mozilla is the lesser of N evils when it comes to browsers, and I get TreeStyleTabs.

When I saw the headline, I thought it was talking about BonziBuddy, a classic browser add-on from the 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy .

Back when anything that tracked your online movements was spyware, and you fought against it, found tools to remove it, and avoided it.

Now it is the norm.

and they don’t even have the guts to give us a nice purple gorilla

I'm sure you'll be able to buy a bonzai buddy skin in the metaverse

For the low price of $2.99 per month, billed annually.

Based on https://twitter.com/BonsaiDesk and https://bonsaidesk.com which don't seem related to a browser at all I'd guess they pivoted to some other product (YC backed after all) and instead of throwing the code away are open sourcing it. Nothing wrong with that.

> Prerequisites: nodejs

Oh my God, it's a browser written in JavaScript.

Yo dawg, I herd you like slow, obnoxious "web applications…"

There are hundreds of thousands of lines of JS making up the "browser" parts of the app known as Firefox.

"Written in JavaScript" is not the thing that tends to make web apps slow. It's all the terrible "best practices" associated with the NPM ecosystem that causes that. You can generally sidestep the performance problems by just not programming in that style.

Show HN: Web browser to help programmers think clearly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28446147 - Sept 2021 (226 comments)

Great that they have gone open-source, but whatever this project is, their github page and their website are some of the worst I have ever seen from a communications perspective!

I have absolutely no clue what on earth a browser for programmers is and why it would help me to 'think clearly'.

Contrast to Firefox and Chrome websites - both of which have a screenshot on their landing page.

This was a video walkthrough of the browser from a while back. I agree the communication on the github and website page need to improve a lot.

https://www.loom.com/share/93c7c0012f514c37b58a42fa65badc88

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28446147

That actually look pretty neat - I've wanted for a while now for my browser to be more "research" oriented, with ways of grouping all those related tabs that are all trying to answer the same question, or represent the same line of inquery.

Trying to workout how this relates to the core product of this startup (3D game UX analytics).

Maybe it was their internal tooling?

Presumably, but it seems most of the work in to improving the productivity of certain web browsing workflows.

It may help improve some tasks, but not exactly core product stuff.

If my capital were on the line, I’d be pretty annoyed seeing it spent that way.

They're just two dudes trying out stuff.

> If my capital were on the line, I’d be pretty annoyed seeing it spent that way.

I think you'll find you get a lot of mileage out of taking those particular glasses off from time to time.

What the dickens, this looks great. Grouping by domain is a great idea along with the workspaces.

> Grouping by domain

I basically do this already with Firefox and TreeStyleTabs (but ad-hoc). Any middle mouse/ctrl+click I do on a link, opens in a new tab nested under the current one. So all HN stuff is under one tab that is collapsed, all GitHub stuff is under one and so one. Really effective when you do research, as you can do the initial search on Google, then every result you open goes under the existing tab, which is conveniently labeled via the <title> tag on the Google page.

That's been one of my favorite features in Safari: sorting tabs by website.

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-organize-tabs-in-safa...

I was privy to a conversation a couple years ago that got out of control, shortly after our peacekeeper left the team, and I was feeling a little too much in agreement with one of the participants A to step in and shut it down even though he was winding B up something fierce.

The apex of the argument came down to documentation quality, and at first I thought this conversation was over and A won a bunch of points. I forgot about it for almost a year and then it came back into my brain, moved into the upstairs room, and has been trying not to pay rent ever since. And this is what is playing in a loop in my head:

    What if your documentation isn't shit because you are bad at explaining things.
    What if your documentation is shit because you're bad at writing code that can be explained?

I was really excited about this thread until I read your reply. And now all I can think is 'why is their documentation bad?' prejudging it before even looking at it.

I like how you turn a phrase, though I fear some manner of contact-tracing is in order now. The next time I see bad documentation, I'll be thinking of your comment, wondering if it wasn't an aborted attempt at explaining the unexplainable.

Another place this pops up is documentation for processes in a business -- this could be a process for onboarding or compliance rituals or (hopefully not) deployment. Perhaps a business group has a process that is taught to new individuals who join the group through shadowing or song or dance, it is part of the folklore and rich and vibrant spoken cultural tradition of the group, but has never been written down. Then someone attempts to document it, and the result is confusing.

What if the process documentation isn't confusing and stupid because the author is bad at explaining things - what if the process documentation is stupid because the process is stupid and needs to be changed.

Another approach to this kind of thing is to reverse the sequence of "do it", "document it" steps and draft a rough version of the documentation up-front as part of an initial design, while it is cheaper to change the process or system, before work is done to implement it and roll it out.

I sat with two teams that had SEI process forced on them, and both of them had their sabres out before the proponent even opened their mouth.

Both groups fell into child-like glee when it was explained to them that SEI level 1 involves writing down your current process as it actually exists. Which meant they got to describe the dumb stuff they'd been putting up with for years, with various degrees of tongue-in-cheek humor, satire, and sarcasm.

- Send boss email

- wait 2 hours for reply

- bug boss about email

- find out IT Guy already left for the day

- Resume process in the morning

Things like that, and a good time was had by all.

In regulated environments there are potential disadvantages to documenting the current adhoc process in all its glorious confusion -- we may be audited to see if how the group operates in practice adheres to the letter of the documented process. If the culture is particularly compliance-oriented, then perhaps we end up "I'm sorry, to comply with our documented process, we can't proceed to step 5 until after the IT guy has returned to work. Since he's still at work today we'd better pause until he clocks off then returns tomorrow".

What you talk about last is referred to as documentation driven development or readme driven development

I think it's great for greenfield work. Forget existing solutions, if you were looking for a solution, write out how you'd ideally like it to work, after it's written, figure out if you can create something that works like that

This reinforces my notion that when there is no documentation, it's because no one has a clue what is going on.

"Is now open source!" is the new hot way to say "We quit." Open sourcing software you decided not to bother maintaining anymore is better than nothing, yes, but without a community devoted enough to it to keep it up to date, it's not much better than dead and gone.

Thankfully, it's MIT licensed and someone can innovate on top of this.

Open sourcing a software you have no intention to maintain is definitely better than keeping it closed source and preventing its distribution. If copyright laws weren't so screwed up a law / regulation could have been made mandating that all software / code that is no longer being maintained should be automatically open sourced (or become automatically open source after 20-25 years).

I thought you were being overly-negative, but:

> Bonsai Browser is no longer being actively developed, but contributions are welcome

I wonder if that almost guarantees "my PR has been open 3 years without action" :-(

Time to fork...

Not that new, Xara, Watcom, and Palm’s Binder among others are much earlier examples, but this particular spin seems to be recent. While I dislike it as much as I do any other instance of spin, in terms of preservation I’d argue it is much better than dead and gone. It’s hilariously hard to find some pieces of 20-year-old-software, even those from major, still-extant publishers that were freely redistributable and supposedly mirrored all over various FTP sites (anybody got a copy of Wx86[1] for the Alpha? :). I shudder to think how hard it’s going to be to locate things from this era of online updates and no download links a decade or two hence.

[1] http://retro.ircx.net.pl/nt/mips/wx86/

This is a lot of negativity considering that when companies shut down products there are often many outcries of "just open source it so at least someone else can work on it if they want to". Shutting down like this should be applauded and encouraged.

A lot of people have responded that way to what I wrote, but I didn't really mean it as negativity. I'm glad that they opened it before abandoning it, but I'm trying to emphasize that that is at best a first step for this project. Without someone willing to follow up by maintaining it, it's still dead. The tone of these announcements lately has not reflected that reality.

> Open sourcing software you decided not to bother maintaining anymore is better than nothing

Sometimes our only option is between two awful choices. I’m grateful they open-sourced. Browsers are hard.

> Browsers are hard.

I'm guessing that's why this is in electron, thus I'm guessing it's for browsing something but isn't a "web browser": https://github.com/Bonsai-Desk/bonsai-browser/blob/2d7a08568...

ed: I just saw the loom URL below, so it's as much a "web browser" as embedding an ancient version of electron can be. Good for those who want both old software and lack of extensions, I guess

I don't know why you're framing that like a bad thing. I'd love if it became an industry standard. Even if no one decides to maintain it, at least there's an option, rather than taking the software to the grave.

I don't mind. For me the product has just begun existing.

Maybe companies considering quitting should try open-sourcing before they shut down and see what good will and free marketing it yields.

The number of times a company shutting down and a software no longer being available has completely broken my workflow, this should be a requirement.

I think in all of my years in software only one customer has ever demanded that we keep our code in escrow.

And the interesting thing about arrangements like that is that there's usually some extra money involved in such an arrangement, enough that we might turn a little profit off of it, reducing the odds that the customer ever needs to use that clause.

Whenever I start a project I usually look for some open source equivalent for inspiration even if it's not maintained. We opened up bonsai in case someone else comes along and wants to understand how we did a few things. There are some fun hacks we had to do to make certain things work around overlaying the main window on macOS that might be helpful for other electron apps.

When I hear browser for programmers, I tend to think of text based browsers like w3m or lynx - not this.

Apparently open-source, but I need to login to use it still (at least going by the Windows version)?

big red flag

No screenshots to be found…

The website is atrocious too. It explains nothing and takes up multiple pages to write three sentences.

I'm going to get a bit sassy here, but it's probably the worst information website I've seen so far. They couldn't even write one paragraph of what the software actually does?

If this was the state of things no wonder it failed...

Requiring an account to use a browser is a hard no, sorry...

yah I'm not creating an account to use a browser, hard pass

Not related to BonziBuddy.

I'm just waiting until Bonsai Buddy goes open source.

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