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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

The advantage of Min would be the UI, which I find quite appealing myself.

One might argue this should be a fork of Chromium, not Electron. Chromium comes with native tabs and a bunch of other useful parts, without the security issues that Electron exposes.

> One might argue this should be a fork of Chromium, not Electron.

Fair enough point. One reason it's Electron, I assume, is that it's much easier for typical developers to build than forking Chromium. I've been there. I've hacked at building a touchless-controlled browser that uses hand gesture and speech recognition to interact with the web. I can cobble something basic together in Electron, but it's much more intensive to get off the ground forking Chromium (though you're right the native tabs and useful parts would be helpful).

> without the security issues that Electron exposes.

Another reasonable point. For reference, here's an overview of security from Electron itself.[1] Security issues are one reason I haven't pursued the touchless browser more actively. I don't know if it's a dealbreaker, but it's not my area of expertise and I'd need to get seriously up to speed before releasing anything.

From a glance, it does look like Min is trying to follow good security practices, such as having BrowserView webPreferences default to "nodeIntegration: false", "contextIsolation: true", etc.[2] And in the issues the maintainers seem aware of security issues, eg:

> Making internal pages have the same privileges as the browser UI would be nice, although it's kind of difficult to implement. You could add nodeintegration to the webview tag, but I think there's a pretty big risk of accidentaly loading a regular webpage with nodeintegration enabled if we do that, which would be bad.[3]

Ideally there wouldn't be such a large Chromium (and Chromium-based) monopoly on browsers, but overall I'm still glad to see projects like this trying to create different UI options.

[1] https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/tutorial/security

[2] https://github.com/minbrowser/min/blob/7aba03fb645334366f9ec...

[3] https://github.com/minbrowser/min/issues/554#issuecomment-38...

This isn't a fork of Electron. It is an Electron-based app, and as such the Electron project maintains the core functionality of the browser and Min just presents a unified interface and feature set.

They didn't say "fork of Electron", rather Electron is essentially "Chromium - browser UI" so they are saying there is a simplification to be made in an app that is "Chromium - browser UI + browser UI"

> They didn't say "fork of Electron"

Flagging that the phrase "this should be a fork of Chromium, not Electron" is ambiguous between "this shouldn't be a fork of Electron" and "this shouldn't be Electron".

The phrasing is ambiguous, I agree. However, as forking Electron to make Min wouldn't make any sense, and the replier knew this, reading it to mean that seems like a mistake to me. The fact is that it can be very difficult to write things that aren't ambiguous at some level (albeit that isn't the case here), so the reader has to make a good-faith effort to understand.

Fwiw, I read it the same way as nateb2022 at first. It took a second read to realize there was another interpretation. This is why writing is hard!

Firefox's design is more custom than you think.

https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/wiki/Show-Off-Yo... https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/pull/511

I wouldn't be surprised if you could find a add-on to get close to that. I used one for Firefox in the late 00s that gave a similar minimal effect, just not as extreme.

Today browsers are one of the most important pieces of security software on our machine. They have a huge surface area, act as a sandbox for gobs of untrusted code and many of us conduct our most sensitive work in them (online banking etc). I'd be hesitant to use any browser that doesn't have the team behind it to quickly manage threats and maintain high quality code.

Sadly, modern browsers don't allow add-ons to significantly alter the UI, so you'd never see an extension like this today.

You can do some neat stuff with userchrome in Firefox (not as an add-on) but it'll break after basically every update. There's no infrastructure in place to update the userchrome in sync with the browser, and Mozilla appears to be hostile towards the whole feature.

There are decent reasons for all of this, but it means the only way to experiment is to basically make your own app, as Min did.

Check out r/firefoxcss on reddit.

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