Veera: India's First Homegrown Browser | Hacker News Reader

Veera: India's First Homegrown Browser

veera.com

12 pointsthunderbong14 comments

Given that there is a team of suits behind this thing I wouldn't be surprised if this thing is riddled with sponsored content in 6 months.

Just look at bloatware apps like Glance in India, or current crop of Redmi/Vivo phones to see the future of this.

It's pretty simple. No one is going to pay for this when Chrome is free. Only people who will pay for a browser are tech enthusiasts and this is doing a terrible job of targetting them. They gotta make money somehow in the end.

If they can get the attention of a sufficiently well-connected person, they can probably scam their way into patronage via some form of bundling either via a well-connected private entity or government.

"Most-favoured browser of the RSS" or some similar gross nonsense.

Well, it's better than ISIS

A closed source android only browser with ad blocking builtin made by a for profit startup. Will allow its own promotional ads though, unless you explicitly opt out.

It seems worse by almost every metric when you compare it to firefox with ublock origin.

why would anyone use this?

It seems worse than even Chrome for that matter.

The shell may be homegrown, but the browser engine is Chromium.

These days, there has been a lot of push from the government and banks to teach security best practices to the common internet users in India. Looking at the website, I'm curious why is a browser serving "Tailor Made Content?"

> Leave the generic content on the generic browsers. Get that VIP experience with tailored content that truly matters to you.

By the way, this is just Android with no immediate Desktop/iOS versions. So, unfortunately, I cannot try out the browser. The thing with India is that we skipped the desktop/computer era and frog-jumped into the fiery bosom of the Internet with all the bad actors baked in. Everyone is left to learn on the job and fend for themselves.

Here is a website that is serving as an example to avoid scams - http://winlotterywin.in (this is everywhere these days and this one is not harmful).

you just said "this site is not harmful" after other reasonable words, yet.. How can that be verified? there is no certificate (not a problem to me) but, anything with gambling in the name is almost certainly tracking at least.. if not worse. Gambling is a club for predators.. clicking on a site is an invitation to walk into the living room with predators..

mixed messages in this post

The website is indeed an advertised examples put up by these common effort called out in banners, advertisements, call-outs, etc to - not click that kind of a website or links. Of course there will be curious people (including me) that will click or type in the website to see what is it. I did and the website is indeed there but the content tell you that this is indeed a sample website, hence this example being just that -- an example.

Utter scam that just hops on the new "homegrown" trend to make a quick buck

Website fails to explain how it is better than existing top browsers? Just because it's Indian made is not enough of a reason to switch.

Gives me scammy, data being stolen vibes

Not surprised to see some familiar names in it.

"brave_100_percent.pak","chrome_100_percent.pak", "libchrome.so"

Is it based on Chromium?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com