I made a browser alone and barely got any users | Hacker News Reader

I made a browser alone and barely got any users

kagerou.glass

5 pointskageroumado8 comments

I’ve been an Arc user for a long time, and grew very used to its horizontal tabs and other features. Once it became abandoned, I, like many others, decided to search for an alternative. There were no real alternative. So I spent months making myself a browser that would look and feel like I want it to feel.

The entire project is made from zero, the only dependency it uses is WebKit itself. Looking through obscure undocumented functions and sometimes using Apple’s private frameworks to achieve effects others don’t even try.

And then I presented it to the world, and the world largely ignored it. I tried various channels, but it seems like asking people to switch browsers is just too much. It basically traumatized me and I lost interest in the project.

I hope this post will get more popular and more people can try the browser. I’d be grateful of someone reposted it on platforms like Reddit as I don’t have the karma to post in most subreddits and got insta banned once I tried.

You can download it for free, it’s simple, elegant, and tries to be what Safari should’ve been.

Distribution is a challenge, but there is also much prior art for how to solve it. From what I can tell you didn't do any of those things. Regular product update changelogs are what inspire trust that a product as critical as a browser will stick around for the long term. There's also an expectation that something like a browser is open-source and on Github, where it's very easy to see release history and how actively developed the project is. After all, you don't seem to have the institutional backing that would justify a closed-source browser.

Without any of that, there's no reason for people to just click download on an untrusted website and then use that software for the kind of sensitive tasks that are commonplace inside a web browser. Like it or not, you have to consider the user's perspective here.

Yes, I agree with you. It’s my first project of this scale and distribution isn’t something I’m good at. Hopefully, the open source version will have a better future

The browser is now open-source at https://github.com/kageroumado/refrax-browser/

As easy as it seems to switch browsers, they can be pretty sticky. I find that especially true now, where it’s hard to go all-in on a browser that doesn’t sync between devices.

It’s ok to not have millions of uses. OmniWeb was released for NeXTSTEP back in 1995 and came to the Mac as NeXT was absorbed by Apple. It never saw huge commercial success (as far as I know) and I saw an interview with Ken Case recently that mentioned he still uses it and keeps it updated, mostly for himself, though the builds are available for free for anyone else who might want it. Similarly, Linus Torvalds maintains uEmacs just because it’s what he’s used to and he recommends no one else use it.

If it strikes a chord and catches on, that is awesome, but even if it’s just for you and you enjoy it, you’re in good company maintaining a project that works exactly how you want.

I wasn’t a huge Arc fan, so it’s not for me, but I’m happy to see more browsers existing that aren’t built on Chromium. If you aren’t interested in maintaining it due to the lack of users and are ok with a Firefox engine with an Arc-like UI, the Zen browser maybe an option. I think that’s what a lot of former Arc users went to.

Browsers are hard because the switching cost is high even when people like the idea. “Looks interesting” is far from “I will replace my daily browser with it.”

Because you've not done anything new, you made yet another Webkit-based browser - and there's plenty of them out there. Sorry, but no one cares.

If you wrote own HTML/CSS/JS engine and targeted Linux (without using GTK), I'll be interested. Like that guy who actually made his own browser recently... unfortunately he chose to use GTK so that was an instant turn-off.

No source code? Was it "you alone" or "you alone (with Claude)"?

You and me both, BTW... Trust is at an all-time low these days, it seems.

I’ll open source it

Reply on news.ycombinator.com