Show HN: PolyBrowser 1.0 – A new way to browse the web. What do you think? | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: PolyBrowser 1.0 – A new way to browse the web. What do you think?

polybrowser.com

44 pointspolysuite43 comments

We’re proud to announce the “Version 1.0” release of PolyBrowser, which represents a culmination of years of work combined with community support and feedback. We feel that latest release brings together the speed, features and user experience needed to successfully introduce PolyBrowser to the world.

For those who are new, PolyBrowser is a “Panoramic Web Browser,” meaning that it stitches your websites together, side-by-side, like a panoramic photo. You can zoom out to see all of your websites at once, or zoom in to see the details, plus much more. PolyBrowser enables you to browse faster by breaking free of the limitations of current tabbed browsers.

I'm writing this comment from a PolyBrowser tab :)

First of all - great job on shipping! This looks great for a first version, and I think it has good potential.

Granted I've only been using it for about 10 minutes, here is some feedback I have so far. I am using a fairly new Macbook Pro.

* panning between tabs is quite jittery and I get lots of jank when scrolling in general (vertical-in-tab or horizontal-between-tabs). Optimizing this might have been low on the list but I think it would make a huge difference in experience if it were smooth and snappy. I have a decent machine so I don't think it is a hardware constraint.

* The interface is a bit bulky, and layout can be improved, and I feel there is some wasted real estate. It may be a challenge to have visual cues for separation, but simplifying and cleaning up a bit would go a long way.

* When I focus on a text box or otherwise click on a tab, you should bring it into view. I understand there is a good use case for typing something while viewing another tab - but not if I cant see anything at all.

* Probably just an issue for folks with a Mac gesture pad, but the swiping to pan from tab-to-tab also triggers the back action for a page. Probably need to override the browser action and continue panning since that's the action I started with.

Thats all for now! Thanks.

Thanks for the thorough review. All excellent points! You're right, we focused on getting everything as reasonably polished as possible before launching version 1.0, so that we could expand the audience and get more feedback (just like this). :)

I'm kind of a broken person, I can't use a web browser without getting distracted if it doesn't have vim bindings. This kind of browser really doesn't lend itself to that.

I don't see how this browser will ever suit me or people like me, which is kind of a problem; how do you expect random non-techhy people to discover this if the techhy people don't move first?

I do like the idea. I find myself wishing I could do a vsplit/split in pentadactyl all the time... So much so that I've considered moving to something like surf with i3. But it's not worth it because none of them are polished enough.

I'd like to see Mozilla really take a stab at integrating pentadactyl-like behavior into their new development browser they're creating. One thing that's really interesting to me is that in recent years (~5ish) we've seen a real split in terms of the browser that developers prefer. I think someone can take that market if they did it well.

> how do you expect random non-techhy people to discover this if the techhy people don't move first?

I feel like non-techy people would be much easier to convince to try a new browser than techy people, especially ones so deeply entrenched in things like vim bindings. There's just a much smaller change involved going from a normal browser in a stock consumer OS like Windows to this than going from something like using vim bindings to this.

I like the idea you've developed here, it's a really interesting take on the multi-page browser interface.

However after testing your browser, I think I'm probably not your target audience as I primarily use a rather old laptop with trackpad only (no mouse) and a screen that isn't touch sensitive, which didn't lend itself to an easy experience of the panning and zoom controls - right-click and drag is unwieldy for me regardless of the target software.

Apart from that, just a minor comment on your website code - the Google Fonts stylesheet link element should reference the https rather than http link. Otherwise Chrome refuses to load it: https://i.imgur.com/GaW3Vay.png.

Also this is possibly a transient Cloudflare problem, but I received this error on first visiting the website: https://i.imgur.com/inugvt0.png. It resolved itself upon refreshing the page.

Thanks for trying PolyBrowser. We were shooting to make PolyBrowser work even on setups like yours (trackpad, no mouse). You can still use Ctrl +/- to zoom in and out, and Control Tab to switch tabs, plus drag with the right mouse button. Thanks so much for the screenshots of those issues!

Looks interesting. Wondering about the performance of it. But it definitely looks cool to have tabs next to each other instead of individually. I tend to have two windows open a lot of the time, but the current browsers don't optimize this use case.

As I'm mainly a Linux user, I'm wondering though: is a Linux build planned (in a near future) ?

Definitely! For the first release, we had to focus on the biggest bang (Mac/Win) but Linux is coming (as soon as we can).

Nice! I hope the linux release don't take so long.

Tried it on my MacBook Pro 17, Yosemite.

1) I agree with the other comments, UX/UI improvement is needed.

2) Sometime when I try to 'swipe' from my trackpad, it does 'to previous page' on the tab, which is not active - next to the active tab. (two tabs opened only - when it happened, didn't try with more tabs)

3) Scrolling/Swiping speed optimisation :)

Looking forward for more updates! Thnx!

Any site I try to navigate to throws the error that the site isn't trusted (gmail.com ???). I click the "Add Exception", and then nothing happens. I'm not able to open ANY website.

Love the concept, hopefully you can get this bug worked out. It's probably because of my companies EXTREMELY strict firewall and proxy...

We haven't experienced that issue, even behind corporate firewalls, but will look into it. Thanks!

Anything logged on my end that I could send to you? (Edit: can't navigate to your Feedback/Support page either)

If you could send screenshots of the error, that would be perfect. Send to (email removed).

email containing screenshot is en route.

Your company is man-in-the-middling all of your HTTPS connections. They probably have their own certificate for their MITM-ing proxy installed in your operating system or browser's trust store. This browser is not using that certificate.

Can't wait to get home to try it on my Windows 8.1 tablet. Looks like the ideal browsing solution for touchscreens.

What layout engine is it using?

Gecko. It's based on Firefox.

So it should be open source, right?

Wasn't able to find anything on their website.

Gecko is MPL - so can be mixed with proprietary code.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Public_License

Yes, all the parts that are MPL licensed (the vast majority of the browser, minus their frontend) need to have their source code released. As far as I can tell, they are currently violating the license.

EDIT: Found the source code release here, so they are fine: https://polybrowser.com/faqs/where-can-i-download-the-source...

Some interesting ideas here.

One thing I noted in a quick play with it on Windows: if you right-drag outside the window, it doesn't get the mouse-up event and you have to right click in the window again to stop it panning.

Thanks yangyang. Yes, that's an open issue that we're working on fixing.

PolyBrowser is trending on Product Hunt... http://www.producthunt.com/posts/polybrowser Check it out!

Wow, this is most definitely interesting! Is it optimized, though? Are all tabs active at once?

Also, I wonder, is this idea original or was there any attempts at making something similar to this before?

Yes, it's optimized for running multiple websites simultaneously. All tabs are visible and running, but whatever you click on becomes the "active" tab, which helps with resources. Also, non-visible tabs aren't rendered by your video card.

We didn't base this designed on any previous ideas. There have been some other attempts to solve similar problems (tile tabs, etc) but nothing that we felt quite "hit it."

Can you configure it to force all tabs to use only the space of one screen - essentially as a tiling manager? I don't want to lose context when looking at other tabs.

There are still "tabs" that jump you to the chosen website, which always drop you in the correct place (centered on screen) so you don't lose context. The only difference is that if the website is smaller than your screen size, you will see the neighboring websites to the side.

I really like the side-by-side navigation - felt much better than tabs!!!!

The rest of the browser needs a lot of work tho. It needs to run faster and look much better.

Seems that it fails to complete downloading, at least for me. Both Chrome and IE complain about download being interrupted/network error.

There is a mirror download link on the download page (hosted on Dropbox) if you are having download issues. Hopefully that works. Please let us know if you still have issues so that we can set up an alternative. Thanks!

Tried both, same thing. I'll try again later :).

Ctrl + click doesn't open links in new tabs. Cool idea, but this totally kills it for me.

Suggestion: Create a Twitter account to follow the updates!

I couldn't find a license. Is it open source?

Hi chris-at, the open source license is discussed on our website here: https://polybrowser.com/faqs/where-can-i-download-the-source...

So it is open-source, but the poly-specific source can't be modified, just reviewed?

Interesting concept.

search in the sidebar...circa 1999

Hey, everything comes back around eventually. ;) No denying that it saves space, and we are going for a search experience that maximizes screen real estate.

looks good. nice to see that people are still trying to rethink objects that have been around for years.

The outcome of "what if the web looked like our Trello board!?!" A question no one should have asked or answered.

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