Show HN: PolyBrowser goes open source on GitHub. Let’s re-imagine web browsing | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: PolyBrowser goes open source on GitHub. Let’s re-imagine web browsing

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47 pointspolysuite24 comments

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This might be the very thing I need on this big 4k screen.

Edit:

Feedback:

- This logo is way too big. Use logo only, no text. I know what browser I'm on already

- Allow the viewports to snap to the side of the screen

- Allow grid. Right now, I have a lot of websites horizontally but this vertical space is wasted

- Allow me to have a regular search bar

- Allow me to zoom / un-zoom individual viewports

- I feel like the new tab button (+) should open an address bar when I click it, and not a whole new tab to about:newtab. But that's personal opinion

- I can't pin tabs (make them smaller)

- How do I remove Firefox Hello?

- I wish there was a way to view all my open tabs as thumbnails in the main viewport (a bit like about:newtab) and be able to manage them from there (close, reorder)

- Bookmark toolbar should be displayed when I'm in a new tab

- The whole thing is a bit laggy

- I should be able to have a website opened in a tab but hide the viewport (pin tabs?)

- about:newtab breaks on small width displays

- I can't select multiple tabs by holding command key

If you open the menu and select Customize PolyBrowser, you can add the standard Firefox search bar back, and get rid of Firefox Hello. Also, the tabs automatically collapse in size when there get to be too many, reducing the need to "Pin" tabs. Otherwise, thanks for the punch list! Please let us know if you or someone you know would like to contribute to the project on GitHub to help make these features happen.

No problem, this was my first impression. Those are valuable, so I love to make lists out of them.

I added the search bar, but I can't figure out how to make it bigger. It shows correctly in "edit" mode but shrinks to something very small on the actual browser.

As for the pin tab feature, sure, they get smaller (like they would in Chrome) but I usually pin a media player and my email client to the left, in icon format. I let my 10 other tabs at full width. This allows me to ignore the media player altogether unless I need to change the current playlist.

In poly, I wish I could hide those tabs and only have them display when needed. A minimize tab feature, perhaps.

What's almost as interesting as what they've built is that they've built this based on Firefox. It's impressive that the UI can be so thoroughly re-imagined with not that much code (not to say it is a trivial project, or to diminish the work put into it; it's very impressive).

I've never thought "I want a panoramic browser", but I never thought I wanted tabs until I had them, and a dozen other large and small now-mandatory features. I'm looking forward to playing with it, to see if it unlocks usage patterns and new efficiency in the way tabs did. Or, perhaps it'll cure some of the negatives of tabs (losing my train of thought, a tendency to always be multitasking poorly, etc.).

Indeed, we're hoping that PolyBrowser becomes a platform for experimentation in new experiences on the web... We're not tied down to the old "tabbed" paradigm, which opens up some very exciting possibilities!

what I really want is to be able to navigate the web, as 3D stacks of elements with writing on their faces, with a Tron-bike

You will... in the year two thouuuuusand.

As a result format for web search, this could work well on big screens.

With web sites putting all the useful info in a tall, narrow bar, the user can use their screen real estate better. Have a desktop browser tell the sites it's a mobile device with a narrow screen, get the smaller mobile version of the site, and lay the search result out in columns.

The move toward responsive web design works perfectly with PolyBrowser... These days you can resize the website down to a narrow strip and get just the key content. We also have a user-agent switch addon that you can use to retrieve the mobile versions of websites.

You know, I don't consider myself to be OCD, but the thought of scrolling horizontally through webpages that essentially never really align worth a damn on the actual browser window honestly makes me a bit nauseous.

No problem. It's not necessarily for everyone, but it's fantastic for anyone who switches between websites for comparison searches and multitasking.

We're excited to announce that the source code for PolyBrowser, the “Panoramic Web Browser," is now available to the community on GitHub! Please join us in developing the browser of the future, or share the news with your friends and colleagues. Let's re-imagine web browsing, together.

Nice stuff !

3 Qs:

- any keyboard shortcuts ? - any list of all the features (apart from the one listed on the website home) - touchpad usage, hints or doc ?

Keep up the good stuff !

Thanks! We worked hard to maintain all of the keyboard shortcuts that are used in Firefox. See here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts-perf...

Our own (limited) FAQ is here: http://polybrowser.com/faqs

It's fully touchscreen-compatible, and you can pan and pinch/zoom with your fingers.

Am I the only one who thinks this browser looks like a bad toolbar your grandma would install?

We've done design surveys and found that most people like the design. That being said, it's impossible to accommodate everyone's disparate tastes. User-generated custom themes are actually the next feature we're adding.

Does the pan feature work with touchscreens? That would be very, very, very fancy!

It does work on touchscreens! You can also pinch and spread your fingers to zoom out and see everything at once.

I'm not at home right now so I can't test it out, but I'm wondering how heavy it is?

Some website are already hard to render, I wonder what happens when more than one of them are rendered at the same time, side by side!

We've tapped into Firefox's ability to asynchronously render websites, meaning that the load on one website doesn't slow down the rest... That feature isn't even released yet as a standard feature on desktop Firefox, but we are able to tap into it already.

Seems pretty nice, but I'll stick with Firefox + the TreeStyleTabs addon.

We're shooting to add the TreeStyleTabs addon in an upcoming release. PolyBrowser lets you zoom out to see all of your websites at once, so you might want to give it a try anyway.

Someone is going to take the chrome content API (or CEF or something similar) and make this happen and will become very popular (or even better, an "IDE" environment of sorts for browsing w/ good context switching). No, I am not talking about a separate window with hierarchical tabs, I am talking about being able to use some of this horizontal space I have plenty of.

The other barrier (which I guess PolyBrowser suffers from too) is that Chromium is so adamant on separate processes per tab that it becomes painful to use a lot of tabs. I wish they would officially support "--single-process" (doesn't need to be default or anything).

Edit: I see PolyBrowser is in XUL so it's already FF, pardon the comparison.

Well, PolyBrowser is designed to make the most of your screen real-estate, not matter what screen size you have. It automatically utilizes your horizontal space for large monitors, and you can zoom out to fit more on small screens.

PolyBrowser also supports large browsing sessions with better memory manegement than Chromium.

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