from Hacker News

Ghost Browser

by nichodges on 8/12/16, 5:38 AM with 46 comments

  • by danso on 8/12/16, 7:54 AM

    Just out of curiousity: how many people here use Google Chrome's multiple-user feature? Non-techie people generally don't know about it, but I'm surprised I don't see it being used by the (few) webdevs I know personally.

    I have a Chrome user account attached to my main Gmail account. I've created another Chrome user account that's tied to my school email, so that I can keep school-related things isolated to that account. But I can operate both Chrome account simulataneously without issue or conflict; I just set the theme of my school-focused browser to match the school colors. It takes very little effort and so I wonder what's the point of using a separate niche browser?

    The multiple Chrome user system is especially useful for web development. I'm not a fan of having 20 webdevs plugins (such as React's special debugger) running on everything that I visit. So I make a new Chrome user just for dev plugins, with the devtools configured exactly as I need them. Sometimes when I'm debugging a live site, I need a stock browser experience (I.e. No Adblock)...so that gets its own Chrome user. You don't have to set up a new Google account to create a Chrome user; that's only necessary if you want your plugins/settings to be stored in the cloud. Otherwise it's literally a 3-click process to create new users and switch between them.

  • by gggggggg on 8/12/16, 6:37 AM

    Google cache view http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

    edit: Not sure why this got a down vote. Site is offline. Cache view will help.

  • by sankha93 on 8/12/16, 7:02 AM

    Firefox Nightly has Container Tabs [1] which have different sessions even though they are a part of the same widow. Also the tabs are colour coded to show that they are different containers.

    [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/tanvi/2016/06/16/contextual-identit...

  • by andreineculau on 8/12/16, 8:36 AM

    In 2016, a browser that needs not only an account registration, but a registration disguised as a "beta invite" (i.e. will send you download links to your email) is nothing but a bad joke and a waste of time.

  • by red_admiral on 8/12/16, 7:34 AM

    A chromium derivative whose key selling point is that it makes something a bit easier which the base version can already do, but you need to sign up for one of their "limited beta invites"? Hmm ... totally doesn't sound like snake oil.

  • by tener on 8/12/16, 7:10 AM

    Nicely done but claims like this:

    > Increase productivity 200% or more

    are dodgy. Where did they get this number from?

  • by robin_reala on 8/12/16, 9:12 AM

    Ghost Browser is built on Chromium so it already works like your favorite browser

    I wonder how they got a Firefox compatibility mode into Chromium?

  • by mrmondo on 8/12/16, 6:58 AM

    The sites dead but I hope this isn't just another javascript application based on another browser.

    Edit: got to it via google cache, looks like it's just based on chromium, didn't check to see if it had more JavaScript in it though as it didn't do anything to interest me.

    I'd love to see a completely newly written browser in Go, C or Swift that is written from the ground up with security and privacy as it's key concern followed by speed. It'd need to be quite modular by design so that security components could easily be upgraded over time and so that new web technologies could be added as they appear. Multi-process, addon (if any) sand boxing and local to-a-directory synchronisation would be wonderful.

  • by rvern on 8/12/16, 5:20 PM

    You can get the same functionality in Firefox by setting privacy.userContext.enabled to true in about:config. Enjoy.

    (More information: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Contextual_Identity_Projec...)

  • by marknadal on 8/12/16, 7:50 AM

    RE: "Error establishing a database connection", oh jolly - I did a whole talk on this. http://video.webcamp.si/wc2016_nadal_the_frontend_backend_wi...

    RE: Ghost. The landing page looks gorgeous, great job! Not being able to download the browser is kind of silly - especially when it is an app (not a service) that is built ontop of Chromium.

  • by Nullabillity on 8/12/16, 6:49 AM

    But... can't Chrome can already do this?

  • by wiredfool on 8/12/16, 8:33 AM

    Is there a way, using something like the virtualization api on OS X, to have a fully separate browser with no write access to the file system? Looking for something like incognito mode, but with stronger sandboxing, but without some of the flash api restrictions that it has.

  • by dredmorbius on 8/12/16, 7:21 AM

  • by joebergeron on 8/12/16, 10:10 AM

    >> "Stop wrestling with multiple browsers."

    Is this a problem many people actually have? Genuinely curious, don't mean to belittle their efforts.

    Although, do we need a brand new browser? How does it compare in terms of performance?

  • by batiudrami on 8/12/16, 6:53 AM

    This seems like quite a niche feature to build and market a browser around.

  • by bobajeff on 8/12/16, 12:43 PM

    With the name I thought this was going to be a browser focused on privacy and removing digital fingerprints.

    What a disappointing waste of good name and trademark.

  • by sleepychu on 8/12/16, 9:53 AM

    Is this a different browser (fork?) or is it a chrome extension?