from Hacker News

Min: A fast, minimal browser that protects your privacy

by aaossa on 12/14/22, 1:58 PM with 190 comments

• by gwn7 on 12/14/22, 3:31 PM

  Fast, efficient, and battery-friendly browser... So far so good. Based on Electron... What?

  How can it be possible for an Electron based browser to be faster / more efficient / battery-friendlier than the other mainstream ones?

  Sounds like bullshit. We need to see some benchmarks.

• by hestefisk on 12/14/22, 3:30 PM

  Every time I see a new browser with privacy features announced, I get hopeful it’s actually something new. Until I discover it’s another Chromium fork with a different skin. I really wish Servo hadn’t died. Until then, I’ll stick with FF.

• by tiffanyh on 12/14/22, 2:23 PM

  Don’t forgot about https://librewolf.net/

  It’s Firefox with every privacy setting turned to max.

• by thunderbong on 12/14/22, 3:37 PM

  Everyone's comparing this to a regular browser. But since it's electron based, I'm just wondering whether this could be a path to creating a really good browser for development. As of now, most of the debugging that's done on browsers are either based on the tools provided by the browser itself, or via extensions and add-ons.

  I just hope, this kind of paves the way for developers themselves to add features and capabilities.

  Other browsers in this space - Polypane[0], Sizzy[1], Blisk[2]

  [0]: https://polypane.app/ [1]: https://sizzy.co [2]: https://blisk.io

• by jefftk on 12/14/22, 3:25 PM

  Whenever a new browser is announced my first question is if it's a new engine, and if not, what engine is it a UI for?

  In this case it turns out to be built on Electron, which uses the Blink (Chrome's) rendering engine.

• by DrSarez on 12/14/22, 2:38 PM

  "a fast, minimal browser [...] written entirely with CSS and JavaScript using Electron" - That sounds like an oxymoron to me.

• by rexreed on 12/14/22, 2:22 PM

  If you want fast and minimal, give Lynx a try. The original fast, minimal, privacy protected browser: https://lynx.invisible-island.net/current/

• by toyg on 12/14/22, 3:18 PM

  I just use FF and leave the stock OS browser (typically Edge or Safari) "clean", ready for those battery-saving times.

  The other day I only had a 20W laptop charger, which I know is only enough to slow down battery discharge with FF; used Edge, and the battery actually charged significantly. Same experiences I had with Safari. I'll keep using Firefox, because it's good for the ecosystem, but when battery is an issue, I switch.

• by callumprentice on 12/14/22, 3:11 PM

  The Ladybird bowser - part of the Serenity OS - is another alternative I’m following with a mixture of astonishment, admiration and excitement - https://awesomekling.github.io/Ladybird-a-new-cross-platform...

  I suspect that for most people, it still has a way to go before it could be considered a daily driver, but the rate of progress is incredible and I’m sure it will get there.

• by amadeuspagel on 12/14/22, 2:49 PM

  I installed it (yes you can install this right away, the download button doesn't lead you to some signup form!) and played with it a bit.

  It's beautiful, but I feel that chrome has a better beauty/functionality tradeoff. Some differences vs chrome I noted:

  — no favicons

  — no addressbar

  — no skeuomorphic tabs

  All these things make it look more beautiful and elegant then chrome, but less functional.

• by NunoSempere on 12/14/22, 4:47 PM

  Recently I've been playing with Rose, which is a small GTK+Webkit project that I've found really nice to hack on [1]. Src: <https://github.com/mini-rose/rose>

  [1]. And I'm in fact typing this from within it.

• by pipeline_peak on 12/14/22, 8:47 PM

  I hate to be egotistical, I’m sure like many people before me, I had the idea of a reader only browser.

  Of course I never came through with the idea because well…look how much unpaid work goes into it.

  As others have said, I don’t think Electron is well suited for anything to be resource friendly. I think it’s well suited for apps on machines that can afford to run Electron, not something as general purpose as a browser.

  Writing a browser is very hard, but something done in reader mode is clearly more feasible. I wanted to marry FreeText with Gumbo, OpenGL and C++. Maybe even throw in a built in RSS reader that displays the stripped pages. but I have no idea how to get FreeText working with OpenGL.

  I think if I could achieve this, I could get something that’s truly lightweight.

• by bee_rider on 12/14/22, 9:28 PM

  I liked suckles surf (which at least uses webkit2 rather than being yet another chrome). But in the end, the web is too complicated for simple tools, something like Firefox with extensions and stuff to handle downloaded files is pretty helpful.

  It seems quite unfortunate that such large programs are required to handle current web standards. Anything useful could be expressed as text in plain old html, but then, all the bloat needs to be there to pay the bills I guess.

• by therealmarv on 12/14/22, 3:07 PM

  Stay away if you value your security. Nothing personally against Electron but a browser is (or can be) exposed to all kinds of sites which do not have your best interest in mind. You really want always the latest security updates and a browser with a strong security concept (sandbox, encapsulation, taking advantage OS security etc) which is not the aim of Electron afaik.

• by wendyshu on 12/14/22, 6:23 PM

  There needs to be a word for these projects that are a UI layer on top of a preexisting browser engine. Calling it a "new browser" is a little confusing.

• by sprkwd on 12/14/22, 2:19 PM

  Out of the new, new wave of browsers, I'm actually enjoying Arc browser at the moment.

  https://arc.net

• by marosgrego on 12/14/22, 3:09 PM

  Some truly minimal browser: https://www.netsurf-browser.org

• by RubyRidgeRandy on 12/14/22, 3:03 PM

  I tried this out for a little bit. Looks very clean.

  I had these issues and suggestions:

  - Set min to dark mode, but it made no difference. Restarted to no avail.

  - Set all ads to be blocked, still saw a lot of ads on reddit, youtube, others.

  - Design wise, I think the app should default to having borders between tabs.

  - There should be more white space at the top to drag the window around. The app opened maximized and when I went to drag it on windows I could only click the the URL bar because there is only a little bit of padding inbetween it and the top of the window.

  - I have a large monitor and the when you click on the url bar when you have multiple tabs open, it expands to the full window width so the text you were looking at moves all the way to the left, very nitpicky I know, but I think this is not a great design choice and maybe the text should stay where it is when changing sites.

• by bityard on 12/14/22, 5:52 PM

  From reading the headline, I was hopeful that this would be one of my most desired apps that doesn't exist yet: a browser that renders pages in Reader Mode, but all the time.

  Unfortunately this is just a regular browser with "minimal" only meaning practically no UI.

• by incanus77 on 12/14/22, 5:15 PM

  I am a longtime very “Mac person” and don’t like non-Cocoa / standard Mac UI apps, but I used Min for a long while. I went back to Safari once Cloud Tabs stabilized, but Min is just incredibly lean, fast, and reliable. Big fan — and I may yet go back!

• by deliriumchn on 12/14/22, 2:34 PM

  Honestly hard to believe that its a power efficiency focused browser when it uses electron and chromium.

  Besides that, I really enjoy the surge of browsers in last few years, we got orion, min, arc and I guess few more I missed

• by graderjs on 12/14/22, 4:12 PM

  It would be cool if there was a "reference implementation" of the W3C specs on HTML, CSS, JavaScript etc, that was untethered to a particular megacorporation / browser-vendor / ideology / stance on privacy / insert other potentially divisive fracture line here ... and fully open source.

  Then folks could "plug them in" as libraries to their app / custom browser, and go to town adding all the custom ad and spyware or privacy and freedum preserving defenses they like.

  Surely a committed group of open sourcers on GitHub could achieve this.

• by column on 12/14/22, 2:40 PM

  Moving the window is harder than it should be, the main tab takes all the width therefore you have to aim on top of it but not to high... Altdrag to the request, but still rather frustrating

• by dang on 12/14/22, 8:27 PM

  Related:

  Min – A smarter web browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15429286 - Oct 2017 (72 comments)

  Show HN: Min – web browser with better search and built-in ad blocking - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11484770 - April 2016 (91 comments)

• by tholdem on 12/15/22, 8:33 AM

  One reason why mainstream web browsers are slow and "bulky" and use a lot of RAM is that they use all sorts of different exploit mitigation and hardening techniques.

  One can only wonder what these alternatives do when they claim to be minimal and fast and worse, private. Can there really be privacy without security?

• by dfex on 12/15/22, 2:01 AM

  Feels very snappy, but for me it's a non-starter: rejects connection to any site with a self-signed certificate, with no apparent means of override.

  I get the security stance, but I configure a LOT of networking hardware via WebUI (eg: Palo Alto firewalls - self-signed from the factory) and this makes it next to useless.

• by ryanianian on 12/14/22, 2:06 PM

  > Or search through the full text of every page you've visited, even if you don't remember the title.

  Is that a feature of the underlying browser engine or an addon? I've wanted that for years but maybe not enough to fiddle with an entirely new browser app.

• by benrapscallion on 12/14/22, 2:52 PM

  FWIW, I love Lynx on my Mac, especially for ad-heavy websites. I miss the "in browser" services that brow.sh [1] used to provide.

  [1] https://www.brow.sh

• by mikl on 12/14/22, 9:56 PM

  Looks nice, but since they can’t be bothered to get the Mac app properly signed, I can’t be bothered to try it.

  Sorry, but with the malware threat level being what it is, getting the app signatures right is table stakes.

• by nothrowaways on 12/14/22, 3:34 PM

  I like the minimalist UI, it should be a default other browsers too.

• by lopkeny12ko on 12/14/22, 4:09 PM

  > browser that protects your privacy

  It's Chromium under the hood. No thanks.

• by mackrevinack on 12/15/22, 10:01 AM

  tried this recently but like most alternative browsers, if it doesnt have support for ublock or dark reader then im usually back to firefox after a day or so.

  theres also another extension that i cant think of the name. it adds the url to the title of the window so that keepass/autotype can detect what site it is.

  i have a few other extensions but i would be willing to forego them if the browser was that good

• by posharma on 12/14/22, 6:00 PM

  All software products start like this - minimal, less memory, etc. Wait for a few months and things go south. Sorry, doesn’t excite me.

• by ThinkBeat on 12/14/22, 11:07 PM

  Would this mean that the browser gets security updates far slower than Chromium itself?

  Or is Electron updates as frequently?

• by nalekberov on 12/14/22, 2:04 PM

  Browser running in browser, not bad, not bad at all.

• by xnacly on 12/14/22, 2:04 PM

  A browser in electron? At this point just use chromium - makes no difference.

  Anyway, use firefox or librewolf. Stop enabling the chromium monopoly!

• by jmondi on 12/14/22, 2:11 PM

  Everyone is complaining it is built in electron, and it is a browser running a browser. Brave is also built on electron and is also a browser running a browser.

• by Maursault on 12/14/22, 2:06 PM

  Which OS versions are supported?

• by sshine on 12/14/22, 2:23 PM

  Electron, WebKit, nope.

  Kudos for experimenting with minimalism!

  But this is not the alternative to Firefox I've been looking for.

• by wereallterrrist on 12/14/22, 3:05 PM

  Just... give Firefox a shot people. Please: https://i.imgur.com/81OpEOy.png