Show HN: Min – web browser with better search and built-in ad blocking

[gkya]

For a truly minimalistic browser with support for modern HTML and a serious orientation towards security, see xombrero at https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/xombrero . It provides fine-grained whitelisting for plugins, js and cookies, and options for enabling/disabling many other security/privacy-critical features, like 3rd party cookies, referrers, etc. The same guys also have made AdSuck, which blocks ads at the DNS level.

These tools do not have the eye-candy that Min has though. Kudos for the design, it's indeed lovely.

[ryan-c]

Xombrero seems to be unmaintained and has severe security problems. It's HTTPS implementation is vulnerable to MitM script injection.

See my post here: https://rya.nc/https-script.html

[dpfu]

For a truly truly minimal browser (albeit without support for modern HTML) check out the Dillo browser [1], in active development since 1999 [2]!

If all you need is to render HTML, it's tiny and fast. It supports HTTPS and no JavaScript (so you don't need NoScript for that ;)

[1] http://www.dillo.org [2] http://hg.dillo.org/dillo/raw-file/default/ChangeLog

[ymse]

I really enjoyed "dwb" until the author abandoned it late 2014. Now they seem to have picked up development again(!):

http://portix.bitbucket.org/dwb/

It's fully keyboard driven (to the extent possible) and has a decent amount of extensions, including ad blocking and a great requestpolicy manager for controlling 3rd party requests.

[Sir_Cmpwn]

I found uzbl after I told a friend about xombrero:

http://www.uzbl.org/

[asb]

If you like Vim keybindings, check out qutebrowser, which currently has a crowdfunding campaign to update it to make use of the newer QtWebEngine backend https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/qutebrowser-a-keyboard-fo...

[symtos]

xombrero depends on webkit. truly minimal? right. oriented towards security? have you not seen how WebKit does security? they wait for dozens of reported vulns before patching/disclosing. nothing that depends on webkit can ever be considered "oriented towards security"

[yoavm]

When I hover the "Download" button, a message saying "OS X 10.10 is required" appears, but when I click the button I get a .deb file. Did I miss OS X switching to Apt?

EDIT: This seems to happen only with the bottom download button, and only on my desktop (Firefox, Arch Linux). On my phone the button says it's available for Ubuntu too. I guess it's just a bug with recognizing the user-agent string or something.

[FussyZeus]

Looks like they fixed this. For the top button anyway.

[mike-cardwell]

"Tabs you haven’t looked at in a while dim, so you can focus on what you’re working on" - I like the sound of this. Is anyone aware of a Firefox addon which does the same?

[Mahn]

On that note, how come that (almost) no browser vendor is experimenting with better UIs for tabs? It seems that they have remained the exact same for the last decade in both Firefox and Chrome. I get that they are functional for the casual user, but for those of us that live and work in the browser we could use more functionality. I could picture for example grouping/ungrouping tabs in a single window, bundling similar tabs, changing the color of the tab depending on how often it's used, a better way to nagivate between multiple browser windows (or "super tabs"), etc.

You could argue that you should rely on extensions if you are power user, but then with the trend that Chrome has set (and now Firefox follows) of extensions being small web apps packaged with an icon, there's not a lot extensions can do to fundamentally change how browser tabs works. Whether tabs become smarter and more functionally rich depends almost exclusively on whether Google, Mozilla or Microsoft decide to experiment it.

[pawsthebear]

Basic userstyle / userchrome css:

  #TabsToolbar tab:not([selected="true"]) {
    background: pink !important;
    transition-property: background-color !important;
    transition-duration: 15s !important;
    transition-delay: 5s !important;
  }

Just tested seems to work fine. Might need some tweaking with

  #TabsToolbar .tabbrowser-tab:hover:not([selected]) { ... }

etc.

[skrowl]

Try Bartab Plus - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bartab-plus/

Bartab Plus can actually completely unload a tab after X amount of minutes / hours. The tab is dimmed and comes back / reloads automatically when you click on it.

This along with tab groups - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-pa... allows you to have hundreds of tabs at your fingertips across any number of groups, without paying the performance impact of having them all actually loaded at once.

[danielhellier]

And on that note, anyone aware if a Chrome extension does this?

[chocolateboy]

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bartab-lite/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-unload-t...

[john_reel]

You may want to look into BarTab

[cha5m]

Serious props to you for making a web browser. That is legitimately impressive.

However I feel like most people won't be willing to sacrifice the feature support, stability and security that a larger browser can provide for a potentially better experience.

If this was made by a single person you should really do a write up about the development process. I think many people would also be interested in that.

[lucideer]

It's built on Electron[0] which is built on Chromium, so it's very much building on the work of a larger browser and just adding a (seemingly) very different UI experience.

[0] http://electron.atom.io/

[xaduha]

You're trying to praise something, but it ends up as an insult of sorts, because you haven't made a slightest effort to figure out what's before you.

[amelius]

Am I the only one who thinks that "tabs" should really be handled by the window manager, rather than by the application?

[mikegerwitz]

I don't think so: I have a number of programs that support tabs or multiple groups of windows in some form, including my editors (Emacs/Vim), browser (GNU IceCat), and terminal multiplexer (GNU screen). It can be argued that each of those are window managers in their own right, but what this does is provide distinct points of context that I can switch between and ignore.

I also use a tiling window manager (Xmonad); it would not be realistic for my window manager to handle tabbing, as that would prevent me from tiling my browser.

I also have dozens (sometimes hundreds) of tabs open in my browser, which I arrange hierarchically using the Tree Style Tab addon, which I find incredibly useful and essential to how I use and understand the Web (...and my train of thought as to how I got 10 levels deep into Wikipedia and various other sites while trying to research something completely unrelated...).

I'm not saying that this rationale works for everyone; this is what works for me, and I like it.

[4ndr3vv]

There are far too many times a day that I find myself hitting > alt-tab > sigh > shift-alt-tab > ctrl-tab

I'm not a "keep all the tabs open forever" person, so having the ability to shift this to the O/S would be great. Can see why this would be sub-optimal for someone who regularly has 30+ plus tabs open at once.

[cytzol]

The key thing is being able to open a tab/window in the background, when everything I know of automatically tries to bring any new window to the front. But I do agree with your point: every application seems to be re-inventing its own window/tab/document management instead of using the ones provided by the OS. I used to use Firefox with Tree Style Tabs, but then I found out that having multiple windows full of tabs was good enough, and I can use the OS to just arrange the windows without needing to arrange the tabs therein.

[oftenwrong]

I feel the same way. Like many people who would agree, I use a highly configurable tiling window manager. I have convenient hotkeys for switching and re-arranging windows. I don't want to have to switch into my browser, and then switch mental modes to a different set of controls for switching and re-arranging tabs.

I have not tried any tabless setups yet, though. For a browser I use iceweasel/firefox with pentadactyl, so I can hit `b` and switch tabs by number or search by tab title.

[reustle]

Isn't that what windows are, if you choose to use them?

[aakilfernandes]

Does Min (along with Brave) do ad blocking at a different layer than plugins? Is there any advantage to having the browser do it instead of something like uBlock Origin in chrome?

[gorhill]

In Min, it's still javascript[1].

Also, by the look of it, the current implementation in Min is very inefficient: for every network request, all the filters will be evaluated to check for a match.

Statistically, on average the majority of network requests are no match, and in the current implementation, no match means having iterated through all the filters, thus a significant overhead added to every single network request.

Furthermore, the evaluation of wildcard-based filters is itself quite inefficient: every time a wildcard-based filter is evaluated, an array of substrings is created and discarded.

[1] https://github.com/PalmerAL/min/blob/master/ext/abp-filter-p...

[calgoo]

A web browser in a web browser :) Is that like a Turing test for web browsers? Something like compiling your language in your own language.

[Retr0spectrum]

Where does it say it's a web browser in a web browser?

[vblord]

I will say it's awesome that someone has the time/ability to make a web browser... even if it doesn't support everything yet.

I do have a general question for the programmers out there... just to see what people's stance is on the topic. If a programmer builds something and wants to make money off of it, one very common way is using ads. I was wondering if programmers are for or against a tool like this that integrates ad blocking. I have no bias either way, I was just curious.

[dkopi]

Ad blocking is just part of the game we have to play. If users are willing to go out of their way just to avoid seeing your ads, they aren't going to be clicking on them even if you find a way to show them ads no matter what.

One thing to keep in mind is that even if a user is using ad blocking, it doesn't necessarily make him worthless to your business. Users still share, invite friends, and help drive traffic to your product. And they're especially valuable if there's a network effect to your product.

[cha5m]

I mean tons of programmers make things for free just because. There is tons of software out there made by people who will never earn a cent off it.

[RodericDay]

I think advertising is immoral and predatory, so I'm very okay with ad-blocking.

[noobie]

Eh, On Ubuntu 15.10 backspace doesn't work and there are no buttons to navigate, no way to close a tab as well. Am I missing something?

Edit: Ctrl + W closes the current tab.

[lobster_johnson]

Haven't looked at it yet, but a tip for the OP:

After clicking the download link, the page displays a message describing how to get around the Mac security check.

There's an easier way: Right-click on the Min app in Finder and select Open. This time the Mac security dialog will show an Open button, allowing you to override the security check. No need to go into System Preferences.

[CameronBanga]

Or ideally support OS X code signing. :)

OP, I'm guessing you're reading. If you need help with that, feel free to email (addy in profile). Sweet project, just wish it had proper signing.

[minbrowser]

OK, thanks, I'll change that.

[skykooler]

I notice that the way tabs are displayed is by drawing the top in some color from the page, and showing the active tab in a lighter shade of that color. The issue is, sometimes the color is white, so the active tab doesn't stand out - I wonder if it could switch to a darker color in that case?

[minbrowser]

Filed https://github.com/PalmerAL/min/issues/20 about this.

[tedmiston]

This is really cool.

A couple years ago, when some browsers still had tabbed windows as an option that could be disabled, I tried browsing with only one tab at a time and found it quite refreshing.

Does anyone know of a browser today with a similar "feature"?

[minbrowser]

Min has this feature, actually. Go to the view menu, and there is an option labeled "focus mode" that limits you to one tab.

[yashafromrussia]

I really like the direction this browser is going in. I noticed I cannot go back/next using a mouse or keyboard (though i can imagine one would be able to swipe to do that).

[emmet]

Am I the only one having real trouble with navigation? I can't figure out how to go back, and closing a tab is cmd-w which requires me to be in that tab? Odd setup.

[egeozcan]

I'd like to have this, only with no tabs support but with access to extensions of chrome. That would be perfect.

[phusion]

Requires OSX or Ubuntu? Damn it, well, it looks interesting...

[quarterto]

It's using Electron, so there shouldn't be much of a barrier to a Windows version (or other Linux)

[rrggrr]

I really like this a lot. Let me open tabs in the background.

[moondowner]

Nice to see deb packages.

[wcummings]

I've been using eww (the emacs web browser) for reading docs, I highly recommend it. DDG is the default search engine. Plus you can display the docs right next to your code :)