[chewzerita]

Okay so I just signed up for the beta of their web browser, why not give it a shot, right?

It turns out that its just a reskin of mobile Firefox, with an extremely, and I mean extremely, limited if-then "extensions" feature. Doing a great job at "showcasing the web's infinite extensibility and customizability".

They also tout the (Firefox's) adblocker, even going as far as to say it will "Block every ad..." on their marketing page (technically impossible).

Just because a company has an orange Y on their homepage doesn't mean their product is good. I'm not saying that it won't be good in the future, but steer clear for now.

Money got us into the mess we are in[1], it is up to the real[2] community to get us out.

[1] Standardized DRM, the impossibility of building a browser engine, etc

[2] By "real" I don't mean corporations that symbolically showcase their "<3 of open source", while profiting off of it

[abhinavsharma]

Thanks for the feedback! As the site mentions, we're still in beta, so feedback is super helpful.

1. Yes, it's forked from Firefox, this is a fairly common starting codebase and compatible license for making a browser, Brave does the same thing. Also, I used to work at Mozilla so I trust their codebase a lot as a starting point.

There's a lot more that Insight can do that Firefox doesn't but that isn't apparent, then I think the onus is on us for communicating that to new users better.

2. The AdBlocking ruleset is actually a superset of Firefox, but it is still limited by Safari's 50k rule limit — https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-neutered-ad-blockers-in-... The main thing we can do to get in addition to this is the ability to inject JS (this is a class of extension) to block anything else you see fit.

3. Apple enforces OS and API level restrictions on a browser, (e.g. must use WKWebView). There's some things you just can't do that you could if you say forked Chromium or Firefox on desktop.

In general, we're trying to make a browser within the UI and technical constraints of iOS that is

1. very easy to build extensions for (usually no code) 2. has an easy to use interface without the complexity of desktop extensions

In order to achieve that, we did have to simplify compared to WebExtensions. Even though the basic interface is IF-THEN (we adopted this so the easiest level of making extensions can be no-code), you should be able to do a lot with it via JS.

Let me know if there's important use cases you have that you have for a mobile browser that you feel is impossible within our framework — that'd be really helpful feedback as well.

Thanks for trying it out!

> Money got us into the mess we are in[1], it is up to the real[2] community to get us out.

I would state this as - enabling businesses to be as extractive as they currently are got us into a difficult place. People I know hold views on what can get us out on the full range from:

a)the solutions having to be structurally decentralized to b) only heavy centralization can wield enough distribution power to mount a strong opposition.

The position we're taking as a startup with this product is that we have to walk the walk of making the web actually more user-centric than the app alternatives because there's really no reason to adopt us unless we deliver on these promises.

[cookiengineer]

What I personally don't understand is why there are literally tons of Firefox forks out there, each on their own claiming to be open without an accessible codebase. And not only that, but also limiting users sometimes even in what they can do with it when they don't pay up.

I understand that money is necessary to survive, but if you claim to be open at least communicate what the money is used for.

Personally I tried to go with foundations and applied to a lot of them, whereas I wasn't accepted anywhere...so now I have to build a company, too, in order to guarantee the project's survival - without accepting foreign money to guarantee its moral baseline, which makes it hard, very hard to bootstrap. [1]

Coming up with a viable working business model for a web browser is harder than someone might think, especially if you need funds to keep your stomach fed.

I'm not saying that it's a good thing what they did, I'm just saying that I understand their problems.

The difference to myself (being seen as a competitor) is that their project will be abandoned once investors get unhappy with their growth, which is a compromise I am never gonna accept if I really care about the "openness" of the web.

[1] https://github.com/tholian-network

[zzo38computer]

I think it is necessary to work to start to actually make a new browser engine from the start, rather than being based on an existing one (except possibly some of the code from NetSurf). I wrote a list of how to make a better web browser (among other things, half of JavaScript DOM APIs are not implemented or are implemented differently, many core features (including some of the definitions of HTML and of the core protocols) are actually included extensions, and extensions would be commonly written in C for efficiency). Some things might not be compatible, but I don't care. I want full control as a user, and I want it for assuming the user has read the documentation and knows how to do it, rather than being stupid and trying to protect the user from themself, better is to allowing you to "have enough ropes to hang yourself and also a few more just in case" like the UNIX philosophy is. (People who don't like that can continue to use the browsers they have.)

I can post the list I have later once I have written a bit more.