[HN Gopher] Bonsai Browser is now open source
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Bonsai Browser is now open source
Author : pps
Score : 103 points
Date : 2022-07-01 13:23 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| loeg wrote:
| When I saw the headline, I thought it was talking about
| BonziBuddy, a classic browser add-on from the 90s:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy .
| doubled112 wrote:
| Back when anything that tracked your online movements was
| spyware, and you fought against it, found tools to remove it,
| and avoided it.
|
| Now it is the norm.
| tekeous wrote:
| and they don't even have the guts to give us a nice purple
| gorilla
| dewey wrote:
| Based on https://twitter.com/BonsaiDesk and
| https://bonsaidesk.com which don't seem related to a browser at
| all I'd guess they pivoted to some other product (YC backed after
| all) and instead of throwing the code away are open sourcing it.
| Nothing wrong with that.
| noja wrote:
| Not related to BonziBuddy.
| Closi wrote:
| Great that they have gone open-source, but whatever this project
| is, their github page and their website are some of the worst I
| have ever seen from a communications perspective!
|
| I have absolutely no clue what on earth a browser for programmers
| is and why it would help me to 'think clearly'.
|
| Contrast to Firefox and Chrome websites - both of which have a
| screenshot on their landing page.
| hinkley wrote:
| I was privy to a conversation a couple years ago that got out
| of control, shortly after our peacekeeper left the team, and I
| was feeling a little too much in agreement with one of the
| participants A to step in and shut it down even though he was
| winding B up something fierce.
|
| The apex of the argument came down to documentation quality,
| and at first I thought this conversation was over and A won a
| bunch of points. I forgot about it for almost a year and then
| it came back into my brain, moved into the upstairs room, and
| has been trying not to pay rent ever since. And this is what is
| playing in a loop in my head: What if your
| documentation isn't shit because you are bad at explaining
| things. What if your documentation is shit because
| you're bad at writing code that can be explained?
|
| I was really excited about this thread until I read your reply.
| And now all I can think is 'why is their documentation bad?'
| prejudging it before even looking at it.
| nescioquid wrote:
| I like how you turn a phrase, though I fear some manner of
| contact-tracing is in order now. The next time I see bad
| documentation, I'll be thinking of your comment, wondering if
| it wasn't an aborted attempt at explaining the unexplainable.
| shoo wrote:
| Another place this pops up is documentation for processes in
| a business -- this could be a process for onboarding or
| compliance rituals or (hopefully not) deployment. Perhaps a
| business group has a process that is taught to new
| individuals who join the group through shadowing or song or
| dance, it is part of the folklore and rich and vibrant spoken
| cultural tradition of the group, but has never been written
| down. Then someone attempts to document it, and the result is
| confusing.
|
| What if the process documentation isn't confusing and stupid
| because the author is bad at explaining things - what if the
| process documentation is stupid because the process is stupid
| and needs to be changed.
|
| Another approach to this kind of thing is to reverse the
| sequence of "do it", "document it" steps and draft a rough
| version of the documentation up-front as part of an initial
| design, while it is cheaper to change the process or system,
| before work is done to implement it and roll it out.
| ss48 wrote:
| This was a video walkthrough of the browser from a while back.
| I agree the communication on the github and website page need
| to improve a lot.
|
| https://www.loom.com/share/93c7c0012f514c37b58a42fa65badc88
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28446147
| bongobingo1 wrote:
| What the dickens, this looks great. Grouping by domain is a
| great idea along with the workspaces.
| ss48 wrote:
| That's been one of my favorite features in Safari: sorting
| tabs by website.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-organize-tabs-in-
| safa...
| capableweb wrote:
| > Grouping by domain
|
| I basically do this already with Firefox and TreeStyleTabs
| (but ad-hoc). Any middle mouse/ctrl+click I do on a link,
| opens in a new tab nested under the current one. So all HN
| stuff is under one tab that is collapsed, all GitHub stuff
| is under one and so one. Really effective when you do
| research, as you can do the initial search on Google, then
| every result you open goes under the existing tab, which is
| conveniently labeled via the <title> tag on the Google
| page.
| m12k wrote:
| That actually look pretty neat - I've wanted for a while now
| for my browser to be more "research" oriented, with ways of
| grouping all those related tabs that are all trying to answer
| the same question, or represent the same line of inquery.
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| Trying to workout how this relates to the core product of
| this startup (3D game UX analytics).
| nequo wrote:
| Maybe it was their internal tooling?
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| Presumably, but it seems most of the work in to improving
| the productivity of certain web browsing workflows.
|
| It may help improve some tasks, but not exactly core
| product stuff.
|
| If my capital were on the line, I'd be pretty annoyed
| seeing it spent that way.
| azeirah wrote:
| They're just two dudes trying out stuff.
| Cyberdog wrote:
| > Prerequisites: nodejs
|
| Oh my God, it's a browser written in JavaScript.
|
| Yo dawg, I herd you like slow, obnoxious "web applications..."
| JasonFruit wrote:
| "Is now open source!" is the new hot way to say "We quit." Open
| sourcing software you decided not to bother maintaining anymore
| is better than nothing, yes, but without a community devoted
| enough to it to keep it up to date, it's not much better than
| dead and gone.
| Semaphor wrote:
| This is a lot of negativity considering that when companies
| shut down products there are often many outcries of "just open
| source it so at least someone else can work on it if they want
| to". _Shutting down_ like this should be applauded and
| encouraged.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| A lot of people have responded that way to what I wrote, but
| I didn't really mean it as negativity. I'm glad that they
| opened it before abandoning it, but I'm trying to emphasize
| that that is at best a first step for this project. Without
| someone willing to follow up by maintaining it, it's still
| dead. The tone of these announcements lately has not
| reflected that reality.
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| I don't know why you're framing that like a bad thing. I'd love
| if it became an industry standard. Even if no one decides to
| maintain it, at least there's an option, rather than taking the
| software to the grave.
| ericraio wrote:
| Thankfully, it's MIT licensed and someone can innovate on top
| of this.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Not _that_ new, Xara, Watcom, and Palm's Binder among others
| are much earlier examples, but this particular spin seems to be
| recent. While I dislike it as much as I do any other instance
| of spin, in terms of preservation I'd argue it _is_ much better
| than dead and gone. It's hilariously hard to find some pieces
| of 20-year-old-software, even those from major, still-extant
| publishers that were freely redistributable and supposedly
| mirrored all over various FTP sites (anybody got a copy of
| Wx86[1] for the Alpha? :). I shudder to think how hard it's
| going to be to locate things from this era of online updates
| and no download links a decade or two hence.
|
| [1] http://retro.ircx.net.pl/nt/mips/wx86/
| tomcam wrote:
| > Open sourcing software you decided not to bother maintaining
| anymore is better than nothing
|
| Sometimes our only option is between two awful choices. I'm
| grateful they open-sourced. Browsers are hard.
| mdaniel wrote:
| > Browsers are hard.
|
| I'm guessing that's why this is in electron, thus I'm
| guessing it's for browsing something but isn't a "web
| browser": https://github.com/Bonsai-Desk/bonsai-
| browser/blob/2d7a08568...
|
| ed: I just saw the loom URL below, so it's as much a "web
| browser" as embedding an ancient version of electron can be.
| Good for those who want both old software and lack of
| extensions, I guess
| donatj wrote:
| The number of times a company shutting down and a software no
| longer being available has completely broken my workflow, this
| should be a requirement.
| hinkley wrote:
| I think in all of my years in software only one customer has
| ever demanded that we keep our code in escrow.
|
| And the interesting thing about arrangements like that is
| that there's usually some extra money involved in such an
| arrangement, enough that we might turn a little profit off of
| it, reducing the odds that the customer ever needs to use
| that clause.
| solarkraft wrote:
| I don't mind. For me the product has just begun existing.
|
| Maybe companies considering quitting should try open-sourcing
| before they shut down and see what good will and free marketing
| it yields.
| webmobdev wrote:
| Open sourcing a software you have no intention to maintain is
| definitely better than keeping it closed source and preventing
| its distribution. If copyright laws weren't so screwed up a law
| / regulation could have been made mandating that all software /
| code that is no longer being maintained should be automatically
| open sourced (or become automatically open source after 20-25
| years).
| hedora wrote:
| I thought you were being overly-negative, but:
|
| > _Bonsai Browser is no longer being actively developed, but
| contributions are welcome_
| mdaniel wrote:
| I wonder if that almost guarantees "my PR has been open 3
| years without action" :-(
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Time to fork...
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Show HN: Web browser to help programmers think clearly_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28446147 - Sept 2021 (226
| comments)
| network2592 wrote:
| When I hear browser for programmers, I tend to think of text
| based browsers like w3m or lynx - not this.
| bruhhh wrote:
| yah I'm not creating an account to use a browser, hard pass
| johnwheeler wrote:
| No screenshots to be found...
| spicybright wrote:
| The website is atrocious too. It explains nothing and takes up
| multiple pages to write three sentences.
|
| I'm going to get a bit sassy here, but it's probably the worst
| information website I've seen so far. They couldn't even write
| one paragraph of what the software actually does?
|
| If this was the state of things no wonder it failed...
| benbristow wrote:
| Apparently open-source, but I need to login to use it still (at
| least going by the Windows version)?
| bruhhh wrote:
| big red flag
| solarkraft wrote:
| Browser innovation is a big deal. There are very few "real"
| (usable daily) browsers with interesting UX concepts due to the
| complexity of embedding a browser engine and keeping it up to
| date (yes, including with Electron).
|
| So this is great, even if only from that perspective! Maybe as a
| base to work from.
|
| I'm not sure I agree with all of the design concepts, but I'll
| definitely call it _interesting_ - finally something legitimately
| new! That 's great to see, specially in this (somewhat
| surprisingly) stagnant field.
|
| (Source: Tried to find some way to get a version of Chromium with
| tree style tabs. All options I found were bad. )
| capableweb wrote:
| > (Source: Tried to find some way to get a version of Chromium
| with tree style tabs. All options I found were bad. )
|
| Give Firefox a try! Revolutionary features such as: Extensions
| can actually change the browser chrome! TreeStyleTabs is a
| extension I can't live without, another one is "container tabs"
| to separate things a bit more. Ad blocking extensions also will
| continue working in Firefox, compared to Chrome which are
| slowly limiting their usefulness.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Firefox also has that tags feature (advertised on Bonsai's
| home page) baked in too.
|
| I used it multiple times a day as it's ridiculously handy.
| LionTamer wrote:
| > Ad blocking extensions also will continue working in
| Firefox, compared to Chrome which are slowly limiting their
| usefulness.
|
| What do you mean?
| kasbah wrote:
| https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/chrome-
| extens...
| capableweb wrote:
| There are many issues with the proposed Manifest V3, but
| the relevant part is that extensions will no longer be able
| to have full control over requests, so ad/tracking blockers
| will be less efficient at their job. From EFF:
|
| > As the name suggests, the new declarativeNetRequest API
| is declarative. Today, extensions can intercept every
| request that a web page makes, and decide what to do with
| each one on the fly. But a declarative API requires
| developers to define what their extension will do with
| specific requests ahead of time, choosing from a limited
| set of rules implemented by the browser. Gone is the
| ability to run sophisticated functions that decide what to
| do with each individual request. If your extension needs to
| process requests in a way that isn't covered by the
| existing rules, you just can't do it.
|
| https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/googles-
| manifest-v3-st...
| jeffalyanak wrote:
| I'm just waiting until Bonsai Buddy goes open source.
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(page generated 2022-07-01 23:00 UTC)