Cool New Browsers
For a while browsers where a bit of a boring application.
There wasn’t really much variation between them and even further back it was risky using one that wasn’t either Chrome, Firefox or Safari because some websites might not even work properly.
Now there’s a ton of browsers that are pretty un-usual, super usable and offer more than just a bit of a different way to render tabs.
1. Bonsai
Bonsai’s a wicked little browser that works with a hot-key. You can open it whatever you’re doing and it’ll hover over your other work for quick reference.
You can switch it to either side of your view, have it fullscreen and (in a later update) has a nice tagging system for you to save your bookmarks and search for them.
I’m using this browser at the moment every day at work as weirdly a kind of second-browser. It’s super-useful for checking Jira and other ticket-like Kanban boards.
2. Min
Min is a really classy looking minimal browser. It also uses a tagging system for bookmarks like Bonsai, but its main draw is that it has no address bar or anything else to distract you from what you’re looking at.
It uses a system called Tasks which lets you run a group of tabs together which you can switch between all at once, a bit like the concept of sessions in apps like tmux.
It also has this nice way of matching it’s toolbar with the current page’s colour scheme.
3. Qutebrowser
This is a supercool browser that works 100% using the keyboard. It has vim-like mappings (huge bonus for me) and also has a really minimal interface. It’s an open source project that’s been running for a few years now and I can’t believe I’ve only just come across it.
It has a really nice system for pressing on screen links without touching your mouse. Just press “f” and every link on screen gets a little overlay telling you what you can press next to choose each link.
If anyone uses Vim you might know this is just like a great plugin called Vim Snipe.
You can even select text by searching for it then pressing “v” to enter select mode and choosing letters just like you would in Vim.
Then you just press “y” to yank (copy) it.
This one’s a huge contender to become my daily driver.
4. Brave
Bit of an obvious one by now I think, although if you’ve not heard of it there’s no shame in it but definitely check it out.
Brave was developed by Brenden Eich (who created Javascript btw). It has a built-in ad-blocker and loads of nice privacy features. It also has it’s own crypto wallet built-in, as well as Tor (…somehow).
Brave is basically Chrome underneath so it works with all the same extensions as Chrome and is pretty reliable for front end development as well.
A huge perk for Brave is, if you install it on your phone it’ll block ads without you having to do anything hacky to it (like install another app to wrap it in or something).
It’s quite recently been given a video conferencing feature, that’s free for up to 4 people. I’ve not tried this yet but that’s pretty amazing.
I’ve been using Brave daily for the past 4 or 5 years, it’s awesome.
