I love the spatial organization. I, not even five or six hours ago, had made a note on my iPhone describing something just like it (except where you would get to the spatial organization view by dragging down the bar at the top of the window). My thought was that we (humans) can remember spaces quite well, and certainly much better than we can track a tab's location in an ever-expanding list. IMO, spatial organization should replace bookmarks (and tabs should be treated as bookmarks unless the user has interacted with them since the browser was opened. Maybe I use tabs in a weird way).

Will definitely have to give this a try when it makes its way to other operating systems.

It just so happens I was thinking about spatial org just yesterday, that it would be so nice if I can have 'villages' of tabs on a (geographical) Map. Amazing co-incidence that I woke up to bonsai browser notification!

You might find The Humane Representation of Thought[1] by Bret Victor[2] useful, where he demonstrates by example, how existing tools/software (generally speaking) doesn't utilize all the 'superpowers' that we acquired via evolution.

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[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agOdP2Bmieg

[2]: http://worrydream.com

Edit - grammatical fixes

> when it makes its way to other operating systems.

know you're referring to browser, but an OS - I think Oberon - had desktop as much larger than screen leading to ability to zoom around and create piles of windows

Active Object System / Bluebottle (2002) is the version of Oberon you might be thinking of. But many did it before that - the first variants go back to the early 70's at least.

Innovative? I have been using qutebrowser for a while, and don't see the appeal of this. I just press a binding, start typing the name of the tab (fuzzy), get the list of matches, choose and there I am. As a basic example among many. Nyxt is just as powerful, if not more.

If you like visual layouts like the one offered then OK, but not me, I think it's distracting and unnecessary.

BTW the headline is blown af

Just because it's not useful or innovative to you, doesn't mean it isn't to others.

It's always good to have more players in this game and to me what they are trying to do seems more approachable than the examples you showed.

> It's always good to have more players in this game

I agree with your overall points but this but stood out to me because it's not clear if Bonsai uses its own rendering engine of it is just another reskin of Blink / Chromium. What we really need is more competition with browsers which use their own rendering engines. Or at the very least, more browsers using Gecko (Firefox). If this is another Chromium-based browser then it's still definitely good to see some new ideas in UI but we don't really see much other benefit having more players in the game.

What worries me the most is that this is closed source but presented as if it is open source. Their binaries are stored on Github but there's literally nothing in the repo aside a README (https://github.com/hyferg/bonsai-browser-public). This is of particular concern given the sensitive content that people use browsers for these days (banking, shopping, research on potentially sensitive topics, etc). It would be trivial for a malicious browser to do some real damage to people and there's no way to prove this browser's intentions are sincere given how little information (ie "none") is published about its developers or even the code.

Yes - agree with you, more players in the Browser engine space would be good.

I'm mainly using Firefox, but it's really becoming a resource hog and making my laptop fan spin more violently. I have a lot of tabs open.

But innovation in how to manage lots of tabs is welcome and this is what these guys seem to address too.

I'll edit the readme of that repo to make it more clear. We're distributing the browser off of github so we don't have to pay for download bandwidth and because it integrates with our CI.

Our website got 1TB of traffic yesterday (which it turns out I have to pay for) and thats without hosting the binary on our site!

Your website is a static page. You should put that behind CloudFlare (or similar) and get them to handle the traffic for you.

We're hosting 15mb of video files on that landing page. Netlify says we've had 2.2 TB of transfer out but dividing those numbers gives many more uniques than we've seen in the landing page analytics :/

If anyone's interested, it is likely that the missing traffic is coming from people with blocker scripts that prevent analytics. I've moved the media files from the landing page over to a S3 bucket behind Cloudflare as suggested.

> not useful or innovative to you,

the message wasn't about me or you, it was about browser space

> I think it's distracting

I'm confused why the thread got so much upvotes, and a lot of comments made me more confused. Not trying to be rude, but I don't really understand the usefulness ..

I'm an avid qutebrowser user too! Thanks for introducing me to Nyxt. I'm curious, why are you using qutebrowser if Nyxt is _at least_ as powerful as QB?

Nyxt is more extensible due to CL, which I like. However qutebrowser is working just fine for me so far and I didn't like how some things worked out of the box in Nyxt, and was too lazy to customize them.

Got it. Thanks.

Is that the same as ctrl-shift-a in Chrome?

Can't say, not using Chrome, but I wouldn't be surprised. It does seem like a no brainer to have in a browser, along with tab groups (which qutebrowser currently seems to lack).

You can also just search tabs directly in the address bar (though then intermingled with other matches)

Not sure if you’re truly always that pedantic or if you are some sort of troll. Good for you that you enjoy something different, but I doubt anyone thinks “I think this is innovative, but let me check with maydup first because he knows it all”.

> Not sure if you’re truly always that pedantic or if you are some sort of troll

wat? I responded to this:

> this is the most innovative thing in the browser space for a long while

I simply mentioned how there have been some other browsers for a while that have an equivalent feature set, therefore this isn't so innovative.

The fucking snowflakes. Where every opinion must be cherished and never argued with.

I think you confused what I mean. I was asking if you were always pedantic. I said nothing about not starting a debate. It’s the way you communicate, not what you communicate.

Your tone makes it seem like you just want to toot your own horn and not like you want to actually have a conversation about the topic.

Maybe you could’ve said “there is this other application that I’ve been using that’s been out for a while and has innovated the browser in similar ways, check it out”

Do whatever you want, I just think you might promote healthier conversations if you don’t come across as pedantic. Unless you’re a troll or proud of your tone, either way, thanks for your time.

Well, when something is presented as innovative, while it's really not (given the context of "browser space"), and you say so, how is it pedantry? There was an overenthusiastic false statement, and I responded to it accordingly, that's all.

I'm surprised to see you so excited about this. Have you used tiling window managers? What does this and a rofi or similar component not have, or a gnome3 script? Not as convenient, yeah.

The big concern I would have if I were these guys is their magic is their UI, apparently, and they've given it away. If they truly have something good, it's some Electron windows inside a gui kit. Not to understate the work, but the work is ahead of them, too.

I've been griping about the tedium of trying to organize tabs (and to a lesser extent bookmarks) for a long time. I typically have hundreds of tabs open and my sanity maintenance method is to keep their number under 256. They're somewhat organized with tab groups but the overhead of managing them is a huge pain point for me. So the visual categorization and search looks like a huge win. I don't care that much about the other stuff tbh :)

Visual organizational tools are very important to me. Even if I'm in the IDE and thinking in code, when I jump tot eh browser for something I want the experience to visual and low-friction, so I don't have to push brower things onto my mental stack, which will slow me down when I want to switch back to the IDE.

I'm very good at remembering where things are, I can pick up a book I haven't touched in months and remember the page I was on, or the last sentence I read to find my place with a few seconds. On the other hand, large scale sorting and rearranging tasks are miserable drudgery so I have a lot of stacks and my bookshelves are, ah, suboptimal.

I'm not sure if this is helpful to you, but at some point I realized that I was using "open tab" to represent many different things. Once I started naming the uses, I realized that I could shift them to use-related systems. E.g., a "to read" tab gets fed to Instapaper and closed. a "to do" tab ends up on a relevant Kanban board. A "I might want to be able to find this again" tab goes into Pinboard. Tabs that are basically apps I want to keep open get turned into apps.

That, combined with relatively small units of work (most of my kanban cards are in the 0.25-2.0 day range) means that I can just go on tab closing sprees frequently.

I ended up liking this approach because having a zillion open tabs introduces a subtle stress and anxiety that's sort of like when I visit a hoarder.

I like the idea of de-convoluting purpose from the information-pile, and indeed there is some weight associated with the thousand-something tabs I have open across multiple computers because they're all "open loops" in some form or another. When I try to deal with it, I often feel resistance to relying on cloud-based services, since it takes a while to get everything you want into that system, and there's the "what-if" questions about service longevity and if they allow exporting complete backups of the data you put in, etc. Certainly doing nothing about it doesn't help though. I do at least make sure my browser application data folders are part of my file-level backups.

> I ended up liking this approach because having a zillion open tabs introduces a subtle stress and anxiety that's sort of like when I visit a hoarder.

Sort of like when I'm being a hoarder, for me... :-( Gotta try and learn something like your approach. (I'll do that as soon as I can get around to it, i.e. when I'm done with all the procrastinating that's piling up on my to-do lists.)

Speaking as someone who often communicates before considering whether the people I'm speaking to share my background knowledge... this might be a more effective message if you ask "have you tried ____?"

Sure, I know this sounds like well-actually anyway, but I tried to soften it by not asking "have you not used..."?

On any Ubuntu/debian system this is pretty trivial try using apt install. You've i3 which is an old popular program with a big community. You use it with scripts like dmenu. It's definitely more of a "hacker" setup that your parents probably aren't going to want to use, but if what you are doing is focusing on a few documents, it's hard to beat. It's a lot more complete than floating single windows over your pane of code. The Bonsai implementation is slow in comparison.

There are lots of others like bspwm (even more hardcore), but my favorite anyone can use this tiling window manager is easily pop_os's from System76. When I have to use Windows or Mac and I don't have that functionality it is annoying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUrvF0Y9AUg

This functionality really should just be built into the OS. The mac equivalent hacks have slowly gotten incorporated into official releases over the years (side by side windows), but they seem to pop up and then die, like Spectacle. If these guys want to do more than just browser documents, what they've got to build is essentially a cross platform tiling window manager. Not easy.

I think the closest you could come to hacking this together is with qtile (py) and you could get pretty close functionality wise.

http://www.qtile.org/

Spectacle has been succeeded by Rectangle: https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle

I've been using Rectangle for ~1.5 years now, and it's been pretty stable and gets regular updates and patches.