Web Browser A web browser.

Project Source

Apr 24, 2019-Jul 4, 2022

Summary

I tend to have lots of tabs open. This project was an experiment in building a web browser that made managing tabs effortless.

Goals

I wanted a web browser I could use myself. Some ideas I wanted to play with:

• What if pages opened in narrow “mobile” views by default? Lots of web-pages are dense and packed with information. What if we only expanded the tab into desktop-mode as necessary?
• What if we had tabs on the left in a scrollable view?
• Tab screenshots?
• Nested tabs?
• What if the tab UI was text-based and interacting with tabs resembled WorkFlowy? You could rename tabs, add notes, put tabs in folders, and it all feels as fluid as if you were just typing text in a text editor?

Solution

I used Electron.js for the basics, and I used create-react-app.

Learnings

I learned that building a web browser using JS and Electron was a tricky proposition. Electron wasn’t designed for making web browsers.

Electron.js also didn’t support Chrome extensions.

Stack