minbrowser
An update on this project
Hey everyone,
As you may have noticed, I haven’t been very active in updating this project recently, and I wanted to give a short overview of what’s happening.
The summary is: Going forward, I will continue updating Min to new versions of Chromium and providing bug fixes. I intend for this project to remain stable and usable well into the future, and I am happy to review any PRs that are opened. However, I don’t plan to spend time working on new features.
A bit of background:
A few weeks from now will mark 10 years since the first commit to Min. When I first started this project, I had no idea that the desire for a minimalist browser was shared by anyone else. With very little marketing other than a Hacker News post, this project grew far beyond my expectations. Just a few months ago, we reached 1 million lifetime downloads of Min.
When I started this project, I was a student with no professional experience. Learning to work in open source has been an incredible experience, and is a huge factor in allowing me to have a career in software today. I’m very grateful to everyone who’s contributed code or sponsorship to this project over the years, as well as the maintainers of Electron; you all have made this project something very special.
However, life has gotten a lot busier for me since I started this project, and it’s much harder for me to find time today to work on it. In addition, I’ve frankly developed some degree of burnout; after spending so long on this project, I no longer have the same level of passion for it that I once did, and I think it’s time for me to find other challenges to work on.
I know that if I asked, there are likely people who would be willing to take over maintenance of this project. However, I also know that browsers are highly security-sensitive, and there are thousands of users who trust this software with their personal information. It’s very difficult to develop the degree of trust that would be required to hand over control of this project and ensure that a new maintainer would have good intentions.
At the same time, there’s never been a better time to build new browsers. Since this project was started, the Electron platform has continuously become more stable and more powerful. AI has the potential to completely change how people use browsers; no one has quite succeeded at building the perfect AI-browser integration yet, and there’s a ton of uncertainty about what that will look like. And there is increasing regulatory scrutiny on browser engines, which could dramatically change the financial model behind most commercial browsers.
As I mentioned, I will continue to maintain this project and ensure that it remains functional and secure, and for anyone who wants to contribute to this project, you are still welcome to do so. However, if you think you can build the next generation of browsers, now is a great time to fork this project, and I look forward to seeing what other ideas are out there to build on Min. I think there’s a lot of potential to continue building a browser that’s distraction-free, that’s efficient, and that helps you get things done faster. I look forward to seeing what you create!
Oh damn, I should have asked for the flatpak package sooner 😅
Anyway, thanks for making this rare gem - Min is really a refreshing way to browse the web, pure joy to use. It's really impressive how many cool ideas you've managed to pack into such a neat little app. I hope I can keep using it for the foreseeable future 😊 (Btw, I have set Min as default on my old Celeron netbook with 2GB RAM and it's hands down the best-running browser the machine ever had 😁 so thanks for keeping that little heart beating!)
Wow. Just found Min and was going to write some ideas etc. I didn't know it was 10 yrs old, but with information overload it's certainly something that I'm sure more people will seek out.
Beyond Min, I tried Niagra to reduce mobile clutter, and Simplify Gmail (extension). Hopefully an integrated minimalist solution to our digital environs (i.e. semantic web or some other personalized way to format and visualize the web) is in our future.
@janxkoci Thank you! I think a flatpak package would be a totally reasonable thing to do, if you want to make a PR for it!
Thanks for this update! 👍🏼 Be safe @PalmerAL, your mental state is important.
Dear author your browser is great on ARM64 SBCs ...hopefully new versions support emoji display
