Launch HN: SigmaOS (YC S21) – A MacOS web browser designed for faster work
Hey everyone Mahyad from SigmaOS (https://sigmaos.com) here, a pleasure to meet all of you. SigmaOS is a new type of browser, designed to make you better and faster working on the web.
If you’re anything like us, you work hours a day on the web, buried in a sea of tabs and web apps, constantly losing context and always one click away from being distracted. We believe that a radically different UX can help with this and that’s what we’re making. Here’s a demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae_XfTSsaAA.
This project is the overlap of our obsessions. I have always been obsessed with organizing because of my ADHD, and became a power user of software that could organize and clean up my workflow, like Superhuman and Notion. I was frustrated by how cluttered my desktop was with irrelevant Safari windows and tabs that I didn't need for my work right then. Also, I always felt overwhelmed by the constant switching of windows and apps to save information I was finding or send stuff to people I was working with. This led to the idea: what if there could be a much more organized browser, and you could easily access any app or tab or note directly from within the browser without needing to change to a different window?
Ali has always been into neo-browsers. Rockmelt (released when he was 11) was the first piece of software he deeply cared about and referred his friends to. Since Rockmelt's shutdown, multiple different neo-browsers came out, but none were as mind-blowing to him. He is also a power user of Photoshop and loves their single-key keyboard shortcuts. Saurav rarely cares about software but is a massive Vim fan. He is obsessed with how fast and powerful Vim makes him at text-editing. So, if you think Rockmelt crossed with Notion crossed with Vim, that’s basically what we’re working on :)
SigmaOS users create workspaces that hold apps and pages related to a project or task. We present those apps and pages in a list format. Users have 3 main actions to go through tasks quickly: they can mark a page as done, snooze a page when they don't need it right away, and move a page once it is no longer required for that task but maybe for some other one.
We help solve the problem of information loss and overload with our search tool called Lazy Search. You can quickly find pages in your history and already-open pages across workspaces. This makes it easier to find anything you have opened or searched before and navigate to it quickly.
We have a split-screen feature to quickly open a second webpage, for example for a quick new search you want to do or multitask by working on two pages at a time. This cuts down on opening unnecessary tabs and navigating away from what you are focused on.
One of the most straightforward but also most powerful aspects of SigmaOS that we’ve put a ton of thought into, is an intuitive and easy-to-learn repertoire of keyboard shortcuts for all the most-used commands and actions. This makes you a lot faster at your work on the web and feels like the other tools (cf. Vim above) that you’re traditionally productive in.
SigmaOS connects your web apps and your browsing activity to understand the context around your actions and searches. Your information is organized by projects, your work is shareable and collaborative, and information retrieval feels effortless. We charge $15 per month, no ads, and no data monetization.
Thanks for taking the time to read our post. We appreciate any and all feedback on what you think is the best thing about SigmaOS and what might not be so great. Please download SigmaOS from our website and give it a try yourself and let us know what you think here :) It looks like the primary redeeming tab groups feature could've been implemented as a browser extension which I personally still wouldn't use as I don't see that it adds any value over my current natural setup of having my "tab groups" basically grouped across across multiple browser windows and virtual desktops. So all sites I frequent are already open and I just use the OS shortcuts for opening the preferred browser window and CTRL+NUM to navigate tabs which IMO beats twiddling with a permanent sidebar that takes up valuable real-estate. It seems like what sets this browser apart is it wanting to charge $15/mo for a platform restricted browser with a tiny featureset and no extensions? Even free, it'd be hard to justify why anyone would choose to use it over other indie browsers like Vivaldi and its history of constantly shipping novel features. To justify charging any $$ would require providing some kind of premium hosting service like a secure VPN, but even that should be no more than $5/mo. $15 /mo would be more than I'm paying for any software, even more than my JetBrains All Products Pack subscription (with continuity discount) for which I'm currently making use of 11 of their best-in-class products - Unfortunately I don't see anything here to justify anywhere near $15 /mo. Although I really can't see myself ever paying a subscription to use a browser so I'm definitely not the target market. Also tab grouping already exists in the free Vivaldi browser so it's an even less compelling feature to pay for. Tab groups also exist in chrome, brave and edge (was behind a flag last time I checked), and presumably other chromium-based browsers too I use tab groups on Edge. I consider it a killer feature. I especially like the auto group feature. I start a search and every link I open in a new tab is added to the group (which is collapsible). I do a lot of spec digging doe my work. It’s not uncommon to have 3 or 4 tabs per data type with many data types. Since the app is launching on Apple's ecosystem, it also makes sense to compare to Safari where we're already getting tab groups and syncing. Plus, there's the usual stuff of password management, email aliases (nice for not giving out your email), and private relay, which is basically TOR lite for grandma. And what about ad blocking? And Firefox I'm familiar with it as extensions, and not completely happy with any - lacking keyboard shortcuts, losing some of my tabs/groups, no synching across devices, multiple backgrounded tabs still running and killing performance and other issues. Was it added to the core browser? Congrats on the launch, the vision to create something different, to lead with Mac, to base it on WebKit, and to charge for it. Not many companies dare do that. My first advice will be to market this as a productivity tool and not a browser. This is much closer in nature to something like Sidekick or Workona vs something like Safari. Writing a browser from scratch (even if you have a good rendering engine for 'free') is unbelievably hard and you probably do not want to go down that rabbit hole. On the other hand working next on features like calendar integration and meeting invite scheduling seem to be more 'in character'. Even if focused on productivity, you will still need to provide many browser-like functionality like syncing across all devices including iOS, iPadOS and Android (because the paying user may have Mac Desktop and an Android phone, and they would expect they can pick up same work where they left it on all their devices). These three apps alone will be monumental underataking because getting productivity on mobile right is much harder and your 'killer' feature - keyboard shorcuts - is already DOA. Second advice is to summon your initial vision and keep it by your side all the time. What is the main reason you decided to build this? Focus on this. Read all the comments and advice you get, but stay true to the real reason you are building this. And third, hoping to raise additional money so you can see the vision come through is not a good position to be in. Are you ready to execute on it even if you don't raise additional round? These things may take years to mature. Good luck! > Writing a browser from scratch (even if you have a good rendering engine for 'free') is unbelievably hard Other than the rendering engine, what is so hard about writing a browser? > Other than the rendering engine, what is so hard about writing a browser? Other than THAT, how was the play, Mrs Lincoln? They didn't write the rendering engine. They used WebKit. They obviously didn’t write a brand new rendering engine Interesting take on a problem that many startups are trying to solve from different angles. As everybody moves to web-based, cloud-native Saas tools, we're starting to run into the issue that browsers just aren't built for complex work in the same way MacOS/Windows are. As you can see already in the comments here, the most savvy, HN-type users have come up with a variety of convoluted and hacky solutions to this problem already (reminiscent of that hilarious Dropbox launch comment, on Linux you can set up a system like this yourself quite trivially...). So clearly it's a problem. Is this the right solution though? I don't know. Some companies have created an electron wrapper for accessing multiple web apps, others have created browser extensions for existing browsers, others are building new browsers from the ground-up (Vivaldi, these guys, etc). Meanwhile incumbents are adding features, ableit extremely slowly, in this direction as well. Browser extensions are the easiest distribution strategy, but they are going to run into feature limits pretty fast. The electron wrapper options out there have worked for me thus far, but I have to admit I'm not loving them. Vivaldi is interesting, but its clear to me the team working on it lacks taste and is throwing features at the wall with no real cohesive strategy. I commend you for trying to tackle this problem on hard mode. I think the biggest problem aside from distribution will be competing with the extension marketplaces of existing browsers. If you can crack that nut, and are good at fundraising, I think you might have a chance at gaining some market-share slowly but surely. > ...reminiscent of that hilarious Dropbox launch comment, on Linux you can set up a system like this yourself quite trivially. Well, to be fair, folks on news.yc weren't exactly the kind of first adopters dropbox was after. The same is true for SigmaOS (and other YC companies in the browser space like usemotion.com, mighty.app, and insightbrowser.com). I mean, imagine a superhuman.com launch hn... Besides, many here question the price point given the alternatives (which is a valid concern). That said, the prevalent sentiment on news.yc has never been an indicator of any company's success. news.yc is a place for tech-savvy enthusiasts, who ironically, react with hostility towards not-yet-obvious disruptions. And to be fair, most disruptions start out on the fringes. And by definition, very few believe in fringe. Damn, that's a great breakdown, and discusses a lot of the things we've been thinking about and what led us towards building SigmaOS the way we are. I'm actually implementing the Chrome extensions API, so SigmaOS will have the same extensions available as Chrome :D I probably can’t see SigmaOS becoming my main browswer without being able to use some basic extensions like Instapaper. Do you have a timeline for extensions? By mid-September, I think. Solid break down. Is there a way to contact you? Could you describe what you are actually adding on top of the new Safari? Tab groups are there, sync of them too, keyboard operation too, sharing as well (your improved sharing does only seem to work when both the sender and receiver have your browser, so for a niche tool, it probably won't be useful that often). Which would mean, based on your landing page, that I'd be paying 15$ per month for split-screen. Don't get me wrong, I think innovating on the browser and trying to find new paths, different to those that have been treaded for years is great! 15$/mo is also ok for a big value-add. But I don't see much innovation here that's not also in the status quo. Please show me what I'm missing though, as I probably don't have the full picture. Hey there! Thanks for your comment :) Here’s my take on tab groups (Safari) vs workspaces (SigmaOS): they seem similar, but they feel very different. e.g. • you don’t always see all your tab groups = no behaviour change, people will still pile up tabs they don’t need. Think of Slack: when you’re done with a workspace, you delete it. But if you’re done with a tab group, you just leave it there to clutter your browser, like many people do with Bookmarks. • you don’t need to work from tab groups = most people won’t organise their work, and still feel overwhelmed We’re trying to rethink the UX of how to work on browsers. It’s not just about the indidividual features. So what are you missing? • Every page / web-app is like a task on a to-do list. You can mark it as done, snooze it for later, or move it to another workspace • SigmaOS' keyboard shortcut system is designed to make you feel fast and still allows you to use shortcuts on web-apps • When you do research and command-click on pages, they open as "sub-pages" showing you where you come from • You can rename your pages to organize yourself and find them faster • Split screen is really awesome for multitasking (but you knew that) :) All in all, it can be difficult to explain how different it is, without trying it out. It would be great if you could try it out and give us feedback :) Really curious what you think! A lot of this functionality can be done by using multiple windows in Safari. Drag a tab out into its own window: boom! split browsing. (But in Safari I'm not limited to 2) I use that a lot for the same use-case as the "sub pages" here: drag a tab into its own window, then command-click to my heart's content. When I'm done, the whole window gets closed. (Also this is without even using tab groups) And Apple's Handoff already does the work of maintaining a seamless browsing experience between devices. I do wish you luck and hope you find some true value differentiators. Yeah, I concur. Furthermore, I can use macOS's spaces for different workspaces and put different browser tabs and windows into different spaces for work, fun, etc. To the OP: I will say that seeing the tree of how I got to the current page sounds interesting if I'm researching something. However, the vast majority of my browsing is just that – browsing. I'm not usually researching something. (So maybe I'm not the target audience?) > You can rename your pages to organize yourself and find them faster Yeah, I don't want a tool that makes me do more work. I'm never going to rename my pages, just like I'm not going to tag all of my photos or emails or files so that the Find function can be more efficient. I just don't have time for that. If there's no way to automate it, then I don't need that feature. Also, just want to say that your logo looks an awful lot like Apple's SiriShortcuts app logo. Might be worth changing it up. Thanks for the extensive answer! Makes much more sense now. Will let you know what I think if I have time to try it out. While I'm glad to see someone experimenting with what browsers can be, I feel like this particular featureset is underwhelming. - Tab groups – common in other browsers and extensions. - Split screen - OS feature. - Share integration – OS feature. - Snoozing tabs, neat. My task list does this, but this is handy. - Keyboard shortcuts, are they that much better than other browsers? - Sync – how many people have multiple Macs? how many of those want to sync state between their personal life and work life? I don't. - Doesn't sell data – typical for most browsers, usually funded by Google search (Chrome/Firefox/Safari). - No ads – typical for most browsers. I don't really know what the sell is here. Having slightly better keyboard shortcuts just isn't worth $15 a month. There are free browser extensions that do all of this, or if you want fancy tab management then something like Workona will do it for $7. Browsers aren't perfect, but as a browser power user this solves none of my problems. As for subscription pricing, I can understand that for a browser engine where staying up to date is critical to the web usability, but for a browser shell, it's a push, even with a good feature set. > Oh, and we don't sell your data > Wondering why browsers are usually free? There's a heavy implication here that most browser vendors sell your browsing data, but you don't state it outright because (aside from Chrome, arguably) I don't think it's actually true. Let's look at the others: - Edge is probably sending all kinds of invasive telemetry to Microsoft - Firefox is maybe(?) sending your email address to Pocket if you have an account with them - Safari is a product that you pay through the nose for None of these things are the same thing as selling data the browser collects. If you have any evidence that this is happening, you should put it on your website, because I'd love to hear about it! If you don't, you should probably not prey on people's deep confusion about who is tracking them on the web, and how. Let's not shift established expectations away from the idea that there ought to be a browser that's both free to use and free of spyware when we already have such a browser in Firefox. > Edge is probably sending all kinds of invasive telemetry to Microsoft I think there's a useful distinction between product analytics, which might include basic details about web usage but likely in a privacy preserving way, and actual web history. All of the browsers, Sigma OS included, are going to do product analytics. But I'm not sure that any are going to actually track web history. They'll track what web features you're using, and Chrome is known to track domains but I believe in a statistical way that doesn't give perfect info on who's using what. They all sync some state if you sign in, but that's a feature not analytics, if you trust them, and Sigma is no different here. Apart from browsers like Brave selling ad space or dodgy Android browsers selling full web history, I'm not sure that any of the major players are actually doing anything fundamentally different to what Sigma is here. Firefox and Safari push the privacy side a little harder in their own ways, but are still roughly equivalent I think. Totally. I don't think Google is necessarily doing anything as blatant as directly selling your browsing history to third parties. Since I went to go check, I might as well share what I found: in my Google account "Activity controls" there is a toggle (off for me, not sure what the default is) that grants them permission to use Chrome history for "faster searches, better recommendations, and more personalized experiences". As I understand it, this is not selling away your data so much as letting them use it to auction your attention to advertisers. Yeah exactly. Third parties can bid on keywords as they have always been able to do, and Google might give you better ads based on that data, but they aren't telling the third party why. That's a pretty big difference! A subscription model for a browser seems like a very, very niche market to me - but then that's the vim angle. For me, hard to justify $15 for a relativity feature-lite browser. You would need a stronger value proposition. I think most of these features can be reproduced for free on any other browser. Split view is neat but I do that already with chrome and spectacle, both free. Vim is awesome because it makes me fast at what I do. I use Vim for everything when I code, except for Swift (Xcode). I feel fast when I'm using SigmaOS. And we hope our users do too. We'll be adding features that our users need as we go forward. VPN would definitely be great. While you're here, anything else you think would be cool? I found out Spectacle was deprecated when I got the new machine, but Rectangle seems to be its successor. Awesome tools! :D Thanks for sharing, didn't know about that. Getting used to the new keyboard shortcuts (you can choose the old Spectacle shortcuts as well) took a few days but had less conflicts and I prefer it now :) Since a couple of comments have made the comparison to Vivaldi, I thought I'd chime in, having used Vivaldi as my primary browser for 3-4 years now. Vivaldi's extreme customizability and rich feature sets makes it possible to mimic the functionality described here. (I love organizing tabs vertically on the left, something only Vivaldi was doing.) In another comment, the original poster mentioned that the keyboard shortcut to close a tab isn't cmd+w, because they don't want users to think about them as "tabs" and don't want to think about "closing" them, they're trying to organize things as items in a TODO list. The value that this provides then, isn't in actual features. All of these features can at least be mimicked in other browsers, either natively in Vivaldi's case, or with extensions and OS features. This browser's value would be in streamlined usability and new way of thinking about organizing things. For that reason, Hacker News in general isn't really the target market. Power-users don't want a new way of thinking about browsing or a streamlined experience, they want the customizability of Vivaldi. I think the marketing here needs to re-framed from focusing on "faster at your work," comparisons to vim, and extolling the virtues of keyboard shortcuts. The people that are interested in that are using Vivaldi or Vieb (https://vieb.dev) or have their own Firefox setup configured just right. You should focus on providing an opinionated way to organize and simplify browsing, letting the browser handle tab management. Reminders for tabs I think is a good idea that no other browser is doing. But can I make reminders for arbitrary text content? A 'browser with keyboard shortcuts' has been done before. A 'browser that is also a TODO list' is more interesting. Just my 2 cents. Thanks for the extensive feedback! Really appreciate it. We'll have to check out how we're marketing it.
It's interesting. I'm a developer who'd call himself a power-user (my .vimrc is fly as fuck), but I'd much rather a product that streamlines the experience as long as it does it well. Which is what we want users to give us feedback on :D Yes, you can actually have todos for arbitrary text content and you can add your current page to the context of the todo. That way, you know where you were when you created the todo in the first place, which can be quite useful. I’ve been using SigmaOS for the last half hour for my active work, after having gone through the tutorial. I quite like it. I can imagine that I may feel it’s worth the money, but I have to spend more time with it before I could know. I do want to mention that I ran into a couple of glitches (as I would expect with any such brand-new product). Somehow in using the Find function I got a freeze where I had to Force Quit. Also, I wish that it would indicate that it got matches and how many matches it found when I typed into the search box. To start things off, I imported from Safari. It looks like it create a “workspace” for every Safari page. But I had so many Safari pages open that the workspace for the tutorial page had scrolled so far down the list that it was off the page. So that confused me for a while when doing the tutorial. (In the end I closed all the workspaces that had come from Safari pages.) I think the workspace-specific todos is a really nice feature with potential to be quite useful. Heya, really appreciate the product feedback! For bugs, you can report them using the question mark at the bottom left of the app. Or join our Slack community :D Super weird that the Find is freezing. If it was working, it would show how many matches it found when you press enter. That sounds like an urgent fix. Great point regarding import! Will make sure the workspaces you import get added after the tutorial. Hmm... hadn't tried hitting Enter on the search. I'm used to seeing feedback from search strings as I typed. Hitting Enter, it works fine, but I'd prefer to not have to hit Enter. Sounds good re putting imported workspaces after tutorial. Yup, should definitely improve that so it's automatic. Thanks for reporting! I'm not the target (I use almost only Linux professionally) but from a quick glance this looks very much like my firefox setup (grouping tabs: tree style tabs + sharing quickly through many apps: share backported + split screen: Nifty Split). I know it sounds like the famous Dropbox rebuttal comment, and I'm obviously not the target demographic, but I'm puzzled :) Heya, no thanks very much for mentioning this. There a lot of pro users who have great set ups which we take a lot of inspiration from. The fact of the matter is a lot of teams don’t use linux necessary and it won’t make sense for those people to have complicated setup. we make that productive set up for them just easier to do So, bucking the trend... but i think this is really well executed and I'm a huge fan. I don't use vivaldi but i dont find it to be as nice of a UX as this. Im a Firefox guy mostly on principal, but if you had a solid free trial on this I would give it a go. Best of luck to you, remember you don't need to do something totally new to do it in a way that makes peoples lives better. I'd consider dropping the prices a bit, $9/mo seems more reasonable to me than $15 but as you add features im sure that will change. Thanks, appreciate it! We do have a 14-day free trial, and you don't have to put your card details when you sign up. Yeah, as Mahyad has mentioned, we're still workshopping price and pricing models. Let us know what you think! This is a very hard sell. As a potential user I'm being asked to abandon my free browser that I trust and exchange it for something that costs money where I would lose access if I stopped paying. I think conceptually what you're building has a niche worth pursuing (productivity focused, project based navigation of the web) but it's going to take a lot of thought to make that more compelling than installing free extensions on an existing browser. On reflection if the core functionality (organising projects/bookmarks as a key part of the browser experience) was made into a paid browser extension I'd be more likely to consider using it. The "Used by people at..." bit is curious and suspicious, especially in relation to their privacy claims. Lets say it is true, there are a few scenario's. One scenario is harmless: these people work there, are friends and told the makers they use the browser and are happy for them to use this info on the site. Most other scenario's: they found this out from e-mail addresses or through some other means and are now using this tidbit on the site to sell their product. This isn't selling information, but it is pretty close to it. It shows that they mine your information and use it to their own benefit. It isn't very nefarious, but it isn't exactly super privacy conscious. "Oh… and we don’t sell your data." oh, but we do look through it and see what we can use four ourselves. Fair point to check. All harmless here though :P These are all users who joined during our private beta and who we spoke to personally :) This really feels like it would have had a better time with a smaller "meet the batch" thread. Given that which startups get to be featured in one of those threads rather than a standalone thread is decided by dang, it almost feels like this thread was intentionally greenlit standalone to start a flamewar. The odds of that are slim, probably, but it seems impossible that anyone thought this was a good idea to give its own thread rather than a smaller and more under-the-radar spot in a group thread. It's so early that it has support for effectively a single version of a single operating system (it isn't even an OS X web browser, it's a macOS browser), it doesn't have ad blocking or extensions, it doesn't look like it fits the HIG of any operating system, let alone the one it was apparently purpose-built for, it really drastically needs a designer, and to top it off it's got a subscription model in a genre of software that has never worked well at even a one-time price. There has never been an iteration of HN that would have given this product at this stage of its development anything but a disaster of a thread. I'm not going to insult the product (I doubt I'd say anything that someone else hadn't already said), but I can't see how anything productive or useful would have or could have possibly came about from this thread. Of course I didn't pick it to intentionally start a flamewar. The things you guys come up with! https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... I know the rules! I said the odds of it were slim! What was your reasoning, though, over all of the other candidates for standalone posts that instead got a group "meet the batch" thread? I can't think of something more like gasoline than this product/stage-of-development/thread combination. I'm just guessing at what you all might find interesting. They're informed guesses, but guesses still. In this case, these guys are working on something big and the background from which they're approaching the problem seems solid to me. There's an interesting delta here between how YC thinks about startups and how HN thinks about startups. I'll try to come back and add more to this comment because it's something I've been meaning to write about for a long time. Edit: here it is... Think of the current state of a product like this as a point on a plane. When YC funds a startup, they're not so much looking at that point, but rather at the vector it's part of. That includes, yes, current position, but also direction (how it might develop over time) and momentum (how fast it's developing, how capable the founders seem). When HN evaluates a startup, people really just look at the current product point: how valuable it is right now, i.e. how ready to fill important use cases and how good a business those make for. That's a perfectly fine thing to assess, but it's a totally different assessment. This is the delta that I mentioned above. Partly this is because of a difference in the amount of information available (YC gets detailed applications, gets to interview founders, works closely with founders during a batch, and so on—HN posts don't provide any of that). But partly also it's a difference in mentality. YC is making decisions from a place of high uncertainty. HN, or at least the critical side of HN, only values what can be demonstrated today and has low tolerance for uncertainty. For YC, the home runs are funding a company that starts out looking like a toy and ends up developing into a big business. But if the startup does a Launch HN while still at the "toy" stage, HN tends to have a big allergic reaction: "how could YC fund such a thing?", etc. etc. Well, YC is funding such things all the time. That's the core of the business. A few go on to get big and then the startup (or YC) gets to point back at threads like this and say "I told you so". More, of course, never amount to much, and in those cases it's the commenters who get to point back at threads like this and say "I told you so". It's hindsight fallacy in both cases though. The lesson for Launch HNs might be that it's in a startup's interest not to come to HN while still at the tadpole stage, when people say things like "I can't see how anything productive or useful could have possibly come about from this thread". On the other hand: those are just comments, and only part of the comments at that. There are also bound to be a lot of users who are interested in the vision and willing to try the new thing even if it's in an immature state. So it's actually not so easy to say what's in the startup's best interest. It's much easier to say what's in HN's best interest: interesting conversation. I'd say we got that here. Alternative/future web browsers are an interesting theme, and while the reception has been mixed, I wouldn't call it a flamewar. It was a bit unpleasant at the negative end, but then other commenters have shown up to compensate for that. That is the natural cycle of many HN threads (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Oh, I wasn't asking about why YC funded it. That part's clear (macOS users spend money on subscription markdown editors that get roughly an update a year, they certainly will buy a subscription to a web browser). I was mostly just asking for that last paragraph there where you explained why you picked this above any of the other ones to highlight with a standalone post. In your announcement post you stated: > Which startups will get standalone Launch HNs vs. being in the aggregate threads? I'll decide that based mostly on what I think HN is likely to find interesting. That's not the same thing as which startups are good (or I think are good!) so please don't take it as that sort of signal. which left me curious. I got an answer, even if it's not one I really agree with. Thank you! It looks awesome! My main 2 concerns would be : 1. Performance If it is slow, or a memory hog, like many browser before, that would definitely be a major issue. 2. Privacy It's 2021, claiming privacy won't cut it anymore. We know the drill. Do you have have a way to ensure you have no visibility of what people browse? Because else, I am sure you'd become an interesting target for various groups who need or want this data. Even if you have no interest in using this data, you can be coerced in providing to various bodies, or it can be hacked, which it probably will be, as we can see nowadays with every company with valuable private data. So the best protection is not have this data on the first place... Just my 2 cents anyway. Don't listen to people on the Internet :) Thanks! Performance: We use WebKit for the actual pages, so similar to Safari in speed and memory usage (much better than Chrome), and our UX should be pretty fast (we did a performance update right before this launch!) Privacy: The app obviously knows what pages are on it since it's loading them. Our server doesn't have any of that data unless you choose to upload it for cloud syncing. That data is encrypted so shouldn't be trivial to access (though we want to move over to iCloud to avoid this problem).
What do you think? Using Azure AppCenter and its analytics SDK isn't ideal from a privacy perspective. I think it's reasonable for product development, but if you want to sell based on privacy I think it would need to go. Hmm, you might be right. AppCenter is super useful for crash logs, but do you think it would be an issue for users when concerned with privacy? We don't identify the reports at all, so literally anonymous crash logs. (And AppAnalytics is needed for it to work with SwiftUI, I think? Might be why we're using that.) I think there are levels to it. Best for privacy would be no crash reporting, but obviously that comes at the cost of no crash logs and needing to do a lot more testing and QA before shipping to get equivalent quality, and that's an engineering trade-off. Custom crash-reporting, where the server is controlled by you, is likely a bit better because it's not going to a third party, but that's another engineering cost. Having crash reporting is probably fine – I put crash reporting in the apps and services I work on, and I expect them as a user – but it is definitely worse for privacy and if an app is marketing on being good for privacy it's not a great fit. As for analytics, again, I can see the reasoning, but I think it would be good to not do it. As far as privacy is concerned, shipping the binary and it doing any networking is the same impact, regardless of the tagging that you may or may not be doing. MS might be tagging connections/IPs, correlating users, fingerprinting, etc. There's also the risk that private data accidentally ends up getting sent to AppCenter (in crashes or analytics) just from values on the stack or the particular code paths that users are executing. Honestly, I don't think you should be selling based on privacy. I don't think Sigma OS is fundamentally better than Firefox/Safari, and it takes a LOT of work and giving up a lot of useful data to do it correctly. I'd put product analytics in (but not too much), keep the crash reporting, don't sell data, don't sell ads, don't advertise as being any more private than that, and use your product analytics to inform your product process and build better features. Awesome, thanks for the case-by-case advice, and a good point on the marketing aspect of things. Really really appreciate it :) Absolutely no chance I'm paying $15/mo for a browser without: - Extensions
- Adblock
- No support for CMD+W (?) Good points! We're working on extensions and Adblock right now, so should be out soon! For CMD-W, we're trying to change how you think about pages to something you "mark as done" as opposed to just "close", and changing the shortcut helps make that change for users. Try it out and let me know if you think it's necessary to support CMD-W :) > For CMD-W, we're trying to change how you think about pages to something you "mark as done" as opposed to just "close", and changing the shortcut helps make that change for users. Please don't force users to un-learn years of what they already know. It doesn't matter if you call it "closing" a page or "marking it as done" but _please_ make well-known keyboard shortcuts do roughly what a user would expect. We definitely don't want to punish our users or make the app feel worse. We're testing out a classic mode at the moment that allows your current shortcuts to work as well :) You can change what happens when a user hits CMD-w. But CMD-w should still be the trigger. Everyone expects a very specific thing, make the current thing go away. Its the same reason you likely picked CMD-k as the shortcut to your pop up window. That's what Slack does along with several other applications. If you want to map this shortcut to your implementation of "going away" that's fine but it should be the same command. This is a fair point. Right now, it shows a message on the bottom-left asking if you meant to close a page and suggesting "D" as the shortcut instead. I think adding a classic mode with those shortcuts enabled should solve the issue. What do you think? What happens when a user thinks they are in an input field and hits 'd'? I've experienced the likely same outcome with Vimium and 'x' I suspect you will want to have modifier keys be the default. Something to ask users rather than forcing them to adopt to what you think is best Hmm, I want to look further into how often this happens.
Was this a big issue for you with Vimium? Right now, if you accidentally close a page, you can quickly "Z" (or click the undo button that shows up) to bring the page back. I've experienced the loss of input when I habitually hit escape to exit input mode and then x to delete text. (Normal on vim, does not carrier over the same with Vimium) This closes the tab, and on restore, the partial input is lost. Had this hit me more than once on Confluence Good point. Currently though, if you "z" a page you've closed, it preserves your input. The system isn't perfect, but it prevents any fear of accidental closing. Can't comment on your browser specifically, just that single key shortcuts which are normal input values is not a good idea. People are used to shortcuts with meta keys proceeding them. It's an established behavior and expectation beyond any one system or tool. Yeah, it's something we thought about a lot before implementing the current system. We think apps like Superhuman have brought the idea of single-key shortcuts into the forefront, and we really like how much more memorable they are for most users. We'll definitely learn from our users' feedback though, and we'll work on a solution with them if they have issues with it :) Are you planning to adopt an existing browser extension API or will extensions need to be rebuilt for Sigma? I'm working on building it from scratch for SigmaOS :P. Should have it out in a couple weeks! edit: implementing Chrome extension API. All Chrome extensions will be available :) What made you decide to build it from scratch? By following a different system you're leaving a lot of free work on the table. For example, I extensively use Vimium, Dark Reader, Stylus, TamperMonkey, and LastPass. By doing it from scratch, all of those extensions would need to be re-implemented in the SigmaOS API. I love the idea of SigmaOS but I can't abandon Chrome/Firefox if I can't have LastPass, for example. Whoops, I might have not explained myself properly. I'm implementing the Chrome extensions API from scratch. When I'm done, you'll have access to all of your Chrome extensions! Oh perfect. Thanks! Great work on the project by the way Thanks! > We're working on extensions and Adblock right now, so should be out soon! Do you find that your decision to use WebKit is getting in your way here? As it happens, my company is also working on a browser for a niche userbase (not competing with you!), and I decided to go with Electron rather than Microsoft's WebView2 because it seemed to me that that option would give us more flexibility to deeply customize both the chrome and the content. Our target user base is mostly on Windows, not Mac, so Apple WebKit wasn't on the table for us. Hmm, not familiar with WebView2 myself. I think WebKit helped a lot initially getting everything running.
Not having access to extensions and other limitations imposed by Apple is a bit of a bummer (which I'm working around), but I think it's been much better than using Chromium/Electron still (especially on performance!) 15$ a month is a ton of money. I'd prefer 50$ one time if possible. The other issue is I simply don't know y'all. You could be keylogging everything for all I know. Even now I tend to use Chrome for secure browsing and Brave for AdBlocked browsing If your income is based on productivity, especially micro optimizations in productivity (decidedly not the case for employees, but perhaps for contractors and freelancers), it might be worth it. Fair point, can't convince you we're trustworthy just by telling you, but I can still say it anyways :P We don't use keyloggers. We don't sell your data. If we did, it would be a breach of our privacy policy and you could sue us, right? (Don't know if I should be suggesting you sue us, but since you won't have a reason to, think we're safe :p) > Don't know if I should be suggesting you sue us, but since you won't have a reason to, think we're safe :p This is the strongest, most credible privacy guarantee, imo. Ask your lawyer to make you as ridiculously vulnerable as possible, perhaps with a small “good faith error” clause. When you get big, you will turn evil. Bind the company now, and it will remain trustworthy for many more years. Honestly, agree 100%.
How do you communicate that to users though? The trust is hard to gain. You don't need to communicate it to users. If they ask, and you can truthfully reply: > We are contractually forbidden from doing this, and if we do, you're entitled to [insert compensation plan that would cripple the company, without a private equity-style (or other) takeover being able to game it for profit] – on top of any legal obligations. then they'll probably sing your praises… if they believe you. So maybe publish a blog post or something about how you bullet-proofed the commitment (with lots of details)? Added bonus: I'd learn how you managed it, because it's too hard a legal problem for my amateur mind to solve. if they believe us, indeed :p Hey, if we figure out how to do that, I'll make a post outlining how to do it for others as well :) Is this how you defend your marketing claims on privacy? Sue us if we have a data breach? Haha, not how I meant to phrase it at least. I was merely pointing out that I can't convince you when I say that "we handle your data safely", so was proposing another reasoning for why we have to make sure any and all data is handled properly. Well it is not a marketing claim, everything is stored locally on your device for now, and later would be using Apple’s cloud system for cross device syncing. A data breach is very different from us misusing your data or monetizing it to be clear right now, its not worth $15 a month, or even $9. I see this as a cash grab from a non supported browsers that is a browser theme. Congrats, I think you are working on something very important. Recently I watched the Ds conferences with Steve Jobs to get a new eye on them. At some point he explains that the minute the user get to see the file system, the learning curve goes everest. And so they made splotlight notably. I think now that was really spot on and that it ultimately goes even further. Look at your desktop computer screen and tell me: how much information is there? A freaking lot. Even a window contains so much information (coords, sizes, 3 buttons, a scroll bar), that's a lot compared to what you find on mobile. The iphone experience is actually pretty different from the desktop experience in that sense, there is an order of magnitude less information on the screen of an iphone. I'm aging. Now whenever I come in front of a desktop computer screen, my heart starts beating, I'm stressed. Thats just too much for me. Whereas the opposite is true with my smartphone, there is something zen about the experience of it all. Another feedback I would have is Fly through your work. Yeah I love that, flying is zen and green. The browser that makes you faster and better at working on the web. Faster and better at working? What experience is that exactly? A burnout experience? All I'm saying is, you are making an OS, learn from the best. Steve Jobs knew that computer programs are crap by default (he says "developing software is hard" - think twice about that one) and so he was always selling the user experience. What is my experience in front of your program? Thanks for the feedback! Simplicity is key, and we hope you feel faster using SigmaOS without adding unnecessary complexity. I literally never post comments on HN but what is this product. Is this $15/month browser for MacOS ? Fancy browser with grouped tabs, split-screen and sharing but still just browser. I think I'm just too poor to understand. I hope that your product will succeed because then I will know that in this world you can sell ice to an eskimo. I make enough money to support $180/annual for a product; however, I see no reason to pay that kind of money for a web browser. It costs the same as a full-priced Windows 10 Pro license. I'm sure there are folks who are willing to pay that kind of money for this experience, I'm just not one of them. > I'm sure there are folks who are willing to pay that kind of money for this experience I hope those folks are aware that Vivaldi gives them the same experience for free. > It costs the same as a full-priced Windows 10 Pro license. I believe Windows Pro license is a one time fee, so SigmaOS is more expensive than Windows It doesn't really matter whether it's a browser or not - what matters is the value it provides. I pay $15/mo for netflix even though I get some amount of free cable tv from my ISP. Google Analytics is free, but I use a paid competitor that I prefer more. There are a ton of free email clients, but I used a paid one because it has features I can't get in the free ones. None of those are "selling ice to an eskimo." Likewise, there's nothing inherent to browsers that mean they always need to be free, just because the dominant ones currently are. Now, that said, I don't think this product is worth anywhere near $15/mo to me, but maybe that'll change over time. A browser that actually makes me significantly faster at my work vs chrome/etc could easily be worth that much to me. Same boat. I have no problem with the price if it provides value for that price. Currently I'm paying: $10/month for Spotify because it's easier than maintaining my own music library and syncing it across devices. $10/month for Lightroom and Photoshop because it's vastly better than its competition I just don't see how this is /that/ much better than the competition (Firefox + extensions) or makes my life easier in any significant way. At current prices, for $15/month you need to provide some serious value because most people will do the direct comparison to other subscriptions they are familiar with. Thanks for taking the time to make us the first post to post a comment about. The one thing to keep mind is this a browser designed for professionals more than personal use. Example would be WhatsApp vs Slack. Granted some people use even WhatsApp for work, but at companies and within teams Slack is used more because of the structure it gives. Now yes there is a freemium version of Slack but to get the most out of it for teams, you need to updated to organisation pricing which at that point it is paid. Again appreciate taking the time to let us know what you think I'm a professional. The way you described it initially caught my attention as something I could use. Make it a one-time payment and I'd think about it. Subware is not something I support. The difference is that Slack actually gives you things when you pay: they host your company's photos, chats, and everything else. SigmaOS is literally flipping zero-margin utility, and I have a hard time imagining a "professional" who feels the need to pay $15/month for something they already use for free (and cannot be used on their other devices). Slack is cheaper, cross-platform, and actually provides some form of value. Slack's paid tier starts at $6.67/user. Google Workspace (Gmail, Drive, etc) starts at $6/user. Microsoft 365 starts at $5/user. Dropbox starts at $10/user. You'll probably get too few monthly subscriptions to make it sustainable.. Suggestion -> Make the basics free, add the collaboration features as an addon. Thanks for the suggestions, we are seriously considering these options, as mentioned under few of the other comments, the pricing isn’t written in stone for us since again we are workshoping that currently :) The negativity in this thread is extremely distasteful. :/ Just want to say, I think what can differentiate this from other browsers + extensions will come down to how well-integrated all of it is. Tab fatigue for work browsers is real and if this helps solve that, then it's worth it. From what I see on your landing page, the UX / workflow looks extremely attractive. Couple of things, a) I do think the $15 per month is a bit too high for my use case - this is the same price as Intellij - which provides enormous value (edit: over alternatives).
b) there does not appear to be any dev tooling at least on your landing page. Both of those together probably means I'm not going to use it, but hope you find your niche market. Good luck! > The negativity in this thread is extremely distasteful. :/ Is it? Product launch threads on HN tend to be rife with questions along the lines of "how is this better than existing products?" or "how do you justify the cost over other alternatives?" In some threads those questions are stated a little more… plainly than in other threads, yes, but when someone starts a thread about a product with a subscription model (already not a popular prospect on HN) in a space where there are already a dozen decent alternatives for free, of course there's going to be some balking and questioning along those lines. At any rate, people post product threads on HN because they think HN's technical audience in particular will be interested in their product - and ultimately in paying for it in one way or another. In that sense we're kind of doing them a disservice if we just blindly cheerlead their product and don't provide any feedback as to why it actually might not be hitting the mark with this audience. Thanks! We're still workshopping the pricing model, but do give the free trial a go and let us know what you think! There's the standard web inspector at the moment. What would you like to see for dev tools? Heh! I don't have Big Sur on my work laptop yet :) So, I'll give it a shot as soon as I can upgrade. The standard chrome dev should be good enough, if that's what it is. Ah, shame! Hope you update soon :) It's standard Safari dev as SigmaOS is based on WebKit. Does it have standards parity with Safari or Safari Developer Preview? Hmm, to be honest, I'm not sure, but I think it's just the inspector and the tools you can access from there. Does anyone here identify as the target market for this product? I feel like "professional users" use Vivaldi or configure Firefox to do everything that this product tries to do. Very curious why YC backed this and what market share they were trying to capture. In your mandatory signup form, I am told "Looks like you missed one of the required fields: [facepalm] Problems". I do not suffer from any of the listed problems. … and now I have to dig up this login link? really testing my patience here… Thanks for the feedback! Will make the change to the form so it covers your case. Regarding the login flow, would you use Google Sign-In if we had it? No, I prefer email signups. I think you've just got too many "okay next" steps. Also, is account activation really necessary? Couldn't I just start using the app immediately and activate within X days? So our login flow requires email login to authorise because we also allow you to sync your data across multiple devices (if you choose to do so). It's true that the signup could be simpler but then I'd worry in the case that someone uses someone else's email, that the real owner of the email when logging in would get access to the original user's session if they chose to sync. Maybe we could have a more complex solution given some time. Any ideas? I type in my email and click "Login" and nothing happens. No visual indicator, nothing. Just sits there and lets me keep clicking the "Login" button. Hey, that shouldn't be happening :( Have you signed up?
If you have and it's still not working, email me at saurav@sigmaos.com with the email address you used, and I can look into it. You assert it’s “Used by people at [four images]”. That’s pretty vague. If you’re going to claim your product is used by people at Apple and CERN, there should be context to back it up. Hmm, interesting point. I presume specific user testimonials might help? What were you thinking? probably someone with @apple.com address signed up No Linux?
No Windows?
No 32-bit?
No thank you. No source code? No tech details? No reason to trust you with my browsing? For all I know, this could be MITM'ing my sessions and exfiltrating my data. Being a paid product gives me exactly one guarantee: that I will be that much poorer. It doesn't increase my trust in the product in any way, it doesn't say anything about what the product is doing for my privacy or security. This is a very poor marketing piece. > Wondering why browsers are usually free? Let's say I am. Care to answer the question rather than passive-aggressively hurting my choice of browser? > No source code? No tech details? No reason to trust you with my browsing? For all I know, this could be MITM'ing my sessions and exfiltrating my data. If open-source is what instills trust, then Chromium would be the most trusted browser. Instead, in practice, we should look at actual 'phoning home' habits and browser's business model to tell us what it real agenda is. Luckily we do need source code at all to check if any browser is sending data anywhere. A simple network proxy will do and is much easier and more accurate than supposedly going through millions(?) lines of code. In case of SigmaOS, at least the business model is more likely to not create privacy-related friction. I haven't checked it with network proxy, but somebody pointed out that crash logs are automatically sent to Microsoft which is not a good sign. Those are the things I would focus on. Can't change your mind on that. I can only tell you that your session data is yours alone, and that we will never monetise our users' data. Free browsers typically make their money from search engine royalties. Users will only pay us if they think the value we're giving them is worth it, and that will keep us developing the product towards what users will benefit from, faster than traditional browsers. But it appears that Apple already stole your thunder on consumer privacy, and that they will be Very Hard to catch up to; private relay is basically TOR lite for grandma, private email is email aliases that ordinary users can use, etc. Plus no discussion on ad blocking extensions or password management? If this is a browser that is launching on Apple’s ecosystem while charging $$, then you have to swing harder than just vaguely insinuating that other companies are sellouts on privacy. And is there any plan to open source so that communities can actually vet anything? > Free browsers typically make their money from search engine royalties. Please name names and map them to that. I know that Chrome is owned by Google. I also know that Firefox makes money from Google for having it as the default search engine. I configure my browser to use DDG. How is your product any better in terms of preserving my data? > and that we will never monetise our users' data. This is already telling; you're admitting that you gather user's data. Is there a clear consent form for that in place? Does your application and your company's data handling conform to GDPR rules? We actually don’t gather our users’ data. But if you want to sync your data across devices, you’d have to upload your data (though we’re trying to move to iCloud for this so we don’t have to keep it). Our privacy policy is available on our website and on the app before you login/signup, and we make sure to handle the data according to GDPR rules (though parts of GDPR are a bit lax, so I’d like to say better), considering it’s illegal not to :P iCloud synchronization is a security risk at my organization, are there options to sync using secure clouds? Hmm, I'm not sure how we'd go about allowing that at the moment without having to integrate each solution ourselves. How about the sync generating a file where you want it to, and you can sync that file using your current cloud storage solution? Would that work for you? This makes me feel rickrolled. I clicked and only see a Mac version download link. The title should mention the platform if it's single-platform. In fact I even have a Mac but it's High Sierra and I'm not updating to Big Sur with all the questionable changes just to try a new browser. Oh, sorry about that! Hopefully you give it a try when you update eventually :) I will. Thank you for doing a great job anyway. I don't actually feel angry or demand anything from you, although I might sound this way. I just expressed my thoughts which many people obviously share. May I, however, ask if there is a serious reason to require Big Sur instead of supporting Catalina, Mojave and High Sierra also? I understand you probably don't want to waste resources on actually supporting them but perhaps you could just build against them and let users use it on their own risk? We're using SwiftUI and WebKit features that were added quite recently (MacOS doesn't get nearly as much love from Apple as iOS). This keeps our product iteration cycle quite high, and the worry is having to implement cumbersome solutions if supporting previous OSs. I'll have to look into it again to see if I can go back just a bit maybe and assess how much time it would take to support those versions. We're a pretty small team :) I would have lobed to try this out as well, but I'm stuck in 32 bit land for the foreseeable future - so I am staying with Mojave. Ah, what a shame. Hopefully I figure out a workaround to support Mojave :D I see. Thank you for your time. Changed the title! I can speculate this can actually attract even more of the target audience to you. Mac people probably feel more enthusiastic about Mac-specific software announcements and are steadier to go and take a look at something Mac-specific than at yet another generic browser. And for the conversion rate - this probably even is a serious boost. We have been getting slightly more constructive comments since changing the title, so thanks :D And those enthusiastic about Mac, also care about things like how 'macOS' is written. Attention to detail matters and shows your own level of dilligence. Interesting. I typically write it as macOS in conversation, but wasn't aware it was seen as correct to capitalise the M. Thanks! > No 32-bit? What's the market share for this one ? At the moment, older model Raspberry Pi's and other ARM-based devices - everything else has moved on to 64 bits already. I don't think 32 bits needs to be supported anymore for consumer applications. I still use a couple of 32-bit netbooks. We're a small team, and we've focused on MacOS for now. But we'll start building for other operating systems as soon as we can! Try not to let the shallow dismissal get you down. While this product is not for me, as I'm not a routine Mac user, I appreciate that you went with a native app (presumably based on WebKit) rather than Electron or CEF. I do wonder what you'll do when/if you decide to do a Windows port, since WebKit on Windows isn't a popular combination. Thanks! Yes, we're full native using SwiftUI and WebKit :D Windows port will be a problem for future me, both fortunately and unfortunately. Workona tab manager does most of that for free. It doesn't have split screen, but it has better bookmark management. Without personal discipline, niether of them solve my real problem of tab diahria as I go down 6 nested rabbit holes trying to solve multiple problems, some which do get solved, and some need exploring later, some which need to be archived. Please, for the love of God ditch messaging. I don't need 1 more place to get a message from someone. If they are too lazy to copy pasta a link, I don't need to see it. I agree on the personal discipline side, but I also think browsers can guide you towards a behavior with their design. Give it a go and tell me if it improved your flow or not. I get you on the whole messaging aspect, though I personally find it so useful for work. Ali and Mahyad can just send me pages without having to pollute Slack with a bunch of links. While we are giving constructive feedback... The sign up form is really annoying to me. I'm already not happy that I need to sign in to use a web browser (and likely to not pay $15/mo for one). But the sign up form keeps adding fields that must be answered before you're done. I'm okay filling out a form... but don't keep teasing that I'm done when I have 10 other questions to finish. This is not a very user friendly pattern. Heya, thanks for the feedback! We were trying to replicate a Typeform-like feel (questions, one by one) to make it more palatable but the goal isn't to bait you into thinking you're done. Do you think we're missing something to replicate the feeling of a nice Typeform, or do you think Typeforms in general are similarly annoying for you? It was just not knowing how long the form was... it felt like it was a choose your own adventure where my answered dictated what the next question was (which was obviously not the case, just the feeling I had). I think something like a (1/10, 2/10, etc...) in front or behind the question would have been helpful. Then you at least know how many more questions there are. Congrats on the launch -- first contact with potential customers must have a lot of little things like this. Thanks! Will try and add that in then. Having watched the demo video, I think this looks interesting. A lot of the (overly nasty) comments here are talking about the pricing for this from a consumer/individual perspective. Frankly, they're right: I think that, for individuals, the benefit over using a vanilla browser is pretty limited. What piqued my interest in the demo are the 'multiplayer' features like super-fast sharing. Today, Sigma seems mildly simpler/faster at that than vanilla browsers, but I think there is a lot of room for growth and innovation here: browsers are mostly 'single player', but work is not. OP, if I were you, I'd be leaning heavily into the more collaborative/social features of this thing and pivoting your GTM efforts toward companies rather than targeting individuals. I think there's merit to some of the comments here that $15/mo for an individual user is expensive. My advice: make it free or insanely cheap for individuals, but limit the collaborative features to paid business users. You're a Slack replacement, not a browser replacement. I largely agree with this. Also worth noting that Slack includes a relatively generous free tier so that people can form habits around it without needing to overcome the payment barrier. Once those habits are formed, the improved paid experience feels much easier to justify. What engine is this a skin for? If they built their own engine from scratch I can see the
$15 being worth it just to encourage more competition and innovation. SigmaOS is certainly an ambitious name.
At present it does not make much sense to me,
but down the line it might. The engine is WebKit. It is our long-term goal for that name to make more and more sense :) I get the vision. You're building Superhuman but for browsers. Power tools for power users who are willing to invest the $$ and the effort to reimagine the most frequently used tool on their computer. Bravo! Thank you :) One thing that I've noticed is when the comments for a Launch HN or Show HN is overwhelmingly negative, that usually the product captures a usecase that people have wanted or hacked together themselves but haven't productionized or monetized. Sometimes, it works out and sometimes it doesn't but it definitely makes me want to judge for myself. Watched the video and the product looks great! I'll definitely give it a spin and congrats to everyone @ SigmaOS for a great launch. Thanks a lot! Hopefully it works out :D Let us know what you think :) Mandatory login to a web browser ? $15/month ? Right off the bat you are putting up obstacles. Unisntalled after being requested email and 14 day trial. Sorry to hear that, in terms of the trial we wouldn’t take your payment details until your trial runs out. In terms of your email we don’t use it for marketing or spam, it is more for being able to record your feedbacks you send us in app. But as soon as you want them delted you can request it and we quickly delete everything for u No ofense, but I wish you all luck with this model. It is not meant for us who work on IT, we have to work with several browsers. This is more for the end consumer like. No offence taken at all. really appreciate you still taking the time to check us out :) I always feel so strange when the topic of tabs comes up. There is an assumption that everyone has hundreds of tabs open all the time. Is that really true? I honestly can't imagine needing more than email, chat, github, and maybe some documentation or something while you are working. What do you people need all these open tabs for?? I've had 100+ for sure. When I used Safari, I had about 15-20 windows open. And honestly, I think SigmaOS is still great (biased ofc :p) when you have a few pages open, just from the ability to organise those pages. I understand your sentiment, however whenever I look at colleagues' or friends' browsers, they do indeed have an endless stream of tabs. Often 30+. Potentially very useful but $15 per month is a lot to ask. A full Office 365 subscription with apps is less than this :( ""Oh… and we don’t sell your data." I have conflicting feelings about this. Closed source codebase; but even if I trust you, what if you get acquired? In fact, because the risks are unknown this seems even riskier than a regular browser (for privacy conscious people). What's being captured, how safely is it stored, can you read it, etc. I think something like acquisition is a really fair concern. Someone here has recommended tying our values down into some form of legal agreement which prevents the company from straying from them. That would also work for acquisition (though I'm not sure how to go about something like that) Someone else has suggested not talking about privacy at all, since those who care about it will want open-source browsers. We're still figuring out how to talk about this. All we want to say is we want to build an awesome product, we try to handle as little user data as possible but handle it appropriately, and we will be doing more to resolve privacy issues in browsers. If I can assuage any concerns (not the major one of it being closed-source though. I can only say trust us for that :p), no session data is captured when you use the app. We don't know what tabs are open. Now if you choose to sync your data across devices, your session data will then be uploaded to our server, stored encrypted. The only user data we have otherwise is from the sign up form. Why did you choose to feature ~100% non-work distractions in your demo video? Reverse psychology? Hahaha. Nevertheless I am intrigued :-) I always use Chrome Omnibar to navigate to bookmarks/history. I wish it could show me the bookmark 1st, but I usually just <down><down><down> to the right suggestion. Honestly, just for fun :D Yes, I use my browser mainly for work, but product demos are usually a bit boring. Also, I was hoping for a little Vim vs Emacs flame war (which didn't happen) and "Backwards Hippo" is just great :D Are there no settings for this? I'm pretty sure firefox does (at least the previous version did) $15 a month is too much for me to consider switching from Safari. Although I'm looking for a decent browser-replacement, because of the <Safari - OS - hardware> update interlock. I don't mind paying for software, but for $15 I'd expect Browser + full blown google internet search alternative + privacy. We're still workshopping pricing models. We have a 14-day free trial, so please give it a go and tell us what you think! Will do! Have a look at Kagi + Orion ;) Honestly, this just seems like a cheap rip-off of Vivaldi. All of the features(yes, all of them) are already present in Vivaldi, including the split screen, tree style tabs, sync, global search, full keyboard support. Slapping some UI makeup on top of an already existing product does not warrant a hefty fee of $15 in my view.
Also, I don't see any proof that my data is secure. For all I know, you guys will sell off my data after 3 years when this doesn't work out. >We charge $15 per month, no ads, and no data monetization.
Isn't it kinda strange that a browser is promising us no ads in the UI, for a price? Like, wasn't that already established? I don't see any other browsers that show ads in the UI(regarding the new tab content, you can easily turn them off). This looks like snake oil the more I look at it. >You can quickly find pages in your history and already-open pages across workspaces.
Have you ever typed anything in a chromium address bar? Apart from the snooze and done features, tell me one thing that this browser achieves that isn't already available through free, open-source, trustworthy extensions whose code I can see and audit. I wonder what it is about hacker news that brings out this incessant negativity in people. Have you considered that: - This product might only be a couple of months old and they have bigger plans for it over the next year? - The founders don't have all the answers and they're learning just as much as we are right now? - Even though YOU might not see enough value to warrant the price tag, there might be people (or businesses) who do? Maybe you just can't empathize because you haven't build something from 0 -> 1 yet. I am the same age as you but I have failed building a couple of things before, where it looks like you have had a bunch of jobs. I don't cast scorn on people who are early on building things, because I've been in their shoes. Maybe you're right and there's nothing here. Or maybe in two years, their browser is miles ahead of the extension you're referring to. > tell me one thing that this browser achieves that isn't already available through free, open-source, trustworthy extensions whose code I can see and audit. They don't have to tell you anything. Go use your browser extension. You aren't the market. > They don't have to tell you anything. Go use your browser extension. You aren't the market. I'm guessing what he wrote resonates with a vast majority of the HN crowd even if the tone of the message doesn't. The whole point of ShowHN is to get feedback, critical or otherwise. You criticizing his feedback kinds of defeats the entire purpose IMO. Although I party agree with you in terms of tone, positivity for positivity's sake is also bad, if not worse. I saw the previous comment as constructive, although I might not phrase it like that myself, but to each their way. OP posted as Luanch HN to get feedback, not just praise. Previous commentator was not being negative or critical with no reason. Aggressive and baseless anti-toxicity is as bad as real toxic behavior. You're free to "love loving" things, but you can't make others conform to your lifestyle. I don’t see the point of building for the sake of building. And yet you're on a hacker forum... Maybe they shouldn't charge $15/month for a product that's incomplete. The only reason I'm not the target audience here is because I won't use a subscription-based browser, much less one that has fewer features than my current browser. I respect people who build software, but you have to get pricing right if you want people to care. > I wonder what it is about hacker news that brings out this incessant negativity in people. It's an incubator site. We're here to offer our advice on upcoming products, and many people post their products explicitly to hear what they might be doing wrong. It's a trial-by-fire, but rapid iteration will almost always yield a better product. Agreed. The subscription pricing model alone is an instant disqualifier. $15 for a one-time purchase? I'd absolutely consider it. $15/month? Never. The comparison of one time vs subscription wouldn't be $15 vs $15 but more like $500 vs $15. In what world is a browser worth $500? For comparison, a complete operating system (eg. windows) has cost around $200, and this was applicable even in windows 98 days, before microsoft was trying to monetize it using ads/telemetry. When buying software the cost is heavily impacted by the number of users that benefit. Windows is used by >100m users, a new browser is probably doing well if it's used by >100. Of course the price is different. Probably more like $5000. Have you considered how insanely complicated browsers are? It’s a miracle they’re free. Well the reality is that there are two browser engines that are free and open source. If they built their own that was better than the incumbents (eg. from performance/privacy point of view), then I might consider it. But I'm not paying $5000 for a chrome reskin, just like I won't pay $5000 for a debian reskin. I’m saying it’s a miracle that Chrome/FF is free. 3 - Chromium/Blink, Webkit, and Firefox. Not a miracle. Just Google. Yeah, and that's why app subscriptions make no sense to me at all. I don't have a problem paying for resources I use—storage space, web-based functionality—but being charged every month just so they don't shut off my software is lunacy, and I will never support that. I'm fine supporting good software. If this app served my needs well, I'd happily pay $50–60 for it. Once. > Maybe they shouldn't charge $15/month for a product that's incomplete How do you expect them to ever finish the browser if they don't have any income from working on it? That’s what investors are for, ostensibly, no? Another way to phrase this is how can you expect people to buy something at a price below it’s value? Actually, haha, I just realized there’s an answer. Because they’ll expense it at work. Let me tell you about a thing called Ycombinator. They help you raise this thing called venture capital for exactly this purpose… Investors like to see revenue, when they are looking to make an investment. That’s what I’m thinking too. But my experience with investors is very limited so far. The investor in the startup that me and a couple of others founded agreed to contribute funds (in exchange for ownership of a percentage of the company), but in our case the condition was that these funds are for things like marketing and other expenses, and not for paying salaries to ourselves. So until our company is making a profit we are not getting paid a salary at all. But I don’t know if this is actually common or not, and how for example Silicon Valley is with regards to this compared to our geographical location. No matter what the industry or the product is, that's not the consumer's problem. The problem is that the crew who reflexively post negative comments on Show/Launch HNs are mostly a loud (and smug) but unrepresentative minority with idiosyncratic tastes. Sure, you can learn something from any feedback, but most products would be made worse if the creators took these comments too much to heart, especially when it comes to pricing. That said, you can obviously get a lot of great feedback on HN too! But no one grumbling about $15/mo being too much to pay for X or subscriptions in general being bad is likely to be very helpful. Best cure for that is "treat others as you would want yourself to be treated". In this case I would really appreciate it if someone told me that my idea wasn't novel at all, sucked or that I was charging exorbitant fees for some minor improvement of my productivity. A lot of times in life, kindness doesn't look like kindness. "In this case I would really appreciate it if someone told me that my idea wasn't novel at all, sucked or that I was charging exorbitant fees for some minor improvement of my productivity." Ok, but if the reason you think something "sucks" is because of an uncommon opinion that you hold, like a good UI isn't important or worth paying extra for, then your comment isn't very helpful to the creator. It says much more about you than the product. Similarly, most people in tech/knowledge work would not consider $15 per month for software that makes them more productive to be "exorbitant", and I think we all know that. If you feel that way, fine, but it's not relevant to the discussion. "Someone told me my idea sucked" is not in and of itself any more of a useful signal than "someone told me my idea is brilliant"; one person's opinion is, well, one person's opinion. Who that person is makes a difference. In the case of SigmaOS here, the "(YC S21)" suggests that they've had at least one very positive signal: YCombinator accepted them. "The most famous seed funding group in the tech world likes us enough to work with us" is probably more of a meaningful signal than "SnarkyTechGuy1337 left us a cutting comment on Hacker News". Almost every Show/Launch HN post that has a slightly abrasive comment (which is not the same thing as negative or nonconstructive) gets a few comments in the same vein from the "people are negative" to the "people are toxic" kinds, which honestly speaking appears way more smug to me. It's not just about being abrasive. It's about posting negative comments when you have nothing to offer. If your reaction to something new is that you have absolutely no interest or wouldn't pay a few cappuccinos per month for it then guess what: no one cares. You're just polluting the thread with noise. Helpful: this is interesting, but I tried it and it's missing these features that I would need to consider paying for it. Not helpful: subscriptions are the devil! The comment all this is under is not just "subscriptions are the devil!". Some responses seem more "reflexively negative" (against any criticism) than the comments they respond to. you don't seem to offer much value over free competitors and why should we trust you might be hard points to address, but are important. "you don't seem to offer much value over free competitors and why should we trust you might be hard points to address, but are important." I agree with you on those points. But dismissing improved UI/UX as "makeup" is not helpful. > But dismissing improved UI/UX as "makeup" is not helpful. It would be if the UI/UX is presented as a feature. I agree with you about the style but I disagree that this is dismissive, it's constructive but coarse. > Apart from the snooze and done features, tell me one thing that this browser achieves that isn't already available through free, open-source, trustworthy extensions whose code I can see and audit. Is there a Spotlight/Alfred extension for Chrome/ium/Firefox? I haven't seen that UX in a browser yet. While I don’t think this browser is for me, cobbling it all together with extensions isn’t the same thing as having a unified product. Only with a unified product can you have a completely consistent experience across all of the features.. like having sharing come into its own workspace next to the ones you created.. and then being able to share via shortcuts into someone else’s shared inbox. I’m not sure this product is fully differentiated yet, but that doesn’t mean extensions are the real competition. The real competition is the default browser. Firefox integrates straight into KDE's KRunner framework, for one. Yes. Vivaldi has one that can be invoked with F2, by default. I think the parent is asking whether there is an extension for Alfred/Safari can search tabs in Chromium/Firefox. Not an Alfred like UI in Chromium/Firefox. More specifically, if there was a F2-like extension for Safari or Chrome. I didn't realize Vivaldi had it and it seems like one genuinely useful feature from this that I would use. I was curious. F2 does nothing for me. This is a particularly nasty comment that has no business being at the top. It's really expensive for Indian audience. You've reinvented Spotlight and tab-grouping by encroaching on the entire content space w/ nested layers of UI elements? If you're targeting the MacOS platform, you may want to reconsider this approach. Cool concept, I wonder removing the price from the website will help with conversion (a la superhuman). A lot of people are probably not even trying it because they haven't see the value of the product yet. Heya, appreciate this. We hope people are at least honest enough with their feedback that they try something before making judgment on it :) This is pretty much solving a problem that doesn't exist at all. That's how you make $$$ in USA. 1. Invent a problem.
2. Market like crazy to make people believe that there's a problem.
3. Charge for a solution to a non-existent problem.
4. Repeat. Show me one example which has worked with that formula and has generated significant amount of revenue? lmao almost all of the garbage crypto"currency" (most of them want to be a store of value and even fail at that) projects You think the desire to have decentralised currency is a non/madeup problem? You said currency, vast majority of marketing around cryptocurrencies market it as a store of value, not a currency. I'd very much like a decentralized currency. Marketing != reality. You can believe whatever the fuck you want from what the 'marketing' is but it IS a currency. No its not How often do "Sigma male" memes go around your office? That was my first thought, thinking it was some kind of operating system for neckbeards. The second thought was if this was some kind of a Motorola spin-off. Been beta testing this (full disclosure, angel invester) and i can honestly say i miss it when i'm not on my Big Sur machine.
Vim keybindings are such a win, and Sigma does it better than all previous attempts at a vim-like browser because it's properly modal. You hit i to Insert (interact) with a page and escape to go back to controlling the browser.
Or you can ignore all that and just use it as a tabs-on-the-sed browser. I'm probably not in the target market, but the slowest thing in a browser these days, for me, is the obnoxious closing of cookie banners and newsletter popups. Hence, uBlock Origin + cosmetic filter list. The productivity boost is more than any keyboard assignment can ever do I guess. Still think it was a mistake of gigantic proportions when Apple removed the legacy extension support. Their content blockers replacement is nowhere near comparable to uBlock Origin used to be. Currently there is no way to block YouTube ads on Safari MacOS and all the advice for extensions that do just sends you in a loop of the same few (many of which are paid for) that don't manage to do it for the past few months. Yes that’s why I switched from Safari to Firefox. Yes, they're very annoying. I'm working on implementing extensions ASAP so you can use those on SigmaOS (or maybe even built-in natively? ;p) Except vim's interface is confusing https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/05/23/stack-overflow-helping... The biggest issue with Vim is that early learners feel punished and feel slower using it than their original tool. That post about quitting is hilarious, I just found it a a few weeks ago :P We're working hard to make sure users don't feel punished when switching to SigmaOS, and only feeling faster from there. Part of the inspiration is from Vim, but that doesn't mean we aren't learning from its mistakes :) You can use the Vimium extension for chrome. Works great and is cross platform, been using it for years. Also, most other OSes have native splitting of windows. Hey, just want to say good luck and keep at it. Lots of skeptical comments here, but that's always the case for different ideas. Stay positive :) Thanks! I do appreciate the skepticism. Most of it seems healthy. If anyone is skeptical, try it out and let us know if the experience sucked (though we don't think it will), and we'll improve it from your feedback :D Thank you, really appreciate the kind words :) Would love to hear your thoughts on the product if you give it a shot! Yep, I'll give it a try. The multitasking seems great. Can you just Shift Click any link and it will open it in the same tab? I'm wondering about workspaces. It feels like a thing that sounds like a good idea but then in practice isn't used much. My browsing is mostly chaotic and I don't really wanna spend time neatly organizing everything. Wondering what your experience with it has been.
Good luck with everything! If you shift-click a link, it will open it in your split screen! I actually have 4 or 5 work-related workspaces (different features I might be working on, one for Kanban board), I have two for personal (1 for DnD, 1 for Youtube videos), and most of my other browsing is quite ephemeral, so the page is closed pretty quickly after opening. We also want to implement rules for workspaces, so for example you can set certain domains to always open in specific workspaces. Try it out and let us know what you think and if it helps you! If you like shift-click, you should also try out our command-click, opens pages as "sub-pages" :) hey there! SigmaOS does look amazing and like something I'd use. one question though.... I wasn't able to create a new window, I use multiple screens. when I do "cmd+n" it prompts me to try "W" which creates a new Workspace. Am i missing anything here? or it is impossible to use SigmaOS on different screens at the same time. Thanks and congrats on the launch! Heya, glad you're liking it! You can't open multiple windows of SigmaOS at the moment. This is something we would like to add especially for users using multiple monitors. cool, I understand that the problem of having multiple browser windows open is exactly what you guys are trying to address... but it is crucial when using multiple screens Yup, totally get you. We'll be picking this task up soon hopefully. You can help speed this process up by reporting the issue using the question mark at the bottom-left of the app. It increases the count of how many of our users need this so we can prioritize our tasks :) I liked the idea.it seems to have potential,considering the raise of bloatware browser tools in day to day life of an dev. but what makes me skeptical about it is, i don't see any user reviews about your product. whenever you are making bold claim about your product, it's existing /early users must verify it is true,which creates trust when potential customers sees it. Have you beta tested your product? Thanks! So we launched into private beta in May, and have been iterating every week ever since. We have a Slack community you can join to talk to our current users as well :) Can I ask where you'd want to see user reviews? Fyi, there's a minor typo on the landing page, the little guy in the bottom left says "Psst... wanna now a secret?" Thanks, fixing it now! If you focus on start-up environments, how about synced browsing for multiple employees to see the same thing? it might have an edge over screen sharing in that it doesnt compress/blur the image and you could built on top of this with annotations etc. I'm not your target audience and also not active in start ups so this is just my 2 cents The initial popup, asking about making the browser as default and to import the bookmarks from other browsers: I deselected both options, and the button became disabled, hinting that I had to at least select one option. But it was still possible to click outside the popup to close it. These kind of UI patterns make me stop using a product immediately. Yeah, sorry it seemed like it was disabled! As Ali mentioned, when you deselect both options, the button says "I'll do this later", which you can click to skip. The button wasn’t disabled, it’s meant to become a "Skip" and hence isn’t a primary button.
Fair enough that we should change that up, thanks for the feedback :) A closed-source browser is unacceptable from security/privacy point of view. Use a non-free license, but open the code. So I watched the demo, read the pitch, and read this whole thread trying to understand why anyone would think that a subscription browser could work as a business, and I think I finally see where they could go that might be interesting. It's right there in the name. A steadily increasing fraction of work is happening in web apps - especially Electron apps that we download and run as "sort of real apps." The HN crowd, including me, loves to bemoan this as "real native apps" generally run faster and offer a better user experience. But the thing about all the electron apps out there is that the majority are really native to the browser, and the electron version doesn't offer that much enhancement to what you get just running it in a browser tab. The reason most of us stop running those "always on" apps in browser tabs is more because it's clutter rather than because running the desktop app makes a huge user experience difference. What might be possible if you designed a browser specifically for running many web apps at a time? A web-app OS. You could converge on better universal keyboard shortcuts. Get better performance and less disk space by not having a dozen full copies of chromium hanging out on your computer. Keep things organized as they've shown with workspaces. But you could probably also bundle a lot of enterprise features in over time. What if the browser had SSO/SAML baked in so that when the company provisions the laptop employees are automatically logged in to all web based services with 2FA etc? Zero trust isn't easy for lower-tech users, and corporate security is worth a lot of money. In a way it's like, what if ChromeOS wasn't an attempt at a full replacement operating system (which can work for many use cases, but it's a hard transition), and instead "SigmaOS" can be the virtual machine that you live your web-app life in without cutting you off from your "traditional" operating system? It's an interesting idea, and I'm curious to see where it goes. Now back to pricing, I find it really hard to believe this makes sense for individuals to pay $15/mo for. But companies? Maybe. So, my advice to the Sigma team would be to keep testing pricing, and if you want to validate the idea that pro users will pay maybe try something like $15/_year_ as an "early access price" for individuals, with "team plans coming soon," or something like that. >But you could probably also bundle a lot of enterprise features in over time. What if the browser had SSO/SAML baked in so that when the company provisions the laptop employees are automatically logged in to all web based services with 2FA etc? Zero trust isn't easy for lower-tech users, and corporate security is worth a lot of money. Stuff like this can't be standardized across the web, so you will end up with a new platform, essentially making people build for that platform and that platform only (depending on those features, unless you can make them optional), which is near impossible. High praise for reading through this entire thing. And even more for the detailed analysis. :D A web-app OS is definitely part of our long-term goal here, and you've covered a bunch of our thought process. Right now, we're targeting individuals and they recommend it to their co-workers and their colleagues, which allows us to get it to teams in a very natural way. Of course, we're still workshopping our pricing model. We appreciate the advice :) Serious question: what are you doing (or can you do) to prevent your company from getting sherlocked out of existence? Sorry, I didn't quite get the question. Are you referring to another company copying our features? > Are you referring to another company copying our features? Yes, Apple. All/many of your great features can (and perhaps will) find their way into Safari. Any thoughts on this? Not being pessimistic or confrontational; I'm genuinely curious. Apple has been "sherlocking" for decades, and your browser IMO is a classic target. More on "sherlocking": - https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/06/08/apple-strikes-aga... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#Sherlocked... - https://www.howtogeek.com/297651/what-does-it-mean-when-a-co... Well – Safari UX updates only come once every few years because they have loads of users and can’t afford massive changes. Imo that’s the reason why the tab group feature won’t work (c.f. my comment to cube2222). Smaller companies can update every week, and hence always stay ahead, until they’re big enough and then can compete more traditionally! With all due respect, this is a bit naïve. Good luck. I'm so, so in for browser modernisation, I really like the look of what you're doing, I'm a devoted vim addict, and I'll be trying the demo later. But honestly $15/month is extremely pushing it, to the point that I probably won't go for it. Presumably i[Pad]OS is on the roadmap? Thanks for the comment and yes iOS and iPadOS are on the road map. In terms of pricing we are still workshoping this since we are a very young company (under a year still). Pricing isn’t set in stone, but we try to work with our users feedback. Cool, thanks. Good luck in any case, I think there's a lot of potential in this area! Whats up with the name? Are you trying to get this thing to be a a complete layer over the OS? What we hope to achieve someday is to make this a layer between your operating system and your web apps. Sorry for my pretencious phrasing, but essentially we want to be like an operating system for your web-apps. hope that makes a bit clearer It doesn't sound clear at all. It sounds nothing like an operating system. Good luck, I can only assume you are using WKWebView, you’ll quickly run into limitations if you want to do truly sophisticated things. Please let me know if you would like to connect, I would enjoy talking about browsers together. Big Sur only (You have macOS 10.15. The application requires macOS 11.0 or later.) Yeah, we're using new frameworks that help keep our performance fast and product iteration high. Hopefully you'll be able to upgrade to try it out :) I was tempted then saw it costs $15 and immediately decided I’d never pay for this. If you’re targeting it as a browser why aren’t you just planning on getting to the size where Google pays you to be the default search engine? I’ve been beta testing this and I can honestly say that I love it! I don’t use too many web apps (except Notion) but still usually have about 50 tabs open on safari. With sigma, I’ve been able to organise all these tabs in different workspaces because I work on a lot of different projects and just this already has, imo, made me much more efficient. I can focus on specific tabs without having to move around like crazy like I usually do on safari. I also love the split screen feature - I read a lot of research papers and sigma makes taking notes while reading so simple. You can also send feedback or request features! Lastly, the design is beautiful and clear, something you don’t always find elsewhere.
Keep up the good work Sigma! Thanks for the kind words and for trying out SigmaOS. Glad we could improve your workflow :) looks nice. is it chromium based ? what about supporting other platforms Thanks! It's based on WebKit directly. We definitely want to support Windows and Linux eventually, but for now we're focusing on MacOS. Chromium also includes the V8 Javascript engine; what do you use for JS? I think it's called JavaScriptCore? It's Apple's and works with WebKit. Congratulations on the launch @MahyadGhassemi! Thrilled to a startup tackling browser innovation with such a strong emphasis on speed within information workflow. Best of luck with the years ahead. I thought this looked neat until I saw the price tag. Are you kidding me? You want to charge the equivalent of 2 Disney Plus memberships just for a /browser/? Another approach to this problem is the emacs aligned nyxt browser Nice, thanks for sharing! :D My personal inspiration is Vim (as mentioned in the post), but we want to avoid the initial punishing feeling that learners feel when learning Vim. SigmaOS should still feel faster to use even from the first time you start using it. Lots of negativity in the thread, but I just want to say I think it looks great. Really interesting design choices, and the screenshots of the browser look awesome. Thanks! A free version with limited features would be great Heya, yep this is something we are workshoping, to make sure we still give a great experience on the free version without you feeling unnecessary restricted. But for now you will have 14 days free so you can use it and feel how the product is :) What support does this project (and other "Launch HN" ones) get from YCombinator? How much money for the runway? It wouldn't be hard to make an Electron clone of this. The only real selling point I see is the privacy aspect? We find Electron lacking on performance compared to native. Try out the product, tell us how to improve it, and we will :) - What is the OS part of your name? - What is a neo-browser? The OS part is more of the vision for the future of our product and where it can go (as well as the fact sigma.com was taken ;(). A neo-browser are browser that essentially try to have a new take on how a web broser should or could be This isn't ever going to be an operating system, that makes no sense. Also "neo-browser" is a dumb term. This is just a browser. Slightly different than others, but fundamentally it's a tool for viewing web pages. You plan to make your own operating system? How will that work given your reliance on OS X? Hey Matt, sorry for causing confusion. We will not create a full on operating system that you would need to install on a separate device. It is more in the sense of the way of working how it is very much sitting behind all your web apps and connects it to your local activities. So, not an operating system... You shouldn't call your product an "OS" then I opened 3 suggested workspaces and it took 3.5GB of memory + my fans started blowing (MBPr 15") That sounds like a bug. Will look into it ASAP. If you report the issue using the question mark on the bottom-left of the app, I'll be able to follow up with you directly :) Honestly, targeting Apple users does not seem like an unwinnable bet given what the product is. $15/month? get out of here. Who do you think is going to pay $15 for a browser? PER MONTH! thanks, but I'm not paying for any browser. The browser should be free imho ;) maybe try to monetise through donations or something of this sorts Fair enough. If you're fixed on that, we're not trying to change your mind (yet :p).
It's a different business model for browsers, we know, but we do think it will be best for the development of the product in the short-term and the long-term. Hopefully eventually, you'll reconsider when it looks even more awesome :) $15/mo for a web browser? Oh wow! You’ve built a social network and integrated it into the browser, I can’t wait to see the potential of surveillance capitalism to advertise everything I ever wanted to me with SigmaOS! Haha, no intention to build a social network here. Just a way to send pages to people, targeted for work. And to be frank, SigmaOS does not and will never allow advertising to our users through the app. Yes, but you could just sell the data to Facebook for a few billion per year. Make it free and do that, it’ll be much more successful… Yeah, but honestly fuck selling data. Suggestion: don't do marketing gimmick like "psst. want to know a secret?" it's very clickbaity and makes me (probably unreasonably) aloof to the whole thing. I commend the attempt at coming up with a "better" browser, but like others have said, this is too expensive. One time purchase expensive is ok as long as I own a copy of that version forever, but subscription and cloud crap, I'm out. I like the idea of keyboard first and workspaces (haven't tested yet, but hopefully something almost as good as savestate on a VM), but these are things that make me want to try it at least, but not at this price. Edit: just realized it's only mac OS? Can't use Linux makes me even more out. Good luck though, I don't know who your target market, but it's not people to whom "the browser is a primary tool", but only a minor subset of them. Sigma has been an amazing browser and has increased my productivity significantly since I started using it. Being able to split my tabs into individual workspaces means I can finally find the website that I was previously reading. They seem to push an update almost every week or so with new features and bug fixes. Really impressed and would definitely recommend trying it out. Thanks for being a great beta user :) Keep the feedback coming! To the people saying $15 is too much: SigmaOS is almost certainly targeting companies, not individual users. If this makes employees save 30 minutes per month, it's worth it for the company. Speaking of browser-related productivity, I recently learned about this very useful Chrome shortcut that allows you to search among your open tabs:
ctrl-shift-A (windows), command-shift-A (macOS) > To the people saying $15 is too much: SigmaOS is almost certainly targeting companies, not individual users. Doubtful, individual signups and education discounts show otherwise. Even as a company I'd be reluctant to purchase this. Heya, actually our main target audience are prosumers who pay for productivity tools within teams and companies. As mentioned this is a tool made more for work specifically, like notion, Airtable and the tools like this. You expect companies to dictate which browser I should use as an employee? Can the team benefits be realized in a poly-browser environment?