[kageroumado]

I’ve been an Arc user for a long time, and grew very used to its horizontal tabs and other features. Once it became abandoned, I, like many others, decided to search for an alternative. There were no real alternative. So I spent months making myself a browser that would look and feel like I want it to feel.

The entire project is made from zero, the only dependency it uses is WebKit itself. Looking through obscure undocumented functions and sometimes using Apple’s private frameworks to achieve effects others don’t even try.

And then I presented it to the world, and the world largely ignored it. I tried various channels, but it seems like asking people to switch browsers is just too much. It basically traumatized me and I lost interest in the project.

I hope this post will get more popular and more people can try the browser. I’d be grateful of someone reposted it on platforms like Reddit as I don’t have the karma to post in most subreddits and got insta banned once I tried.

You can download it for free, it’s simple, elegant, and tries to be what Safari should’ve been.

[avarun]

Distribution is a challenge, but there is also much prior art for how to solve it. From what I can tell you didn't do any of those things. Regular product update changelogs are what inspire trust that a product as critical as a browser will stick around for the long term. There's also an expectation that something like a browser is open-source and on Github, where it's very easy to see release history and how actively developed the project is. After all, you don't seem to have the institutional backing that would justify a closed-source browser.

Without any of that, there's no reason for people to just click download on an untrusted website and then use that software for the kind of sensitive tasks that are commonplace inside a web browser. Like it or not, you have to consider the user's perspective here.

[kageroumado]

Yes, I agree with you. It’s my first project of this scale and distribution isn’t something I’m good at. Hopefully, the open source version will have a better future

The browser is now open-source at https://github.com/kageroumado/refrax-browser/