> And yet instead of feeling accomplished, several years ago Leca realised he felt an internal void.
> Has anything he’s built really improved people’s lives?
> To hear Leca describe it, the development of Beam is as much an effort to improve the web browsing experience as it is a spiritual quest for meaning.
> “The only reason I’m doing this is to be working for the greater good,” Leca said. “Is this something I can explain to my kid and be proud of the fact that it’s not just a stupid business to make money?”
This reads like a parody of SV hubris. It's a startup to slap note-taking onto a browser shell. It's not curing cancer. I do believe that creating software can be a deeply meaningful experience, and that software can change people's lives for the better in real ways. But... this is a VC-funded startup for a browser shell.
> “What do I have for all these hours I spent on the internet?” he said. “Nothing. I’ve got three bookmarks and a few notes here and everything else is basically lost.”
It's crazy to me that the author thought that and their solution was "I should make it easier to take notes" and not "I should spend less time fucking around on the Internet mindlessly consuming media."
The knowledge base should be primarily in your head. If your mind doesn't feel like a knowledge base to you, it's because we're all so busy jamming new data into it that we never slow down and take the time to reflect and process what we've already consumed.
> It's not curing cancer. I do believe that creating software can be a deeply meaningful experience, and that software can change people's lives for the better in real ways. But... this is a VC-funded startup for a browser shell.
I have worked on software for treating cancer, and I have worked for Mozilla. And boy, let me tell you, the latter sure felt like it had a much bigger impact on the world.
Are you affirming munificent's claim of "SV hubris" or do you actually feel you made more of an impact at Mozilla? This is an honest question; I can't tell which way you are trying to go with your comment.
Let me tell you a little bit about medical software. It is incredibly hard and expensive to get data. It usually involves finding enough people who are dying in a particular way (already hard), and managing to collect comparable data from each (i.e., with the same process: even harder). There is never enough of it to do the statistics you want. Once you have some, and you maybe come up with some way to do some step of the treatment process slightly better, there are a lot of hurdles and it takes a very long time before anything you did can actually be used on a patient. Rightfully so. People's lives are at stake.
With cancer in particular, maybe after a decade in the field you might know if what you did had a positive impact on treatment outcomes. Maybe. That's the best-case scenario. For me, I don't even know if any line of code I ever wrote was actually used to treat a real patient. Oh, yeah, and those dying people whose data you used to come up with and test your idea? Yeah, you could not do anything for them. They got whatever treatments were the best available at the time, and good luck. If they were great treatments, you probably would not have been working on the problem. So that sucks.
Meanwhile, at a browser company, I was able to write a patch and within a month or three it was deployed to over a hundred million people. Software projects I worked on are currently used to encode and decode a non-trivial fraction of the bits on the internet. They are deployed on every Android handset and every iPhone (not just in Firefox), so that's a few billion devices. Every time you make a Zoom call or use probably almost any other video conferencing service, you are using at least one, if not several, of those projects. I understand people are doing a lot of video conferencing these days. Maybe even some telemedicine calls between radiation oncologists and their patients.
So, uh, yeah. I feel like that had more impact. Not to discourage anyone from trying to cure cancer. It's incredibly hard.
P.S., "cancer" is actually a thousand different diseases with a thousand different causes and requires many different treatments. There will never be a "cure for cancer".
There are other problems in healthcare that are more tractable. I built some software a few years back that identified HIV+ patients at risk of developing certain complications, and alerted their clinic/case workers. We were able to show after a year that they were seeing real improvements across their patient population.
This is probably the most meaningful thing I’ve ever done.
Sure thing, my email address is in my profile. I left that job like 2 years ago, but I’m still close with the CEO and have done some other health tech projects.
No disrespect intended but this reads a lot like I tried to cure lung cancer but the challenge was too much so I switched to selling vapers instead. Also, you’re counting your blessings in terms of reach, which is relatively easy to come by. Anybody working on Chrome, at Google, WhatsApp, etc gets this reach for whatever work they do.
VisiCalc should get the credit: Lotus 123 and Excel are both derivatives that would not exist without VisiCalc (though it’s a given that someone else would have come up with a similar concept ex nihilo around the same time, imo).
Lotus Notes is awful. It’s Exchange, but worse. They wanted it to be an “open” platform for applications to be built on top of but failed to win over hearts and minds (and especially not hearts...).
I mean, that's fair. He's not even wrong. I just found it funny that I have literally done both of the things he was trying to draw a contrast between. I mean, not precisely slapping note-taking onto a browser shell, but close enough.
That’s only because a cute for cancer is a binary result.
If tomorrow we found the cure for cancer, and your work contributed even the slightest amount to it, that’s what you would be telling people at parties, not that you also worked at Mozilla (assuming you’ve done equivalent work in both fields).
It's not binary. There are thousands of variants, thousands of paths to matestasis. Some cancers are already, for most intents and purposes, "cured" (prostate, thyroid, testicular etc.)
No, I don’t think this is true! “Curing cancer” is short for making progress on many aspects of many diseases. There are so many people doing productive and rewarding work that tangibly improves and lengthens lives. And alongside those, there are ineffective and dysfunctional projects that in retrospect were worse allocations of funding and skill.
This reminds me of what a coworker of mine said who moved from working on software for medicine to consumer tech, that the gains in medicine were so hard won and so niche he felt like he was having a much greater impact making our bit of consumer tech better, given how many users we had.
> The knowledge base should be primarily in your head.
I agree generally, then there is also a case to be made about writing down notes as a way to memorize the information. Particularly useful when starting on a new subject and could be great for teaching.
There is also information that isn’t worth memorizing but worth annotating. Shopping for instance.
I would appreciate a 2-way annotation system, where existing notes would appear when visiting a page and where pages would appear when visiting organized notes.
I agree that note-taking is important. But I don't think eliminating a single click to switch from the browser to a note-taking app will make any measurable difference in the quality of anyone's knowledge base or note-taking. The thinking and writing is the hard part.
Browsers are already huge beasts, but I feel like their large feature set mostly benefit the cloud services than the user. I am not advocating for even bigger browser, but I would welcome a better local-first integration with surrounding apps.
As of now, extensions are pretty limited in what they can do around the browser UI.
On desktop, extensions can merely add icons to a toolbar and inject content to the current page. Vertical sidebars are gone.
On mobile, it’s even more limited to adding actions to a menu and some background tasks.
Browsers escaped from the crazy and sometimes fragile extension system that could interact with the browser chrome, maybe for the better, but nowadays, they are mostly sandbox screen readers or huge cloud only monoliths à la chromeOS.
"The knowledge base should be primarly in your head".
Unrelated to the article, but I often vaguely remember that I did read something on internet, and want to be sure of what I did read, but google search is not powerful enough to find the thing I already seen.
I wish I had a search engine for every content I browsed, watched, heard, but I don't care about the content I didn't read yet.
It has full-text search with Sonic (or ripgrep as a fallback), it's a new feature released recently (v0.5.3). If you use the Docker setup it should work out-of-the-box.
> "I should spend less time fucking around on the Internet mindlessly consuming media."
How do you know that is the target audience? To me it's people who are research focused, which doesn't necessarily mean they're fucking around at all. Academics, scientists, etc, often spend a ton of time reading papers and researching things + taking notes. You're making a big assumption here.
While we've gone OT, thanks. That was an interesting read from a different point of view.
Personally, I had never even considered taxidermy on a pet. It'd feel too much like having a relative stuffed and put on display which somehow feels disrespectful.
But then, there are things like Lenin and Mao being on display. Way off topic now so I will stop.
That’s a key insight for all of us. The internet contains just too much stuff that is interesting. We will never able to consume all of it. So you have to restrain yourself eventually.
> The knowledge base should be primarily in your head.
Making it easier to store and recall useful information, without using your brain, is a good thing that has fuelled progress in recent decades.
The impermanence of the internet requires you to store useful information in your brain (you can't guarantee that it will be stored for when you need it), when really it would be better stored externally.
The fact that the internet is impermanent encourages you to treat it as something you need to siphon information from (jam all the data into your head), rather than a safe store that you can depend on.
I'll take the exact opposite side on that one. Here's the red flag:
> The knowledge base should be primarily in your head
This is exactly the same thing as saying "you shouldn't need search engines, you should be able to find it yourself." But Google proved that if you can change the way people find information, you can literally change the world. It is precisely in building new tools, new fundamental primitives by which we interact with information, that we can make the biggest impact.
It remains to be seen if he can execute, but the idea of decentralized, personal knowledge databases sounds like it could be one of those indispensable tools in the future.
I had the same existential crisis from of all the time I waste on the internet.
My solution was to make the Productivity Owl. It’s not for everyone, but if you need an extremely strict browser extension to change your browsing habits I think it’s useful. (also free and open source)
Hey that's awesome! If you ever think about charging or adding paid features, check out my extension payment service https://extensionpay.com It's nice because it's cross-browser and you don't need to run your own server :)
Seeing as the article is almost 100% focused on UX, the browser is almost certainly Chromium-based. In which case it'll be joining the club alongside Brave, Vivaldi, Silk, and many other browsers aiming to "reinvent what it means to browse the web". There's nothing wrong with that (though I'm personally a little weary of the song and dance), but it isn't a shot across the bow of web-monopolists like some here might be hoping.
This choice (under Gary Kovacs, IIRC) has effectively made it a poor choice for _anyone_ to build on top of Mozilla's browser engine without forking the entirety of the mozilla tree. You'd need to have a very good business justification for attempting it.
Since Chrome is essentially a superset of Chromium, it's been obvious how to build your own equivalent of Chrome (and first-party supported!). There is no "Firefoxium" version of Firefox, and I'd expect developers would need to go to great lengths to keep their code up-to-date on top of mozilla-central.
Building a new gecko-based browser is not the same thing as "embedding gecko", at least on desktop platforms.
Creating a new gecko-based product is not very hard, even if you will hit some cases of the platform depending on firefox that you'll have to workaround or borrow.
Creating a full new blink-based product is as difficult actually. Most chromium derivatives take the simpler road of forking chromium, not building a new blink-based browser (eg. Brave maintains a pile of patches).
I don't understand why you would expect a "firefoxium": there is no such thing because there is no proprietary version of the open source Firefox. If you fork Firefox, you're in the same boat as people forking chromium in terms of complexity.
What do you mean by "Creating a new gecko-based product"? I might have overlooked something but last time I checked, there was no way to use a current version of Gecko outside of Firefox, except for GeckoView on Android.
I'm not sure what this is (something like FirefoxOS?) but what I meant is there's no such thing as a "Gecko WebView" (for embedding in UI frameworks) or a "Gecko Electron" that you can use without forking some huge Mozilla thing (except for GeckoView).
This business is probably spending $0.5m on engineering effort to build a customised version of Chromium, and $9m on marketing in order to get people to use it. The question is why. The feature they highlight in their marketing could be a plugin, but VCs aren't stupid. They're not giving someone $9.5m to spend making a browser if the same business goal could be achieved with something far simpler. That money is mostly going on a plan to take a little sliver of browser market share with some other end goal that they're not talking about.
I don't think there's any mention of the new browser being open source? Not sure why you used GNOME Web as an example. Safari is based on webkit and actually webkit is originating from Safari (forked from khtml ages ago).
I assume is used as an example as it is OSS, and lays bare the ridiculous nature of pouring money into something that could conceivably be gotten for free.
> “If we grab a few percentage points of the browser market, then maybe we can be paid by Google. That’s a long shot, but that’s the thing I’m hoping for.”
A well capitalized competitor who only aspires to reach a strong enough position to eventually be paid by the dominant player. This clear and irrefutable evidence of a severely unhealthy market and a textbook case of the impact of monopoly power on consumers. Where's the choice if pretty much all the competitors are aiming to attract Google's business and comply with their vision for the internet?
This is like university CS courses where they tell you that anyone can be the next Google or Amazon
Statistically, you won't. You're quite likely to be a small to medium sized business owner, or a decently paid independent developer, and that's perfectly fine. But there's no need to convince people to aim for the top and nothing else
It doesn’t seem like that. Related your example to their comment, the very presence of Google is causally linked to the tiny chance of being the next Google Chrome, because Google has monopoly power in search and is leveraging that to power in browser competition. ‘Winner takes all’ markets are created, and can be disassembled.
The OP comment is pointing out that to survive and thrive in the browser market an entrant has to seek revenue from its dominant competitor. That is not simply a reality of some businesses being big and some businesses being large. That is anti-competitive.
This reminds me of this idea that someone had a while back to record every moment of your life with a GoPro-like camera, and then use AI to catalog the salient parts for later reference. The problem was, predictably, that the signal-to-noise ratio was far too low. There was just far too much video to review to find the really interesting things, and so they gave up on it after a year or so working on it.
This is also the primary reason why I've given up on all these note taking apps. Once you get too much data in them, they just become totally unmanageable.
There's a real problem here to be solved, but I just don't see how you make tangible progress on this one without having something much closer to strong AI.
I've noticed this as well - a significant problem with knowledge bases is that as knowledge builds up it becomes exponentially more difficult to organize. The article did hint at a solution, however: they are hiring machine learning experts to develop a system that reads into websites you are browsing and doing the organizational grunt work for you. Personally, I believe this is a good solution: throw knowledge in, let AI organize it, and provide a search function to quickly retrieve it again.
Throw machine learning at it and it would again be that people are just passively browsing the web instead of trying to prioritize and sort out their thoughts.
The question then is will the search be as good or better than Google? If it's not (and it's exceptionally unlikely that it will be better), then it'll be faster to find the original source on the web via Google.
I agree. As humans, we're really good at finding the information we need, and when you have thousands of people every day searching "quit vim how" then PageRank takes care of the rest.
What's difficult sometimes is finding the right keywords for your problem. If you're really stumped, and copy/pasting the stack trace doesn't help, then figuring out what to search is a problem in itself.
Better. When I create notes they're abridged with the important parts in my own words and I usually include a few links for reference. With researching on google I'd need to find the proper search phrase and content again (not always one of the top links) and then I'd need to read through it all.
“What do I have for all these hours I spent on the internet?” he said. “Nothing. I’ve got three bookmarks and a few notes here and everything else is basically lost.”
Myself and developers I've worked with suffer from this. Information is easily searchable so we never bother to memorize the function signature for things like substring(). Is it the (start index, end index) or the (start index, length)? This repeated googling of the same question (sometimes on a daily basis) is draining.
I have a belief that this phenomenon is one reason HN bashes on tech interviews. Developers find that they actually have very little retained knowledge when placed in front of a whiteboard. They are dependent on Google and SO.
I don't think taking notes in this NEW browser will alleviate this problem. Instead of Google you now depend on notes. Personally I recommend Mastery Learning[1]. It involves more effort but produces much more confident developers.
When confronted with a new technology suggestion, don't forget to ask "What problem does this solve?" Maybe there is a low-tech solution that's better suited.
I can't say I find this to be a problem for development, but I still bash on tech interviews. Mainly because the knowledge base required to solve an interview is vastly different from the knowledge base you use in your everyday job.
As a teenager I was memorizing PHP function parameters for fun and I rarely had to jump to the docs. Even now that I have a family and my brain doesn't want to work, I rarely reach for GO or SO to do something. I mainly rely on static typing and jump to definition in the IDE.
Every once in a while I forget something stupid (eg. I forgot how to floor in JS once and I was stuck with either doing >>0 or google how to Math.floor) but I can't say I would want to store this kind of information anywhere: It's too sporadic and it's incomplete; just keep the documentation of the tools you're using nearby if you need it.
That said, I see the benefits for KB and I use them all the time.
I agree with you, doing it in the browser won't change things much.
Usually, by the time I Google the same thing three or four times, I don't have to Google it a fifth. I use a knowledge base based on Johnny Decimal's system [0], but it's still usually faster to Google something than look it up unless I know exactly where it is.
the tech industry and its insistence upon framing everything around "improving lives" is extremely grating. this guy feels unfulfilled and like he hasn't improved anyones life so he tries to make a browser?
i really wish people like this would just come out and say "yea i am successful and i am going to keep pushing because i think i can do better." is that really so bad?
1. My culture tells me that success and fulfillment comes from doing X.
2. Get really good at X.
3. Still feel unhappy and unfulfilled.
4. Do not reflect on why that didn't leave me fulfilled. Do not critique my culture.
5. "Maybe if I get really good at X. I'll just X better than anyone has ever X'd before. That'll do it."
I have certainly fallen into this trap many times. I am problably currently occupying it on multiple axes. But I've at least learned to escape it in at least a couple of ways.
I’m way more cynical than that. Him framing the narrative that yeah what I did before was nothing compared to what I will do next is going to get investors and that is what separates him from the other millions of developers out there; his sales skills.
I get you. Personally, I made a deliberate choice this year to try to give more benefit of the doubt and charitable interpretations to narratives I see online.
I think one of the key problems facing our culture is mistrust, and the only way I know to remedy that at the individual level is to just... trust more. I accept that sometimes I'll get burned. I'd rather have that happen than to contribute to a society where everyone is untrustworthy because they know they are not being trusted anyway.
I don't want people to feel that they may as well do the crime if they're gonna do the time (be mistrusted) anyway.
I agree mostly and it will probably lead to a more happier life. But the incentives amongst interviewers and the ones that are interviewed are too aligned in these cases. You can trust the government because you have little choice, but most media is different, the authenticity just isn’t there nor is the necessity.
I had big hopes when wordpress became popular and people started to write small blog posts about their experiences and thoughts. Medium seems to be damaging this though. I’ll stop rambling now.
I considered this as well, although from my view I think it just shows how uncreative a lot of people in tech are. this type of messaging clearly works, or we wouldn't see it constantly.
Even if it is true OP feels unfulfilled, they are trying to rationalise what their difference is. I celebrate this. It is absolutely better than to make people question whether or not their social contribution is worthy.
Software does change lives, and building the social awareness of this implication is important. Chastising those who mention social implications in their software pitches doesn't help to make consideration of social impact a normal part of software development.
oh please, so now every time someone claims they want to "change lives" we must heap praise on them just in case someone at some point will actually want to do it?
does software change peoples lives? absolutely. should we be encouraging people to participate and build software that can legitimately achieve this? absolutely. is there a pervasiveness in tech to constantly frame, no matter what technology is being worked on, in the light of "changing lives"? in my opinion, yes. I see it constantly in the tech industry, and at this point it is essentially a marketing gimmick. im saying I find it irritating that the tech industry is unable to market themselves and their technologies without this blanket statement.
Is there an industry, any industry, that does not aim to "improve lives" (even if they do not state it explicitly)?
edit: Just to extend this thought, I see statements about "improving lives" as laziness or lack of clarity about the value they bring to users. If all you can say about your note-taking app is that it "improves lives", you need to dig deeper to explain how it improves things.
I think there are some, like top athletes that want to break records. They are extremely competitive but they don't pretend to be improving lives. Some of them do use the attention they receive to improve lives.
"[The browser] tracks how long someone spends on a website as a measure of how useful the information is likely to be, and then can match that to an existing card to store relevant information."
This is probably a simplification of how it works, but taking this description at its word, Beam will just start assigning outsize relevance to sticky high-engagement sites like Youtube and Twitter. Hope it's more impressive than that!
I love this concept, its like a power user's knowledge base specifically tailored to consuming large amounts of web content. There are definitely power users and busy people who could benefit from this. However, I think the most difficult thing this project will encounter is making money, because it is too niche to attract a large enough user base to force Google to pay for default status (not willing to switch browsers). I hope that once they roll out their core knowledge base system they pivot to making a cross-platform group of browser extensions/mobile browsers to expand the reach of their service.
Fair point, though as someone who manages two Chrome extensions, I can speak to the danger of building a company on that foundation.
For example, they offered payments through the Chrome Webstore for years. Late last year, they announced they were pulling the plug on payments, effective February 1.
They gave scant instructions on how to migrate your users, and they declined to provide you with the email addresses of said users, so that you might be able to contact them.
They didn't make explicit what would happen if you failed to migrate people in time (would they lose access to your extension, have free access forever, have it uninstalled from their browser?).
They also declined to notify the users that Google payments were going away and that they should expect paid extensions to have a new payment system and upcoming migration.
They also have new extension review rules all the time, and they occasionally nuke your extension for no good reason. [1]
It's nice to be able to reach people on Chrome, but it comes at a substantial cost.
Yeah, Google's handling of extension payments was terrible and sad. On the flip side, I made a replacement https://extensionpay.com that should do a lot better job — I made it for my own extensions and it works cross-browser too :)
Nice! How does your feature set compare to Beam? Looking at pricing, it seems like your primary gating feature is search history, is that right? What does the storage space relate to? Is that just the text from the bookmarks? Or do you store entire pages?
Fun fact: I actually know the guy featured in your first customer testimonial. I met Alan years ago at a hackathon, where he helped me build one of the earliest versions of what has become my startup. Great guy!
I couldn't find it in Google either. Found two other tech companies using Beam in their product name (not to mention Erlang) which is only a minor issue. And the site doesn't mention browser anywhere on the homepage (SEO?).
Even the footer and "Join the beta" CTA only loads after the generic slogan.
Hopefully this isn't an indication of their design and web dev sensibilities. Which are critical for browser development. This is some basic work you do before doing PR rounds.
It's almost like they were trying to reverse-optimize conversion, like maximizing click-away rate. I really want to see how someone well-versed in UX would justify such design, because I see it in many places and am absolutely baffled that anyone could think it's a good idea. It also requires (what I see as) a nontrivial amount of JS/CSS wand waving, which compounds my confusion.
“You’re watching a video, you’ve got an idea, and then you’ve got to do the old dance,” he said. “I’ve got an idea and then I need to include it in my notes app. Then you navigate to it, you put it there, and then you come back to your content. You can do this two or three times a day. But if you do this 20 times, it’s completely breaking your mental flow.”
Hmm, I don't know if this is worth making a whole new browser. I use bookmarks for this, and if I'm really interested in posterity I use the OneNote browser plugin to add it to my notes. I know this experience could be a bit more integrated but it feels pretty smooth already, not like something that slows me down.
One thing I'm much more interested in in a new browser is breaking the Chromium monopoly. I hope he will take Gecko for his engine so it might get some more traction.
Perhaps the real problem is navigating between the apps. I use i3 and I have no problem switching between 2 workspaces in a fraction of a second. Most modern desktop environments try to slow it down by adding some fancy animation or some needless UI component.
Meh, in such cases I’d just put the browser and note-app side-by-side, so switching is quick even with traditional DEs. You can even do this on an iPad and some bigger phones. Why the hell is this guy getting 9.5m for solving a problem that has already been solved?
Someone on HN discussed a similar idea not long ago, where a browser would download and record every single webpage you visited and stored on your computer. And it will record how long you spend on those page as an indicator of importance. You can then easily search back all the information you have read somewhere on the Internet without going to Google. You can then Add notes and Tags to those pages like we do with Bookmarks.
I think what Beam proposed here is very similar. Or may be he even got the idea from HN :)
The idea is superb. It is actually a big niche. We all have pieces of our memories as photos. But our digital life is not documented. If I want to use my browser history, a lot of pages from some years ago dissapeared. Bookmark handling by all major browsers is lame. I'd love to use a browser that helps me gather knowledge and create my own Internet Archive.
I just hope he won't sell the company when it kicks off
I am not involved in any browser development, so count me as an outsider. Considering what browsers we have available and taking their estimated development costs into account (not to the point we are at now, but at their release), $9.5M seems like a hobby project at best. What am I missing? And is aiming for a sellout to competitors already a business model in a way that you openly advertise it?
$9.5M one time is too little, but you could def get by with funding a competitive Firefox-level product on a budget of $25–30M annually if you ran lean enough and (counter-intuitively) paid high programmer salaries. Pay slightly higher than experienced Googlers make and move the business out of the Bay Area.
I wonder why these so-called 'serial entrepreneurs' don't get tired of playing this phony game of crony capitalism... Why don't they try real capitalism. The one where you take a real risk and produce real value. Bootstrapped, no corporate insiders to provide you a crony-exit, no shell game, no revenue laundering, no tech journalists...
And why is the guy who built a career out of making products which, by his own admission, are detrimental society, be the one to build products to supposedly help society. He should stick to his own crony capitalist bubble and let the real value producers do the socially useful work. If a crony capitalist wants to switch sides and do good work, they'd better start on the right foot by bootstrapping it with their own money.
It's too easy to make amends using other people's money. These entrepreneurs' win-win mindset is the root of the problem. It's not enough that they get a ton of money playing some phony shell game, they also want to have the moral high ground pretending to be the good guys.
Personally, I see this as an opportunity for Apple to actually invest heavily in Safari. But Apple's walled garden is no different than Chrome or Edge from a risk perspective and poor Mozilla is so captured by the search traffic payment they get that I really don't see any progress here for many years to come.
As we return to "browsers with an editorial opinion" market differentiation is based on that opinion. Apple has been pushing privacy really strongly to move people to the Apple ecosystem. As the "browser that won't let you be tracked or compromise your privacy" they have an opportunity to further "choke" the data/advertising streams of competitors.
It is the advantage of having a weapon that you can use that damages your competitor but not you. Chrome started out that way[1] as a way to attack Microsoft (and to some extent Firefox)
When you see things like Tim Cook saying he will "end" Facebook, you might reasonably ask, "Wait how could he possibly do that? He doesn't control the web." And you would be right, with the exception of understanding that Facebook makes its money on data extraction[2], and a lot of Facebook users are also Apple device users. So on the Apple device Apple can build a browser that lets their users access Facebook while taking away as much data as possible from Facebook. This damages Facebook revenue, forces them to invest in counter measures, and doesn't change Apple's revenue model hardly at all.
As a result, from a business perspective, I think Apple could justify investment here in a browser that puts forward a point of view that makes it harder for Google and Facebook to make money.
[1] FWIW I worked at Google when Chrome was launched and understand that there was the 'open standards' narrative but there was also a pretty obvious 'hurts Microsoft/Apple' narrative. So the technical reasons to invest aside, my opinion is that the real reason any large enterprise invests in anything is because they have a reason to believe it will make their business stronger, more difficult to attack, more profitable, or with luck all three.
[2] I think the term 'surveillance capital' a bit too inflammatory.
Well perhaps if we talked about browser perspective?
Chrome - we own the world so use our browser with its proprietary extensions and only works completely if you hand over a Google account.
Firefox - we try to follow standards and be good to users as long as we don't piss off the people who are paying our salaries too much.
Edge - So much faster and better than Chrome all you need to do is let us know all about you and what your doing and use our services that give us more 'stickyness' over your use of our browser.
Safari - Oh hey, we need a web browser so uh, here is a web browser.
Brave - Crypto currency is the best, oh here's a browser.
Chromium/Konquerer/etc/etc - Opensource is the best! Only we don't do what all the other browsers do, and half the time you'll find the web page is rendering weird but you can fix the code and send us a PR and we'll look at it and contemplate it.
Sure that is a cynical view, just trying to share what it feels like that to me.
> Chrome - we own the world so use our browser with its proprietary extensions and only works completely if you hand over a Google account.
I've never logged into a Chrome browser with my Google account. What am I missing? I know you do have to log in if you want to purchase certain Chrome extensions, but now that Google killed their payment infrastructure, this seems not to be an issue anymore.
Oh I agree it is an excellent browser for many things, and it is nicely "unOpinionated" on many things. It really only trips me up with web sites that are trying to "guess" my web browser and they guess wrong and then Safari ends up doing something stupid because the webdev thought it was firefox or chrome.
> “So if I’m into guitar making and a Japanese guy has an 80% overlap of links on guitar making, it’s highly probable that I’m going to enjoy looking at what he’s done and enjoy navigating into his knowledge base. This is still very far away, but it’s basically a cultural search engine.”
That interesting bit was first uttered at least a dozen years ago, and for the most part we've collectively decided that following that thought to its conclusions is exactly how Facebook got into the Current Troubles with farming dissent.
What it doesn't take into account is that the reason I only think 90% the same things as someone else is that I've accidentally or consciously avoided going down certain rabbit holes that are likely to break your brain. This concept that 'there are no dangerous thoughts' is directly at odds with, "there are some things you can't unsee". If you believe both things at once, then you're fooling yourself.
We protect our lizard brain from stuff that is rationally objectionable all the time so that we don't horrible things in the spur of the moment.
A lie is best concealed between two truths, and cults of every kind know that they have to find common ground with you. And on the internet there isn't a door for you to hide behind and "don't make eye contact" doesn't work as well. And then you add social networking algorithms that build the cult for you. You don't even have to decide to build a cult to end up running one.
Delicious offered something a lot like this. Obviously they only had actual bookmarks and tags were manually chosen by people (there wasn’t really machine learning) but on average tags made sense and by looking at the tags that people commonly applied to links, one could find similar links by searching for those tags. Some problems would be spam and the fact that modern urls are more likely to try to be unique—you’d need to figure out how to strip the tracking part from each url.
Someone is trying to something new with idea tribes, which is great. The last big push was from reddit with sub-reddits. It'd be interesting if idea tribes were merged with a wikipedia.
From having worked at a large French mobile operator, I can tell you that the EU money granted in European projects was/is not solely favoring France and Germany: we had a couple of people working full time to put together proposals for EU funded projects; they had a very high success rate and one of their tricks was to always include partners from small/poor European countries, because EU wanted to help these countries. So for a while, we had a bunch of projects with greek partners, even if they didn't bring much to the table from a project perspective. I hope this genuinely helped them.
You reaction is typical of small, rich nordic countries unfortunately.
How about lower taxes and no need for full time proposal writers? EU literally cannot see small companies, and I'm not even talking about that stupid preferred values wheel. Projects being evaluated on merits? Nah, let's fund things because they have a gender balanced team (look it up, I'm not kidding).
Yes, if be very surprised if it wasn't built on top of Blink.
It reminds me of a Mac program that a work colleague used, Devon Agent, that consumed the web content that he browsed and indexed it along with local content.
There also used to be a functionally simpler Recoll plugin for Firefox that indexed web text. I really should look to see if that has migrated into the new plugins model.
With limitations imposed on extensions it may be hard. Also, developing an extension makes you dependant on browser developers. Thing that many felt badly during last years. So it sounds reasonable to create own browser. It is great it is possible, while it is unfortunately sad also that you have to do it that way.
I though it is Brave. At least to me they did reinvent the browser, no ads and the amount of garbage blocked is amazing. The performance is also pretty good.
Same story with me with one thing added: never thought I would be doing the whole digital currency thing (BAT in this case) and now I'm doing small contributions to independent sites/content creators.
OT: Why doesn't the article have a link to the Beam website? That seems like something that would be relevant to someone reading this article.
I've noticed this trend a decent amount, where news articles don't link to the very product/study/whatever they're actually talking about. Very frustrating.
Sounds like the kind of thing I'd want, but I don't want to have a very high degree of control over how that info is shared beyond my own personal computers.
Everyone will still use chrome. Example, when I do a fresh install of Windows I use Edge to download chrome then never use Edge again despite all the nags.
The article is pretty light on details, but it appears Beam is attempting to solve the bookmark problem. But that brings up a really fascinating question: what are bookmarks for, and is there really a problem? If not, what is the real problem?
Before Google, bookmarks were necessary if you ever wanted to find your way back to a website. Now, all you need is some dim memory of a website to find it with Google. Currently, I only use bookmarks like I used to use fast-dial — to quickly navigate to websites without having to Google for them (or for internal work URLs that are not crawlable). The bookmarks bar has become a built-in concise portal for my various go-to sites.
So if the original purpose of bookmarks has been achieved, what is the real problem here? I remember the many hours I used to spend organizing my bookmarks into tidy folders, like a personal Wikipedia of topical links. Many of these sites were blogs that were deprecated by the migration to social media and aggregators. My topical folders are now my Twitter feed and subreddits. So the idea of bookmarks as the “organization of specific topical data” is now outsourced to others.
And yet still, I have a nagging feeling that there is something missing from our experience of the Internet, and that some aspect of the concept of bookmarks reveals that problem.
Beam suggests that it is marking some piece of information as important — not marking a URL, but marking information itself. As information has grown exponentially, I do often find myself feeling like I’m drowning in a sea of important information, because my mind can only remember so much. There’s a nagging feeling that I’m losing important information, and I know that although I can (and do) bookmark URLs, I haven’t used a non-toolbar bookmark in years.
I find myself utilizing various hacks when I find a piece of information I think it important and don’t want to lose: I send myself a link via Slack, or sometimes by text message. How often do I actually revisit those links? Maybe once or twice in years
So there’s the problem identified in behavior: bookmarking or otherwise saving URLs, but never actually visiting those links. Am I the only one who does this? Probably not. When I add a bookmark, it is always accompanied by a sense of futility, but I do it anyways! When I leave a tab open to reference later, I know I’ll probably just close it later without a glance. But I still do it.
The true problem underlying this futile behavior is obvious and agreed upon: information overload. But we can be more precise: information overload that makes all information ephemeral, when some information should be permanent.
When I read an article about Beam, what I want is not only the article itself, but a kind of rap-genius of meta-information I’ve previously marked as important running alongside it. I’d see information about other browsers. I’d see quick summaries of the dead social-bookmarking sites and why they failed. I’d see pithy HN comments about why some people seem to get VC money thrown at them.
It would be like this HN comments section, but the only person commenting would be myself with full recall of everything I’d ever read, happily chirping away at every paragraph, line, and word. It would be a genius version of myself with a photographic memory.
So there it is: the real problem — we are not geniuses with perfect memory. But it would be pretty cool if we were.
If there were a GPT-X continually fine-tuned on everything I had ever read (with meta-data about how long I had read and whether I found it important), then I think it would be possible to at least solve part of this problem — that of not having a perfect memory. But ML has a long way to go until it is capable of producing genius, let alone intelligence.
This is to say that Beam has taken on a problem much harder than “bookmarks”, and it is going to take more than a few million to solve.
> But we can be more precise: information overload that makes all information ephemeral, when some information should be permanent.
On this particular point I disagree, though I love the rest of your writeup. The information was always there, somewhere; you just couldn't really access it. Google and other aggregators have made it possible for us to operate "one level higher". I don't have to remember exactly what Bayes theorem is and how it can be used, I can just remember the type of problem Bayes is excellent at solving, and rely on the internet to bring me quickly up to speed. It _has_ made us all geniuses, but we take it for granted because we've gotten so used to it that it seems obvious.
I think what Beam is attempting here is a similar leap in technology, and it should be interesting to see if they succeed and change our relationship with information. It definitely feels like something is missing, because the internet is too unreliable; if a video is deleted or a link is broken, you're out of luck.
> Has anything he’s built really improved people’s lives?
> To hear Leca describe it, the development of Beam is as much an effort to improve the web browsing experience as it is a spiritual quest for meaning.
> “The only reason I’m doing this is to be working for the greater good,” Leca said. “Is this something I can explain to my kid and be proud of the fact that it’s not just a stupid business to make money?”
This reads like a parody of SV hubris. It's a startup to slap note-taking onto a browser shell. It's not curing cancer. I do believe that creating software can be a deeply meaningful experience, and that software can change people's lives for the better in real ways. But... this is a VC-funded startup for a browser shell.
> “What do I have for all these hours I spent on the internet?” he said. “Nothing. I’ve got three bookmarks and a few notes here and everything else is basically lost.”
It's crazy to me that the author thought that and their solution was "I should make it easier to take notes" and not "I should spend less time fucking around on the Internet mindlessly consuming media."
The knowledge base should be primarily in your head. If your mind doesn't feel like a knowledge base to you, it's because we're all so busy jamming new data into it that we never slow down and take the time to reflect and process what we've already consumed.