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 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.
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!
Other than the rendering engine, what is so hard about writing a browser?
Other than THAT, how was the play, Mrs Lincoln?
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.
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.
I'm actually implementing the Chrome extensions API, so SigmaOS will have the same extensions available as Chrome :D
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.
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!
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.
- 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
Sounds good re putting imported workspaces after tutorial.
I know it sounds like the famous Dropbox rebuttal comment, and I'm obviously not the target demographic, but I'm puzzled :)
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.
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!
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.
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.
These are all users who joined during our private beta and who we spoke to personally :)
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.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
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.
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 :)
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?
- Extensions - Adblock - No support for CMD+W (?)
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
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?
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 hope those folks are aware that Vivaldi gives them the same experience for free.
I believe Windows Pro license is a one time fee, so SigmaOS is more expensive than Windows
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.
$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.
Make it a one-time payment and I'd think about it. Subware is not something I support.
Suggestion -> Make the basics free, add the collaboration features as an addon.
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!
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.
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?
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.
Very curious why YC backed this and what market share they were trying to capture.
… and now I have to dig up this login link? really testing my patience here…
Regarding the login flow, would you use Google Sign-In if we had it?
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?
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.
I presume specific user testimonials might help? What were you thinking?
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?
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.
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.
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.
Hopefully you give it a try when you update eventually :)
What's the market share for this one ?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
It is our long-term goal for that name to make more and more sense :)
Watched the video and the product looks great! I'll definitely give it a spin and congrats to everyone @ SigmaOS for a great launch.
Let us know what you think :)
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 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.
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.
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.
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
I don't mind paying for software, but for $15 I'd expect Browser + full blown google internet search alternative + privacy.
>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.
- 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.
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.
> 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.
Is there a Spotlight/Alfred extension for Chrome/ium/Firefox? I haven't seen that UX in a browser yet.
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.
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.
The second thought was if this was some kind of a Motorola spin-off.
Hence, uBlock Origin + cosmetic filter list. The productivity boost is more than any keyboard assignment can ever do I guess.
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.
https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/05/23/stack-overflow-helping...
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 :)
Also, most other OSes have native splitting of windows.
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
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!
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!
Thanks and congrats on the launch!
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?
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?
I'm not your target audience and also not active in start ups so this is just my 2 cents
These kind of UI patterns make me stop using a product immediately.
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.
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.
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 :)
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...
Presumably i[Pad]OS is on the roadmap?
Hopefully you'll be able to upgrade to try it out :)
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?
We definitely want to support Windows and Linux eventually, but for now we're focusing on MacOS.
Thrilled to a startup tackling browser innovation with such a strong emphasis on speed within information workflow. Best of luck with the years ahead.
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.
Try out the product, tell us how to improve it, and we will :)
- What is a neo-browser?
maybe try to monetise through donations or something of this sorts
Hopefully eventually, you'll reconsider when it looks even more awesome :)
And to be frank, SigmaOS does not and will never allow advertising to our users through the app.
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.
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.
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)
Doubtful, individual signups and education discounts show otherwise.
Even as a company I'd be reluctant to purchase this.
