Some of these features look awesome and I can see how much thought went into them. The hotkey toggle looks like a viable alternative to splitting the screen with a console and pop out mode seems similar to how Firefox allows videos to be overlaid on other pages. I'll be honest, I don't really see the utility of some features like workspaces or the tree history, but then again I initially rolled my eyes at Gmail's pop out compose and clearly they knew what I wanted better than I did!
I have a few questions:
1. Did you code the engine from scratch, or is it based on Chromium or Gecko or something?
2. What's your sustainability, e.g., monetization, plan for the browser?
3. Do you have any estimate on how long until I can `apt install bonsai-browser` from an official distro repository?
We’re using Electron with all the UI done with HTML. The criticism against Electron is that you don’t need to bundle a fully functional web browser to distribute a your app but distributing a fully functional web browser is one of our goals! The other options were using CEF or actually recompiling Chromium. To have a sensible workflow with Chromium you would want to hook into it with a scripting language so you can develop the chrome [0] without recompiling. Electron already has done this with the BrowserView API accessible with javascript! We’ve already run into limitations of the Electron framework so we will be considering extending it or doing our own thing when it makes sense.
> What's your sustainability…
I really like the JetBrains perpetual fallback license so something like that at a price point of $50 makes sense. If we can provide some useful paid services that run on a server then we could make the browser free.
> Do you have any estimate on how long…
I’ll look into it! If it’s no harder than signing/notarizing the app for macOS distribution then the main work to be done is fix some bugs and make sure the windows play nicely with the host OS. This could be done in less than a month from now!
I have a few questions:
1. Did you code the engine from scratch, or is it based on Chromium or Gecko or something?
2. What's your sustainability, e.g., monetization, plan for the browser?
3. Do you have any estimate on how long until I can `apt install bonsai-browser` from an official distro repository?