[HN Gopher] Beam has raised $9.5M to reinvent the browser
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Beam has raised $9.5M to reinvent the browser
Author : cpeterso
Score : 36 points
Date : 2021-02-03 19:50 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sifted.eu)
(TXT) w3m dump (sifted.eu)
| mpalmer wrote:
| "[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!
| tomaszs wrote:
| 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
| 1MachineElf wrote:
| 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.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| 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.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| From _which_ risk perspective?
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Why would this be an opportunity for Apple to spend time and
| money on something that isn't going to change their
| marketshare?
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| 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.
| sneakernets wrote:
| Why, oh god why? Imagine if all these soon-to-fail initiatives
| helped to develop Firefox, an actual alternative to Chrome and
| Blink-based browsers!
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| This sounds like a browser extension.
| tpmx wrote:
| Yeah, but if you brand it like a browser and if you're french,
| you're pretty likely to get EU funds to burn.
| tomaszs wrote:
| 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.
| smt88 wrote:
| It should be one, but you can't raise money as easily by
| pitching an extension.
|
| I also doubt that the state of the art of ML can achieve his
| vision of taking meaningful notes from websites.
| dingaling wrote:
| 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.
| leadingthenet wrote:
| One that already existed at some point: StumbleUpon.
| smt88 wrote:
| Article doesn't mention rendering engine, which I was most
| curious about.
|
| The answer appears to be WebKit:
| https://startuparound.com/read/1603209607.9733047/Beam-is-bu...
| stakkur wrote:
| "Beam has raised $9.5M to reinvent the browser"
|
| ...for which, once again, you will be the product.
| nexthash wrote:
| 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.
| amelius wrote:
| > "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."
|
| ...
| mft_ wrote:
| This would be a huge moderation task, I suspect. Maybe
| solvable... but probably very difficult.
|
| (Wasn't there a startup a while ago that let you add notes to
| any website, and they were visible to all... but it was
| horribly abused?)
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| 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.
| brundolf wrote:
| 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.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| FWIW, this is partially Mozilla's fault. About a decade ago
| they made the call to make it more difficult to embed Gecko
| outside of Firefox.
|
| Dead links abound: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embed...
|
| Scary warnings: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embed...
|
| 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.
| akdor1154 wrote:
| An old Techcrunch article says they are using WebKit and
| focusing on a Mac app.
| brundolf wrote:
| Hum, interesting. So still not a whole new browser engine,
| but could conceivably help balance things out a little bit
| one day.
| StreamBright wrote:
| 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.
| chaostheory wrote:
| 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.
| rmellow wrote:
| So this is StumbleUpon, with extra steps.
|
| I liked StumbleUpon, and I think there's a place for it. Perhaps
| not as its own browser.
| Krasnol wrote:
| Sounds like an article advertising an addon not a browser.
| [deleted]
| woeirua wrote:
| 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.
| nexthash wrote:
| 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.
| woeirua wrote:
| 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.
| karlding wrote:
| Google also tried doing this via Google Clips [0], which is
| (perhaps predictably) discontinued.
|
| [0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/16/20917386/google-clips-
| de...
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| "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.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| 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.
| munificent wrote:
| _> 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
| also 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.
| vincent_s wrote:
| In case you're looking for the actual app: https://beamapp.co/
| afterwalk wrote:
| That has got to be the most frustrating landing page design...
| waiting 5-10 seconds for the slogan and the call to action to
| appear...
| dmix wrote:
| 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.
|
| Edit: found a blog post with their 'vision', with content
| that would work better as homepage
| https://getonbeam.medium.com/beam-bright-paper-1ca4ae41ae0b
| skulk wrote:
| 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.
| ordinaryradical wrote:
| Might be wise for a beta sign up, depending on the
| objective? If you only want the true believers/patient,
| this is actually a useful pattern for you.
|
| Maybe the issue is that we assume betas are a way of
| establishing a customer base instead of establishing a
| product?
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