Launch HN: SigmaOS (YC S21) – A MacOS web browser designed for faster work

It looks like the primary redeeming tab groups feature could've been implemented as a browser extension which I personally still wouldn't use as I don't see that it adds any value over my current natural setup of having my "tab groups" basically grouped across across multiple browser windows and virtual desktops. So all sites I frequent are already open and I just use the OS shortcuts for opening the preferred browser window and CTRL+NUM to navigate tabs which IMO beats twiddling with a permanent sidebar that takes up valuable real-estate.

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.

Congrats on the launch, the vision to create something different, to lead with Mac, to base it on WebKit, and to charge for it. Not many companies dare do that.

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!

Interesting take on a problem that many startups are trying to solve from different angles.

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.

Could you describe what you are actually adding on top of the new Safari?

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.

> Oh, and we don't sell your data

> 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.

A subscription model for a browser seems like a very, very niche market to me - but then that's the vim angle.

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.

Since a couple of comments have made the comparison to Vivaldi, I thought I'd chime in, having used Vivaldi as my primary browser for 3-4 years now. Vivaldi's extreme customizability and rich feature sets makes it possible to mimic the functionality described here. (I love organizing tabs vertically on the left, something only Vivaldi was doing.)

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.

I’ve been using SigmaOS for the last half hour for my active work, after having gone through the tutorial. I quite like it. I can imagine that I may feel it’s worth the money, but I have to spend more time with it before I could know.

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.

I'm not the target (I use almost only Linux professionally) but from a quick glance this looks very much like my firefox setup (grouping tabs: tree style tabs + sharing quickly through many apps: share backported + split screen: Nifty Split).

I know it sounds like the famous Dropbox rebuttal comment, and I'm obviously not the target demographic, but I'm puzzled :)

So, bucking the trend... but i think this is really well executed and I'm a huge fan. I don't use vivaldi but i dont find it to be as nice of a UX as this.

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.

The "Used by people at..." bit is curious and suspicious, especially in relation to their privacy claims.

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.

This really feels like it would have had a better time with a smaller "meet the batch" thread. Given that which startups get to be featured in one of those threads rather than a standalone thread is decided by dang, it almost feels like this thread was intentionally greenlit standalone to start a flamewar. The odds of that are slim, probably, but it seems impossible that anyone thought this was a good idea to give its own thread rather than a smaller and more under-the-radar spot in a group thread.

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.

It looks awesome!

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 :)

Absolutely no chance I'm paying $15/mo for a browser without:

- Extensions - Adblock - No support for CMD+W (?)

15$ a month is a ton of money.

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

Congrats, I think you are working on something very important. Recently I watched the Ds conferences with Steve Jobs to get a new eye on them. At some point he explains that the minute the user get to see the file system, the learning curve goes everest. And so they made splotlight notably.

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.

I literally never post comments on HN but what is this product. Is this $15/month browser for MacOS ? Fancy browser with grouped tabs, split-screen and sharing but still just browser. I think I'm just too poor to understand. I hope that your product will succeed because then I will know that in this world you can sell ice to an eskimo.

The negativity in this thread is extremely distasteful. :/

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!

You'll probably get too few monthly subscriptions to make it sustainable..

Suggestion -> Make the basics free, add the collaboration features as an addon.

You assert it’s “Used by people at [four images]”.

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.

In your mandatory signup form, I am told "Looks like you missed one of the required fields: [facepalm] Problems". I do not suffer from any of the listed problems.

… and now I have to dig up this login link? really testing my patience here…

No Linux? No Windows? No 32-bit? No thank you.

Workona tab manager does most of that for free. It doesn't have split screen, but it has better bookmark management.

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.

While we are giving constructive feedback...

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.

Having watched the demo video, I think this looks interesting. A lot of the (overly nasty) comments here are talking about the pricing for this from a consumer/individual perspective. Frankly, they're right: I think that, for individuals, the benefit over using a vanilla browser is pretty limited.

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.

I get the vision. You're building Superhuman but for browsers. Power tools for power users who are willing to invest the $$ and the effort to reimagine the most frequently used tool on their computer. Bravo!

One thing that I've noticed is when the comments for a Launch HN or Show HN is overwhelmingly negative, that usually the product captures a usecase that people have wanted or hacked together themselves but haven't productionized or monetized. Sometimes, it works out and sometimes it doesn't but it definitely makes me want to judge for myself.

Watched the video and the product looks great! I'll definitely give it a spin and congrats to everyone @ SigmaOS for a great launch.

""Oh… and we don’t sell your data."

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.

Unisntalled after being requested email and 14 day trial.

I always feel so strange when the topic of tabs comes up. There is an assumption that everyone has hundreds of tabs open all the time. Is that really true? I honestly can't imagine needing more than email, chat, github, and maybe some documentation or something while you are working. What do you people need all these open tabs for??

Why did you choose to feature ~100% non-work distractions in your demo video? Reverse psychology? Hahaha.

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.

$15 a month is too much for me to consider switching from Safari. Although I'm looking for a decent browser-replacement, because of the <Safari - OS - hardware> update interlock.

I don't mind paying for software, but for $15 I'd expect Browser + full blown google internet search alternative + privacy.

What engine is this a skin for?

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.

Honestly, this just seems like a cheap rip-off of Vivaldi. All of the features(yes, all of them) are already present in Vivaldi, including the split screen, tree style tabs, sync, global search, full keyboard support. Slapping some UI makeup on top of an already existing product does not warrant a hefty fee of $15 in my view. Also, I don't see any proof that my data is secure. For all I know, you guys will sell off my data after 3 years when this doesn't work out.

>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.

Cool concept, I wonder removing the price from the website will help with conversion (a la superhuman). A lot of people are probably not even trying it because they haven't see the value of the product yet.

This is pretty much solving a problem that doesn't exist at all.

How often do "Sigma male" memes go around your office?

hey there! SigmaOS does look amazing and like something I'd use. one question though.... I wasn't able to create a new window, I use multiple screens. when I do "cmd+n" it prompts me to try "W" which creates a new Workspace. Am i missing anything here? or it is impossible to use SigmaOS on different screens at the same time.

Thanks and congrats on the launch!

Been beta testing this (full disclosure, angel invester) and i can honestly say i miss it when i'm not on my Big Sur machine. Vim keybindings are such a win, and Sigma does it better than all previous attempts at a vim-like browser because it's properly modal. You hit i to Insert (interact) with a page and escape to go back to controlling the browser. Or you can ignore all that and just use it as a tabs-on-the-sed browser.

Hey, just want to say good luck and keep at it. Lots of skeptical comments here, but that's always the case for different ideas. Stay positive :)

The multitasking seems great. Can you just Shift Click any link and it will open it in the same tab?

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!

The initial popup, asking about making the browser as default and to import the bookmarks from other browsers: I deselected both options, and the button became disabled, hinting that I had to at least select one option. But it was still possible to click outside the popup to close it.

These kind of UI patterns make me stop using a product immediately.

I liked the idea.it seems to have potential,considering the raise of bloatware browser tools in day to day life of an dev.

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?

Fyi, there's a minor typo on the landing page, the little guy in the bottom left says "Psst... wanna now a secret?"

So I watched the demo, read the pitch, and read this whole thread trying to understand why anyone would think that a subscription browser could work as a business, and I think I finally see where they could go that might be interesting. It's right there in the name.

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.

Serious question: what are you doing (or can you do) to prevent your company from getting sherlocked out of existence?

I'm so, so in for browser modernisation, I really like the look of what you're doing, I'm a devoted vim addict, and I'll be trying the demo later. But honestly $15/month is extremely pushing it, to the point that I probably won't go for it.

Presumably i[Pad]OS is on the roadmap?

Whats up with the name? Are you trying to get this thing to be a a complete layer over the OS?

Lots of negativity in the thread, but I just want to say I think it looks great. Really interesting design choices, and the screenshots of the browser look awesome.

Big Sur only (You have macOS 10.15. The application requires macOS 11.0 or later.)

Another approach to this problem is the emacs aligned nyxt browser

https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/

I’ve been beta testing this and I can honestly say that I love it! I don’t use too many web apps (except Notion) but still usually have about 50 tabs open on safari. With sigma, I’ve been able to organise all these tabs in different workspaces because I work on a lot of different projects and just this already has, imo, made me much more efficient. I can focus on specific tabs without having to move around like crazy like I usually do on safari. I also love the split screen feature - I read a lot of research papers and sigma makes taking notes while reading so simple. You can also send feedback or request features! Lastly, the design is beautiful and clear, something you don’t always find elsewhere. Keep up the good work Sigma!

looks nice. is it chromium based ? what about supporting other platforms

It wouldn't be hard to make an Electron clone of this. The only real selling point I see is the privacy aspect?

A free version with limited features would be great

- What is the OS part of your name?

- What is a neo-browser?

I opened 3 suggested workspaces and it took 3.5GB of memory + my fans started blowing (MBPr 15")

thanks, but I'm not paying for any browser. The browser should be free imho ;)

maybe try to monetise through donations or something of this sorts

Oh wow! You’ve built a social network and integrated it into the browser, I can’t wait to see the potential of surveillance capitalism to advertise everything I ever wanted to me with SigmaOS!

Love it so far. When I think about all of the time and tasks lost because of my mountain of tabs, $15 is an infinitesimally small price to pay given my workload and schedule. If it's not for you it's not for you but at least just try it.

This will actually make me money and help me clock our earlier aside from the headaches I won't have. My life feels more organized and I am happy to have a team that is dedicated to building and improving a product. I have been a freeware/opensource nut for years but as I grow older I have learned the value of my time/happiness vs money. Everything is an investment and I am trading a little bit of cash for a better quality of life at work and time. That is going to be worth it 8 days a week.

Sigma has been an amazing browser and has increased my productivity significantly since I started using it.

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.

To the people saying $15 is too much: SigmaOS is almost certainly targeting companies, not individual users.

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)