The Rude Baguette reports
Modular, Open Source, Hackable Breach is ticking all the boxes with the ambitious browser project they launched this month. The team, originally composed of TOTEMS (formerly Nitrogram) CTO Stanislas Polu, Socket.io (now Automattic)'s Guillermo Rauch, Alejandro Vizio & others, is now made up of around 80 developers collaborating on the project. Since its release last month, the product has seen over 160,000 users user the browser (according to their public Google Analytics account), with around 2,500 Daily Active users using the product.
Built on Google's open source Chromium project, Breach goes one step beyond Mozilla & Chrome, who enable developers to build 3rd party add-ons/plugins for the respective browsers when you first start Breach, it has no functionality. Functionalities are brought in by modules, meaning that everything down to the core features of a browser navigation, display, etc. are hackable.
The product isn't quite mass-market ready yet, says Polu, who says that it is more exciting for developers (especially those who love browsers built entirely on node.js), but that Developers are likely to bring some great innovation to the outdated parts of a browser "bookmarks", "tabs", and other features that have been grandfathered into the modern browser may be ready for an overhaul.
(Score: 1) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29 2014, @10:48PM
I wonder how speed and security go with this one.
My prediction: neither.
(Score: 1) by Horse With Stripes on Tuesday July 29 2014, @10:56PM
Seems very fast to me. None of the regular crap and bloat weighing things down.
Security? There's only one way to find out ... I'll log into Facebook and see if my computer is a brick before dinner ;-)
(Score: 2, Interesting) by N3Roaster on Tuesday July 29 2014, @11:12PM
A web browser is probably an area where extensive use of JavaScript makes a lot of sense. The practical reality is that web browsers these days need to provide a host environment anyway so it's not as if it can be considered bloat and since everything is usually coming in over a relatively slow (compared to anything inside your computer) network connection language choice is unlikely to be a bottleneck under normal use provided the implementation isn't terrible. Granted, I might have some bias here as I've written a desktop application where a lot of it is in JavaScript (QtScript with a bunch of stuff exposed to the host environment, nice for being able to rapidly customize things) and nobody else complains about performance.
Typica - Free software for coffee roasting professionals. [typica.us]
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday July 29 2014, @11:45PM
On the other hand, who the heck wants to fight a browser that installs non-functionally?
I keep Epic around for for my paranoia mode browsing. The Proxy is slow, but sometimes that's good, and you switch it on and off with one click. (Epic allegedly defeats most trackers).
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 30 2014, @04:21AM
Does Epic defeat Canvas tracking? If so, everyone else needs to look hard at their code and copy what they did. If not, you're being tracked everywhere by the new preferred tracking method.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 30 2014, @07:06AM
canvastracking requires javascript -> use noscript
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 30 2014, @06:27PM
Tor Browser Bundle prevents canvas tracking by default.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Horse With Stripes on Tuesday July 29 2014, @11:40PM
AFA security is concerned, it has a long way to go:
- does not display the full URL so you don't really know where you are.
- doesn't block popups; in fact the window was taken over by a Glen Beck ad that couldn't be navigated away from so I closed the tab.
- does not show the URL in any links so you have no idea where you're going to click.
- don't not have a 'copy link' option in teh contextual menu.
It's very fast so your screen will be comandered in the blink of an eye and the popups will be open before the afrementioned blink is complete ... and will take you to who knows where when you click on something (I clicked on a blank part of the page that happened to be an ad that either didn't display or was hidden on purpose by the website I was visiting).
(Score: 3, Funny) by wonkey_monkey on Wednesday July 30 2014, @09:43AM
When will your eyes heal from the subsequent bleaching you gave them?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 1) by Horse With Stripes on Wednesday July 30 2014, @12:20PM
I keep asking my Dr. Magic 8-Ball but I can't read it. When will they learn that they need to put a speech module in these things?
(Score: 4, Funny) by Bot on Wednesday July 30 2014, @12:19AM
Easy fix: put noscript on it.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Wednesday July 30 2014, @01:45AM
Seriously, a browser that needs a plugin just to have a UI at all, but will still happily auto-execute trojans for you without one, who thought this was a good idea?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday July 29 2014, @10:49PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by nightsky30 on Wednesday July 30 2014, @11:34AM
Maybe the base install?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29 2014, @11:08PM
Shows once again why marketing morons shouldn't be writing breathless intro PR rubbish, at least not for outlets like SoylentNews.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Horse With Stripes on Tuesday July 29 2014, @11:17PM
The 'Tab Strip' Breech uses is, well, rather horrible. The visible portion of the URL is all the way to the left and uses 435 pixels (along with the < & > controls). When you click on a tab it moves to the leftmost tab position (immedeately to the right of the visible portion of the URL) and the other tabs move to the right. It's like 'shell game for tabs'.
Yes, it's an alpha release, and yes the 'tab strip' can be replaced by another tab module (once someone writes one), but it's not the kind of UI that I'd have a dozen tabs open on each of a dozen windows (not that Breech supports multiple windows yet). .
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 30 2014, @12:29AM
Explain to me why I should use this over Palemoon?
I don't like anything from the former CEO of anything.
(Score: 2) by SlimmPickens on Wednesday July 30 2014, @01:39AM
Well you won't suffer from too much choice.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Lagg on Wednesday July 30 2014, @01:13AM
So it would seem what we have here is another uzbl. I wanted very badly to like uzbl but it was just too unusable for the most part and I ended up sticking with chrome which I switched to from firefox due to the ever increasing bloat and general nastiness of XUL. Now that chrome is getting worse with its bloat and google's never ending attempts to force more crap like webrtc down everyone's throats I have nowhere to go for the moment though I am considering palemoon. Doesn't remove xulrunner and things like that obviously but it does get rid of a lot of crap. All in all it looks decent for a redistribution of firefox. Anyway, getting back on topic this looks like another uzbl. It claims to be modular and highly extensible and installs in a bare bones state. That's fine, I actually liked certain things like the idea of daemons for things like cookies with uzbl. Having multiple processes doing IPC is just neat and quite unixy. Dare I say even p9-y.
But then reality hit uzbl in the face and they ended up having to disable one of the more interesting parts of it which was a JS object that could be used to read and write various properties of uzbl at runtime because of a security hole. I'm guessing much of the same will happen here. It's really too bad since we're in desperate need of a nice and modular web browser that isn't filled to the brim and the kitchen sink that holds it. Plus a web browser is one of the few cases where JS is suitable as an extension language. Has a lot of potential but no one has implemented it well except chromium. If only mozilla would do that mythical rewrite and make extensions proper HTML things could be awesome.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 30 2014, @07:57AM
Breech is built on top of Chromium.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by kaszz on Wednesday July 30 2014, @02:25AM
A browser where all the parts talks to each other via fast interprocess communication IPC (sockets, shared memory etc). This could make it possible to give each tab a seperate process.. and KILL IT when it misbehaves. Or perhaps just restart the Javascript module for that instance of tab. It could also enable a special module that will tell which Javascript commands a certain website will be allowed. Or if the TLS certificate is any good or faked by a steamrolled certificate authority (CA). A module to handle cookies could accept all cookies but mangle them and delete them a few minutes later.
It should also make it possible to try different html-renderers while keeping the same surrounding environment. Possibility to replace Javascript with something sane or a module that can emulate different quirks. The main advantage with this model is that you won't have to compile the whole mothership for every little change and perhaps can replace modules while running the browser. Which perhaps also means that there needs to be a serious security and a secured IPC to avoid trojan IPC modules.
I like the idea, but perhaps this organizations is not the right incarnation.
(Score: 1) by MajorTom on Wednesday July 30 2014, @07:07AM
This kind of thinking is what has been pissing me off with Firefox, Thunderbird, Gnome, KDE, Chromium, Windows 8 etc. They could potentially do some really cool stuff, but one of their first thoughts seems to be to screw with the UI.
(Score: 2) by nightsky30 on Wednesday July 30 2014, @11:42AM
I agree. I don't get why they seem bent on killing what works before the new stuff is vetted first. At least in this instance you have a choice a la plugins.
(Score: 1) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 30 2014, @07:58AM
While it does sport free licenses, has somebody actually audited the code base to make sure there are no nasty surprises?
(Score: 1) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 30 2014, @08:23AM
Not another Chrome clone. We need freedom of choice, not the freedom to choose Chrome A or Chrome B.
We used to have Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and Chrome.
Now there's basically Chrome and Internet Explorer left, and Internet Explorer is only relevant to those poor souls who keep complaining about being stuck on Windows. Firefox is becoming more and more Chromey with every new release, while Opera just gave up and switched to Blink, the base of Chrome.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by KritonK on Wednesday July 30 2014, @08:23AM
If I want to use a browser that considers standard parts of the browser as "outdated", I'll use Firefox.
(YA satisfied pale moon user.)
(Score: 4, Funny) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday July 30 2014, @11:28AM
> when you first start Breach, it has no functionality. Functionalities are brought in by modules,
I have gone one step further and built a browser that is not only without inbuilt functionality, but doesn't even have the ability to load functional modules until you code that bit in for yourself. The great thing is the whole package fits in less than one bit!
Anyone want to fund my kickstarter?
(Score: 2) by mrider on Wednesday July 30 2014, @06:59PM
int main (int argc, char *argv[]) {
// Add whatever browser functionality you need here...
return 0;
}
Doctor: "Do you hear voices?"
Me: "Only when my bluetooth is charged."
(Score: 2, Funny) by gidds on Wednesday July 30 2014, @01:06PM
Breach is a nice operating system [c2.com], but what it lacks, in order to compete with Firefox, is a good browser.
[sig redacted]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 30 2014, @06:24PM
I think all those efforts are better spent enhancing Tor Browser Bundle. If everyone used TBB we would all be safer.