Whenever I read “beautiful” in marketing copy, I’m immediately put off. It’s so presumptuous and conveys vanity. Moreover, users may prefer their software to be utilitarian, and in any case are likely to have different opinions on what constitutes “beauty”. For that aspect: Show, don’t tell. If people do find it beautiful, then they don’t need to be told. And if they don’t, then telling them is unlikely to change that.
- I know many people actually care about beauty. In fact, with the same amount of bugs, the users of the most beautiful software will actually report it's less buggy.
The problem is when someone makes appearances more important than being useful.
But I want to give this project the benefit of the doubt.
How do you know it was one of the developers who wrote this? Maybe they hired someone to create the site and the content. Granted, the site is in the repo and you can see who committed the assets. But that still doesn't tell you who originally wrote it.
You're suggesting one of the developers went through all the trouble to create a browser, then allowed someone to add assets to the repo without the developer reviewing them first?
I'm suggesting that you don't know who wrote the content. You don't know the developers wrote it. And if a non-developer wrote it, then that person probably isn't going to commit the content to a repo.
The first sentence in the first paragraph on the website is "beautifully designed". Clearly the creator wants to bring to our attention that they spent a lot of time designing the visual aspects of this browser. And from the looks of things, this is indeed true. The browser does look very beautiful.
But... this is literally form over function.
Browsers should be like car tyres. Only after you have selected for your functional use case and requirements, do you filter for visual aesthetics.
If google decides that they don’t want to fund Mozilla anymore, then these Firefox derivatives fall as well. I don’t really see the zen team (or other ff forks) hiring the FF devs that are making 6 figures at Mozilla.
If Firefox decides to deeply ingrain some DRM standard, there’s a high likelihood that it’ll be included in downstream browsers like this one, unless they are privacy nuts like librewolf.
We need entirely new browsers that are more than window dressing on top of existing ones.
Remember what happened to Thunderbird, though. Mozilla dropped it, and it got better. There are good reasons to think that Mozilla - the corporate entity - is cancer.
T'bird is owned and run by a for-profit company called MZLA.
That company is owned by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation but Mozilla does not own, run, operate, or control Thunderbird.
Comparison: Pret a Manger, the fancy sandwich chain, is part-owned by Mcdonald's. But you can't buy a Big Mac in Pret, and you can't buy a Pret fancy noodle salad in McDonald's.
I like it, because it shows the author's aspiration. Not all software aims to be visually appealing, which is totally fine. But depending on what the software is, aesthetics are something that I find important.
For browsers in particular, that is a major reason why I don't use any of the existing Firefox forks: they are all very utilitarian. But I look at a browser window pretty much all day long, so I prefer a visual design that brings me joy.
This sounds like a marketing-speak. Joy is not an experience gained by staring at the visual design of a browser. You are confusing joy and another experience, perhaps appeal or attraction.
If you genuinely experience joy from browser visual design, you are probably that same guy who experiences “delight” when a customer support representative treats you well on a phone call.
Can we just have two separate things? One is a browser that works well, and the other could be maybe some pretty pieces of paper that you can stick over the UI elements that don't spark joy for you.
I feel the same, and not just about "beautiful". Any time a marketing person tells me how to think about their product, it pushes me away. Tell me what it is, now how I should think about it.
Imagine having an artist who does paintings and an architect both come up with a concept for a building. Then have each explain their design decisions and why you might select that concept. Each are going to use much different language, though each concept might still be described as beautiful by a judge. Of course, you still need to craft your language to appeal to the buyer, but an architect can probably still do that more effectively. And that architect likely isn't going to use the word "beautiful." The architect's message would likely resonate with me because I could feel the domain knowledge and craft skills shining through.
I think you be comparing an amateur artist with a professional architect (which isn't surprising; amateur architects are very rare and professional artists have less visibility.) Only amateur artists would actually describe their work as "beautiful".
If you go to a gallery or museum and read what a professional artist says about their own work (usually found on little cards next to paintings/scriptures/etc.) their descriptions tend to be about much more focused on what they were trying to convey and how they used that medium to do it.
This is also what I've seen from professional architects.
That doesn't mean you would be any more swayed by the professional artist, but it's at least more apples to apples.
If only an amateur would use the word beautiful, then was it an amateur who wrote the content for this site?
The core of my comment was that different professions use different language. In your example, I may find a similar level of skillful description of their work, but that's not going to cross over into different domains. The architect would likely write a more compelling pitch for a building design concept than an artist who is a painter. The artist may not use the word "beautiful" but still may use other language which is a similar miss in domain language used for a successful pitch.
In my field, I have to sell software development services to customers who may not be technical. I have to be careful to limit the depth of my technical explanations. But I'm still going to use just enough domain language that the customer will intuitively understand that I have a better grasp of the work to be done than the newly hired sales guy who is doing a pitch for the company he represents.
Here's a snippet from "above the fold."
> Beautifully designed, privacy-focused, and packed with features.
Packed with features? That's like creating a menu item in your site nav entitled "Stuff" or "Misc."
You mean "tell me what it does". Beautiful is what a thing is. And what a thing does follows from what it is.
Contrary to modern misconception, beauty is objective. Taste is subjective. What makes good taste is alignment of the subjective with the objective.
So, in this case, we can ask "what makes a browser beautiful?". Well, since it is a tool, then its usefulness is intrinsic to the kind of thing it is. So, how useful it is as browser is constitutive of its beauty, as beauty has to do with the perfection with which something realizes the kind of thing it is.
> You mean "tell me what it does". Beautiful is what a thing is. And what a thing does follows from what it is.
If they state in the readme that it's a web browser and I can compile it using GNU make then I'll believe them. If they say it's whizzy fast and easy to learn then I'll consider that's probably somewhat true. If I read "beautiful" and "paradigm-changing" and "redefines the browsing experience" then I imagine they're just trying to puff themselves up without having anything concrete to back it up.
It's true that things can be beautiful, and there are some universal (enough) beauty standards. The signal of being beautiful is not saying "look how beautiful I am" though. It's easy to claim something like that and hard to refute, so it's not a very good signal. The beauty should speak for itself, or at least be attested to be a third-party like with a quote from a review.
I don't find it off-putting. I may or may not agree that the software is beautiful because, as you point out, people often have different opinions on what constitutes beauty.
All the same, I find it useful to know that the authors of the software consider "beauty" one of their goals. And beauty does not preclude utility.
Also, beauty is in the eye of the beerholder. I don't consider the screenshots of Zen to be beautiful by any measure. It's a mess of grey on grey, none of the buttons look like buttons, and I'm getting a headache from all the moving crap on the home page.
> Beautifully designed, privacy-focused, and packed with features.
If I'm going to put in the effort to create something like this. There is ONE powerful reason which compels me to do this. If I'm pitching this to an investor, then I need to craft a message to convince the investor to hand over money. The above line is wasting space.
I get a sense that the message is either crafted by developers who are horrible at doing so, or by copy people who know nothing about the product. And in neither case does anyone spend significant time finding and interacting with passionate potential users to find what sorts of messaging resonates with them. As with writing, you need to find your voice, and let that voice drive the messaging.
Personally, I wouldn't even bother starting such a project if I didn't get to the "find your voice" part. Maybe the developers have some hand-wavy plan to sell options and accessories rather than having a strong starting point to solving a problem.
It's still hopefully useful dialogue on a common subject. I would be grateful to get this much feedback. And the discussion helps boost the visibility of this project on HN. Pick apart my work all you like, I'm happy to see it continue to hover on page 1. Please continue.
It's not the message, it's the delivery. Some people don't react well to having their skills publicly derided as "horrible". We're all human after all.
If that's the impression you got, I don't know what to tell you. Among the very first words on the page are "Donate" (clearly indicating that it is not a professional product). And directly below that we have the words "Introducing Zen Alpha" which should tell you to expect a product that is anything but polished.
>is cringe at best and disingenuous at worst.
Groan. Can we stop with the hyperbole and be a little more constructive? You're saying it's "cringe" and "disingenuous" because they used a professional looking template and their marketing copy needs work? Let's give them the benefit of the doubt, shall we?
Speaking of marketing, whenever I see a comparison chart where "our product" ticks all the boxes, I immediately think "what criteria did you not include in the comparison?"
