You may have heard it said that browsers are a dime a dozen these days. That’s wrong. Clearly the price is far less than a dime to get a dozen Mac browsers up and running. The browser trend is toward speed and privacy and free.
Along the way to the future of browsing, a Mac app developer decided minimalism is still a good thing. You know, small is beautiful, and less is more. That’s exactly what you get with the Min browser. Min as in minimal, or minimalist, but perhaps minimum. Min is free. That’s the minimum price.
Simplicity Rules
One of the problems you may have noticed if you use Safari, Google’s Chrome, Mozilla’s Firefox, or even the new and improved and Chinese-owned Opera browsers, is that they all have a bucket of features, and though each has a focus on speed and privacy, they all have a list of features to wade through.
Min does not. Min is, well, minimal. Or, minimalist. Yet, Min looks very familiar.
Yes, Min is a browser and looks and behaves much like Safari but without all the extra clutter. Click the + button to create a new tab. Click on the tab to open a search bar to hit Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo or whatever.
The built-in search bar does more than search. It grabs information from Wikipedia, features a calculator, and comes with what is called ‘fuzzy search’ so you can get to a website without typing in the entire URL. For example, type in ‘mac’ and that gets Google’s Gmail. Tabs can also be split into groups.
Safari has both a Reader view and a Reading list. So does Min. Preferences are nominal and self explanatory.
No minimalist web browser would be complete with an option to manage content and block ads and trackers. There is a setting to block scripts and another to block images. Like macOS High Sierra’s Dark Mode? Min has that, too. Because Min is a minimalist browser meant for speed, it comes with a bunch of keyboard shortcuts so you never need to touch the mouse or trackpad.
What’s really interesting about Min is not just the minimalist design or limited features. Instead of using Swift or another high level programming language, Min is written in JavaScript and CSS, and the code is open source and available on GitHub.
We are so used to extra features on our main browsers that Min takes some time to get used to, but it’s fast, simple, elegant, easy to navigate, and uncluttered by comparison.
Min is free. Min in the minimal browser.
