Nothing

Inspiration

Most popular websites are designed to maximise user retention by utilising vibrant colours, clickbait thumbnails, targeted advertising, and other paraphernalia. We are seeing a spike in young people desperate to increase their attention spans and productivity, using apps like Opal and Brick. And so the inspiration came from identifying the issue with browsers, and designing one with minimal distractions.

What it does

When a request is sent for a webpage, we catch it before its displayed to the user and inspect the HTML. Anything Nothing deems necessary is added to a user-facing template, while everything else is discarded. For example, we removed YouTube thumbnails: they're purely designed to encourage clicks. This leaves the user with no ads, no pop-ups, no comments, and no suggested videos. In addition, all websites are monochrome and all text is lowercase.

How we built it

Nothing built an Electron based web-browser that injects a minimal template UI over pages. These templates are driven by site-specific adapters that extract structured data out of the DOM for search, news, video, and shopping. This data is injected into uniform templates to keep everything visually consistent, which is then displayed to the user.

Challenges we ran into

Occam's razor is a broad and difficult prompt to answer, especially when trying to create something impressive yet simple. It took 6 hours and multiple iterations to come up with an idea that matches the brief of the task. In addition, many websites are heavily dynamic, so waiting for the right DOM data was tricky. Building templates that effectively captured multiple websites was difficult to get right; it took many iterations to get all the website to work coherently.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the fact that we made a browser that not only matches the minimalism required, but is also a product that we, as students, would genuinely use (especially in the age of short-form addictive content). We went back in time and reached the core idea of what a browser should really provide, and no more.

What we learned

We learned the technicalities involved in developing the, surprisingly many, features provided by a normal browser. From something as simple as reordering tabs, having to implement the feature ourselves taught us how to make a browser usable. We also discovered how much unnecessary information is contained within these websites, designed to keep a user glued to the site.

What's next for Nothing

We'd hope to deploy a distributed network of servers hosting RLM agents that build and manage our site adapters. This would make interacting with the browser more scalable, due to the self-maintaining property the adapters would have due to the RLMs. It would also be snappier and more robust, since adapters could be cached and shared between many users.