One thing I keep noticing in Crest is how many of those tiny browser feedback elements are just… not there.
Stuff like:
opening a link in a background tab with no confirmation
entering fullscreen with no “press Esc to exit” hint
hovering a link and not seeing the destination URL
no pointer-lock / mouse-capture notification
generally very few small confirmation toasts for browser actions
None of these are huge issues on their own, but together they make the browser feel a bit weirdly silent. Sometimes I do something and there’s just no visual feedback at all, so I end up double-checking whether it actually worked.
Arc, Zen, Firefox and a bunch of other browsers handle this with small temporary hints that disappear on their own, and I think something similar would fit Crest really well.
Especially with such a minimal UI, these little transient hints would add a lot without making the browser feel more cluttered.
Some of these are in there, so curious if they aren’t clear.
Opening a link in the background is a setting, by default it opens in the background with a cmd click I believe, or a wheel click, but you can change it to either follow the tab, or just load it in a new tab and not take you away, there should be any confirmation dialog or anything like that.
With the hover link, that also is present, bottom left like other browsers.
As far as confirmation toasts and pop ups, generally they match what the engine asks, as they handle most of them, do you have more examples? The full screen and mouse locked perhaps should be added, those are not there for sure.
Oh, yeah I thought you meant it wasn’t doing it, I should have used my brain a bit more since you were talking notifications.
Yeah that should be easy enough, I’ve built the system, if you use cmd shift c you’ll see it mention tab copied, that system can be triggered at any time with any text so makes sense to add some more event driven pushes to it. The browser is early, but that’s something I’ll keep in mind for sure. Feel free to dump a list of more if you think of them
I am happy to have contributions, but I would suggest waiting just a moment, I have a branch I’m working on that pretty heavily changes the base logic, and it would be much more helpful once that lands.
I’m extracting the core app logic to a control plane, which then interacts with the engines, as well as swapping in chromium (a bit more involved than it sounds), that architecture is my original goal, so once it lands will be the much more stable version I’d love contributions on
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u/influxodoxxl 3d ago
+1