alt Hacker NewsYeah I think that framing fits. The technical complexity in Sail and Muddy was real, but hidden in a way that didn’t translate into perceived user value.
We had some theories for how it could land big, but none strongly resonated. It wasn’t just “put websites in another app.” We were hoping multiplayer would do something similar to what Notion and Airtable did. In my mind, those products “land big” because they feel like docs and sheets on steroids. Blocks, databases, formulas, all inside surfaces people spend so much time in, so the step change feels obvious.
With Sail/Muddy, the bet was that multiplayer browser surfaces would land big and help with collaboration, alignment, handoff, etc. Someone sends you the exact things to click on inside a message, you pin them to come back to later, no more switching tabs, you can see what other people are doing. Some users did see Sail as a tool for big research projects, accumulating tabs and sources spatially, though mostly single player.
In both products, we were also rendering browser tabs and web content inside their own processes. Sail on an infinite canvas, Muddy inside a shared chat workspace. Architecturally, there’s a big difference between “this is an iframe in a web app” and “this is a real browser tab with full capabilities.” But that distinction doesn’t land unless people feel a step change in what they can do. To most users, it just read as embeds. They weren’t thinking about iframe limitations, process isolation, site compatibility, browser architecture, or the experience that enabled. And they shouldn’t have had to.
So yeah, not small in ambition or product theory, but small in perceived divergence. The system was ambitious, but the delta users felt was often more like “a nicer way to look at web stuff inside another interface,” not “this changes how I work with people or how I use my computer”.
Not sure if this fits, but I think that the browser as a portal to the web of all information invites you into a space of so many possibilities, so many user interfaces and experiences that any change to the portal itself in that context exists alongside the sea of other (to the person at least) similar variants, and must necessarily feel small. Also because the browser has perhaps succeeded as a category because it was the thing that got out of the way for all of that content, and so you weren’t just competing with browsers for user mindshare and differentiation, you are competing with the entire Internet. Because peoples’ experience of the browser is not really of the browser as a product. It is what it accesses to. And there may be reasons outside of lack of imagination that all major browsers have converged on essentially the same pattern. Just an idea