🧘 Less is More

The world needs a radical browser

A thought we had at Kosmik this week: we have (unintentionally) built one of the more radical browsers out there. 

This thought originated in the aftermath of something we posted on YouTube a few days ago. We spent the last couple of weeks revamping our browser experience within Kosmik to make it as simple as possible, with the goal of making the web no more than the press of a key away for our users. We were really happy with the end results. One of the core changes is that now, in Kosmik, you just have to press ‘W’ to browse the web. 

As always with product updates, we recorded a tutorial on how this new browser functions and posted it on YouTube. Within 24 hours, 15,000 people had watched that video. And, within four days, that number shot up to over 40,000. 

As a team, we sat down to figure out what in this video resonated with people so strongly. Of course, we believe part of it comes down to the fact we’re building a good product, with smooth, clean, and aesthetically pleasing user interfaces, and the browser functionality in Kosmik is an extension of that. But I think it’s also so much deeper. 

Kosmik’s browser (and Kosmik as a whole) is different to the other browsers on the market. Arc, SigmaOS are extensions of the traditional browser, and for many people provide a better experience than the Chrome’s and Safari’s of the world because they are more intuitive interfaces that better fit how we use the web and how our minds operate as we’re surfing it. 

We love those browsers. We’re also not competing with them. 

In Kosmik’s browser, there are no tabs and no windows. There’s just a place to focus. Our browser isn’t designed to be a replacement for what you use to surf the web, but it is designed to be the browser you use when you have a specific goal in mind, and that goal relates to ‘creating’ something. 

For example, if you’re reading an article and want to extract key paragraphs. Or if you’re scrolling on Pinterest and want to save images for a moodboard.  

In many ways, it’s a browser specifically for creative people who want to capture things from the web and then, well, create something with them. We want people to be able to research, collect assets, take notes, share images, build libraries and more without any distractions. 

Why? Because when it comes to creativity, less is always more.  

Over time, the way that we create things has turned into a bloated and complicated process that no one really enjoys. If I’m designing something in Figma, for example, I have to browse the web, save images to my desktop or to the cloud, then reupload them in Figma again. Or if I’m researching for a paper, I can’t take notes in the same place I’m reading through my sources – I always have to browse using one software, then take notes in Word or Google Doc, and even then there’s still no place for me to annotate anything freehand. 

When did everything get so complicated? Our digital lives were supposed to make things easier but instead, we’re all drowning in apps, folders, files, bookmarks, tabs that are too structured for how our brains operate. This chaos takes up so much mental space that it’s hard to think and even harder to create good work.  

One of my goals with building Kosmik was to reverse this whole process. I wanted to create one, simple space where users could come and do everything they needed to. Browse the web, write notes, save and store images, paste text from an article, read PDFs and extract paragraphs, mindmap, brainstorm. It’s why we took the unusual route of building an integrated browser, PDF reader, and annotation tools into a canvas. 

Our vision is coming to life, and users can feel how much more enjoyable using Kosmik is. And it’s a great feeling that we can make people's lives a little better by making their time at their computer more enjoyable.