Portal — The Better Browser
Are you tired of being trapped in tab hell, struggling to find what you need? Have you ever felt the overwhelming chaos of a disorganized browsing experience? Are distractions constantly hindering your productivity and focus? If so, we just might have the solution for you: Portal, a browser that allows you to take control of your browsing experience.
What is Portal?
The Portal experience starts from the moment you open the app. Instead of being greeted with the traditional blank screen, where your main point of navigation is the URL bar, our HomeHub allows users to take a variety of different directions based on their current needs. Whether it be opening up an app, using one of our many widgets, entering what we like to call Limited Browsing, or creating a Portal, the HomeHub provides a base for all your information to be logically stored and easy to access. But what exactly are these features? To you they may sound like a jumble of names, but we believe if you give them a chance they will change your browsing experience for the better. So, let’s explore!
Workspaces, or what we like to call Portals, are where users can better organize their tasks. Rather than having one window with all your tabs, users can have one Portal for their school work, one for planning their vacation, and another for planning their next sorority event. By delineating which tabs go in which Portal, users are subtly pushed towards organizing their information in one cohesive manner. The best part is when your browsing session ends, your work won’t be lost. Until you electively choose to close your Portal, your websites will stay opened and available, right where you left off. And in the case that you do end up closing your Portal, its associated history is saved, so you can always look back.
Sometimes, however, a task may seem too small or quick to necessitate a whole new Portal. Luckily, we’ve thought of that. For websites that you frequent often, we’ve created an app icon bar. Always snapped on the left-side of the HomeHub and able to appear when browsing with a simple Cmd+P, the app icon bar allows you to save any number of websites such that they are just a click away. Additionally, when opening up an app while browsing, you are presented with a few options. First, you can view your app in what we like to call the “MiniView,” if you want to take a moment to focus just on that one website, it will appear along with a nice overlay and border over your current website. If, however, you want access to both information at once, you can enter split screen mode and your primary browsing as well as app will snap in place to create one cohesive view.
There may, however, also be instances when you may not need a Portal or app but rather want to make a quick one-off search. Luckily, you can easily enter either a url or search term into the Omnibar. Doing so will take you to a “limited browsing” view where you will only be able to access one website at a time. We believe this will not only prevent tab clutter but also keep you focused on that one specific task that motivated the search in the first place. Plus, if you do end up going down a rabbit hole, you can always press the “New Portal” button in the top right corner and be brought back to the more expansive browsing experience found in the Portal framework.
While we don’t have time to provide a complete list of our many features, through our website as well as start-up tutorial experience, users will be acquainted with much more: TempTabs, a way to easily and briefly look at urls before deciding on the best one, Templates, a way to create Portals that open to your favorite website automatically, Notes, an easily accessible widget to jot down all your thoughts, and much, much more!!! The best part is we plan on continually adding features.
How does it work?
For those interested in the technical aspects behind our project, it is built using Electron and React. Electron is a framework that embeds Chromium and Node.js together to create desktop applications. We chose Electron for a few reasons. For one, Electron is used to create some of our favorite apps such as Slack, Notion, and even Microsoft Teams. Also being part of a team that proudly uses both Mac and Linux, the ability to work across a variety of operating systems was invaluable. React was also used to allow us to easily create various components and interactive features common in a variety of these other apps as well.
Beyond the main stack, a few smaller components of technical interest are our use of a local sqlite database to store all information pertaining to history, workspaces, and other user preferences. Google Analytics to keep track of anonymized user behavior to allow for A/B testing and points of impasse. And lastly, Bugsnag to allow us to catch any failures or bugs, within both development and production versions of our app.
We believe as a society, we have a growing dependence on technology. As the amount of information on the internet increases and we spend more time online, overcoming tab overload, browsing chaos, and distractions become more crucial. Thus, there is a clear need for a browser that prioritizes organization, focus, and efficiency.
A growing number of browsers are attempting to tackle these problems. Perhaps, the most well-known in this area is Arc. However, what sets our browser apart is that we offer a comprehensive and intuitive set of tools to improve both tab organization and browsing productivity. Most current solutions, either in the form of Chrome extensions or browsers, only focus on one or the other.
Since our beta release, we’ve attracted users from college campuses across the country and have gained users in Europe and Asia as well. We believe Portal will change the way people interact with the internet and are excited about the impact it can make in people’s lives.
Whose on the team?
The Portal team is made up of 6 Dartmouth seniors: Mark Tao, Isaac Feldman, Ben Fernando, Jason Chen, Ben Korkowski, and Megan Ren. Overall our group likes to think of ourselves all as full-stack developers, working and touching all aspects of the project. To the extent that we did specialize, Mark was our history database wrangler implementing most of the sqlite database. Isaac was our Omnibar and Portal wizard producing the code to capture webpage screenshots and remember user’s visited sites. Ben F. dominated the tab navigation; without his keystrokes, Portal’s tab situation would be in shambles. Jason was the proprietor of all things widgets, making the timer and notes work like a charm. Ben K. ran point on the variety of temp tab features and the persisting of workspaces throughout the user experience. And lastly Megan oversaw templates, portal creation, split screen view, and so many other features that we’ve lost count. Big shout out to the whole team!
Time to download Portal!!
Portal will change your browsing experience and your life. Try Portal now. It’s free!
