Modular, Open Source, Hackable – Breach is ticking all the boxes with the ambitious browser project they launched this month. The team, originally composed of TOTEMS (formerly Nitrogram) CTO Stanislas Polu, Socket.io (now Automattic)’s Guillermo Rauch, Alejandro Vizio & others, is now made up of around 80 developers collaborating on the project. Since its release last month, the product has seen over 160,000 users user the browser (according to their public Google Analytics account), with around 2,500 Daily Active users using the product.
Built on Google’s open source Chromium project, Breach goes one step beyond Mozilla & Chrome, who enable developers to build 3rd party add-ons/plugins for the respective browsers – when you first start Breach, it has no functionality. Functionalities are brought in by modules, meaning that everything down to the core features of a browser – navigation, display, etc. – are hackable.
The product isn’t quite mass-market ready yet, says Polu, who says that it is more exciting for developers (especially those who love browsers built entirely on node.js), but that Developers are likely to bring some great innovation to the outdated parts of a browser – “bookmarks,””tabs,” and other features that have been grandfathered into the modern browser may be ready for an overhaul.