The case for software that does less
After eighteen months of stripping features from a browser, we found something unexpected about what people actually need from the web.
We started Quiet with a simple premise: most of what a modern browser does, you never asked it to. In the summer of 2023, I sat in a small office in Helsinki with two other developers and a whiteboard full of crossed-out feature ideas. Our goal was not to build the next great browser. It was to find out how little one could ship and still be genuinely useful.
The weight of default settings
Every browser ships with a hundred decisions already made for you. Where the tabs sit, how bookmarks behave, what the new-tab page shows, which extensions get promoted. We made a different choice: ship with almost nothing, and let the user decide which features earn their place. It felt reckless at first. Three months in, our retention numbers told a different story entirely.
The best interface is the one you forget is there. You should be thinking about the page, not the chrome around it. — Quiet design manifesto, September 2023