Raven - a Mac site-specific web browser

Nice looking site, but I dont understand what Raven does. As an example here is the explanation for the Smart Bar feature:<p>"Raven uses a technique called "site specific browsing" to create a dedicated browser instance for certain websites and their features. It debuts with the most widely used websites including Google+, Facebook, Twitter and Quora. Within each app Raven provides yet another instance for key features. This provides a whole new level of multitasking within a single window. The Smart Bar unifies navigation across many different websites allowing access to features quickly, without effort and with little instruction."<p>I have no clue what this means. This clearly needs to be dumbed down to be understandable by average users.

Checked this out and have a few thoughts. I wasn't expecting a full browser interface (specifically, tabs, etc). A site-specific browser, to me, is not a browser replacement, but rather an alternative application for a specific site. The moment you add more than one site to a SSB,it defeats the "site-specific" aspect. The reason I used Fluid or Prism (other SSBs) is that I get separation of browser instances for each of my webapps. With Raven, this seems to get "lost". I do like what they are calling the smartbar, as it adds quick shortcuts to various areas of the webapps that are running. This is nice, but again, this detracts from the SSB aspect. At least you can hide it, unlike other apps using this UI concept. The other thing that I feel is missing, or at least I could not find easily, is a way to install userscripts and userstyles. For me to switch to a different SSB platform, I would need to be able to bring over my customizations. Other than this, the app UI is nice, the icon is nice, the name is nice, and the domain and website are nice. Look forward to seeing where this app ends up in the long run.

I just tried it out. It's <i>not</i> a site-specific browser at all, it's a normal web browser with a few nice interface ideas in it. Raven is using the WebKit/Safari engine, and shares its data repositories (such as cookies, history, offline data).<p>Between the misuse of software jargon, the buzzword overflow, the overall site design, and the potential for abuse I'm having a difficult time trusting this thing with my data.

My name is Kevin and I am the designer behind Raven. We believe there is a better way to discover and interact with web apps. That browsers could do a better job. At this moment we may not have the exact receipe right but we'll get there with time and iteration. The dream is that we will all someday have a centralized place to find web-based solutions and reduce the friction of signing up for them.

Auto-downloading just because I visited your download page is obnoxious. I just asked you your name, and you immediately tried to jump into my bed. Not cool.

This looks really nice! I like that there is a difference between favorite bookmarks and reference bookmarks. I have tons and tons of bookmarks of stuff I just want to keep/remember but do not visit every day.<p>The only thing I do not like so far is that I can't use mouse gestures (three finger slide) to navigate back/forth like I can in Chrome. I'm addicted to that feature.

All I can think about is that scene from Big, where Tom Hanks raises his hand and says "I don't get it."

Loving it so far! Nicely done.<p>The concept makes perfect sense ... to me anyway. Having the 'web apps', with their own unique drop-down context menus only a click of a button away makes for such an awesome alternative to wasting time looking for appropriate links/buttons on websites.<p>The potential for making a user's web-browsing experience less cluttered and more organised is definintely there.<p>Looking forward to see where this is at in six months.

Can we get more technical detail? How closely is this attached to OS X? Heavy integration with Cocoa and other OS X APIs? Is there much portability to other OSes? Do you have any plans to release the source (or has the source been released already)? What license? What rendering engine do you use (presumably WebKit)? Is this a serious effort or more of an exploratory or proof-of-concept thing?

Aw, man. Would love this if it were an extension and not a full-on browser replacement!

I quite like the browser. While it kind of creates a bit of a walled garden effect. The truth is that most people browse the same websites most of the time. The potential with Ravens approach is that they can leverage that.<p>Quite often people will browse about one topic and then want to go to one of their other sites to get a different perspective, or to watch a video of it etc. It would be good if there was built in "search" where it can work out what topic you are reading and automatically search your other main sites for the same topic. Then you can click between your main sites to get each perspective/content on that topic.

It totally misses the point of SSB, first it shares its data with Safari (cookies, history, etc) and somehow wants to become the web on training wheels.<p>Filling web forms? Sign up? This problems are trying to be addressed by SSO using providers like Twitter, Facebook or some new kid in town with OAuth/OpenID/YouNewHipsterProtocol.<p>The idea of having a Site Specific Browser was to have a independent "browser" just to go to X site and be encapsulated from crashes or oddities from plugins from your main browser. It may also have some nice OS specific eye candy or features like system wide shortcuts.<p>Not becoming the web on training wheels.

I quite like it. Check out the "Web apps", to understand what Raven is about.<p>But please, don't close all websites when I close the window. Closing tabs on closing the window makes sense for Chrome, where each tab represents something ephemeral to begin with. But in Raven, a "tab" might be my Twitter page or my Hacker News feed. I want that to be readily available when I reopen Raven. (For the time being, I might just use CMD-H instead of CMD-W)<p>Or maybe that is not what Raven is intended to be after all?

One of the benefits of using a single-site browser is that you can restrict the URLs the browser will load, protecting you against phishing, cookie stealing, etc.<p>Last I looked at Fluid, it had a whitelisting feature but it was horribly broken in that it included default rules that were irremovable like 'userscripts.org*' allowing 'userscripts.org.evil.com'.<p>I haven't looked at Raven yet, but hopefully it has whitelisting that works. That alone would make it worth looking into for me.

Nice how they've placed Hacker News in in the promo for "The Smart Bar" right on the homepage. That should earn some downloads right there. I'll give it a spin.

I didn't understand anything the site said, but I liked the pretty pictures a lot so I downloaded it. I think this could be appealing for highly visual guys like me. Maybe replacing all that copy with a nice video will be a good idea.<p>I didn't quite get why there are "apps" and why they need to be installed. Why are these more than just regular bookmarks?<p>That needs a better explanation.

The side pane for history, bookmarks, downloads, etc is so awesome! I really wish I could do this in Chrome...<p>Basically, I love the left side of Raven. I don't like the tabs and address bar...

Be nice to get some of these to be a bit more cross-platform. I believe the only cross-platform one out right now is Prism via Mozilla.

This is missing support for gestures and a lot of the standard hotkeys like switching tabs. Kind of disappointing.

Where is the command + F "search" fucntion???

Flock, again?

nice name, nice domain<p>but i don't get raven's USP

fuck not another browser!

"It debuts with the most widely used websites including Google+, Facebook, Twitter and Quora."<p>Lol, most widely used websites? Maybe for tech geeks. But for the rest of the world, it's Facebook, Craigslist, YouPorn/PornHub, etc.

"Raven is a site-specific web browser for Mac"<p>You're welcome.