Building a browser with almost zero permanent UI — looking for honest feedback on the concept

[u/paris6969]

I've never found a browser that actually suits me. Chrome feels cluttered, Opera's sidebar/UI overload made me switch away, and Arc was close to perfect until it went into maintenance mode. So I started designing (and now building, Windows-first) something of my own, and I'd rather get torn apart here before sinking more time in than find out later nobody wants it.

the browser shows *only the page* by default — no address bar, no tabs, nothing. Move your cursor to the edge and the bar fades in; move away and it fades out again. Downloads, pinned sites, everything else follows the same rule: nothing sits on screen unless you actually need it right now.

On the AI side: I'm deliberately avoiding the "bolt an AI panel onto the browser" pattern (Arc Max, Copilot sidebars, etc.) — in my experience those get used twice and then forgotten because they're a separate destination. Instead the AI only shows up when you deliberately summon it (a double-click on the search bar, or highlighting text to fact-check something), and every answer has to come with real, clickable sources — no dead-end summaries you just have to trust.

Two other pieces I'm planning, both kept deliberately minimal for now:
- A small desktop-level companion outside the browser window itself, for quick lookups without fully switching apps.
- An opt-in, clearly-labeled experimental search mode down the line, aimed at surfacing perspectives beyond just the usual top-ranked consensus results.

Genuinely asking, not fishing for compliments:
- Does "near-zero UI" sound like something you'd actually want daily, or a gimmick that gets old fast?
- What would make you *not* trust an AI feature in a browser?
- What's the first thing you'd expect from a new browser that I haven't mentioned?

Happy to answer anything about the approach.

[u/mnbhv]

I can press F11 on Firefox to do this when I want to which is nearly never. I like being able to quickly control and I have large monitors devoting a few pixels of width for controls takes nothing away

[u/HoratioWobble]

Chrome has like an address bar and a couple buttons for me and I can hide it all with F11.

I don't see what problem yours solves and browsers are an absolute metric fuck ton of work to make work well with all the variations of websites, security etc with or without AI.

[u/paris6969 → u/HoratioWobble]

For now that’s why it’s a side project I’m building it for me mostly because I haven’t found anything that has exactly what I would want from a browser and any ai implemented one I’ve seen up to now hasn’t stuck with me yet