Just tried a new browser SigmaOS, with some interesting page-grouping and navigation features. But it’s going to be a $15 / mo. subscription (for a browser!) and keystrokes don’t follow Mac conventions. Looks like Electron. Ugh.
I mean, that takes some bravado. I almost want to subscribe just to celebrate the confidence they’re rockin’.
Link for others:
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Interesting concept. As they say, free browsers have to make their money somehow, and it’s you they’re selling. However, for me, $15/month is out of the question by about 3X. I might give it a shot at $5/month ($60/year) with a 2-4 week free trial.
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They are providing a 14 day trial and a $30 credit, and a 50% education discount. Even so it seems like a lot.
I spent about an hour with Sigma and found it was too buggy to make me more productive. It also has some UX work to do to figure out when it should let the active page capture a keyboard shortcut and when it should let the Sigma app capture it, and how to signal what a keyboard shortcut will do. It’s also missing a content blocking solution. I was able to send several bugs/issues to the founders which hopefully was worthwhile.
The paradigm of treating URLs as completable tasks is most interesting to me. It reminds me of some prototyping I’ve done to bring the Hey email service’s approach to other sources of data/distractions. A lot of the lesser features can be replicated in Vivaldi or Firefox, but I see the potential value in being able to package them consistently and attractively, at least, for some people.
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Way to bury the lede! Say more about this someday…?
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So I’ve been using SigmaOS for at least a month now so I thought I’d give my impressions. When I first downloaded it I was thinking no way I’d pay for a browser monthly but let’s see what it does that’s so interesting. I totally just gave them my credit card 
I’ve kind of been on a browser journey the last nine months. I’m finally fed up with Safari after it being my default for ages; tons of important missing extensions for me (Singlefile, Toby, Hypothes.is especially) and poor privacy controls for me (no whitelisting 3rd party cookies, it’s all or nothing) finally did it in me. Since then I’ve tried about everything with Vivaldi coming closest followed by Firefox. There are so many Chromium browsers; ugh, no others stuck for me.
Sigma is very early days right now, it does have bugs, a lot of missing features and some confusing shortcut issues to overcome. But it thinks the way I do, workspaces work even better than Vivaldi tab groups, I can get very contextual, that’s what really sold me. Safari Tab Groups now come pretty close but Sigma gives me a bit more control.
I like that you can do almost everything via the keyboard, they’re inspired more by vim than macOS which took some getting used to, it frankly needs work. I do love that you can do everything via command palettes like those in Sublime, VSC, Obsidian, etc. Vivaldi also has this feature.
The big thing is that it’s native, it’s all SwiftUI and it uses WebKit, not Electron or Chromium. It may not look like a traditional Mac app but it’s pretty well inline with other SwiftUI apps like Craft. In spite of being WebKit they’re implementing support for Chrome Web Extensions and should be adding that in the near future. If they pull it off I’ll pretty much be sold on SigmaOS.
The other thing that’s really attractive right now is that they’re extremely responsive to feedback on their Discord, they implemented SF Symbols support for workspace icons at my request since I really hate emoji in UI. They fix most bugs in a day or two, occasionally in hours.
I’ve got some other requests like AppleScript support for at least grabbing the URL of the current tab that they’ve said they’ll add down the road, hopefully with more. I also hope they’ll add a URL scheme for going to a workspace directly. They’re seem undecided on if they’ll implement bookmarks but I think that will be less important to me when I can use Raindrop.io and Pocket extensions.
It’s quite incomplete but has tremendous potential and they’re moving fast. I don’t think this will ever be a browser for everyone but for power users, especially if you buy into David’s contextual computing vision, it’s really worth a look. Maybe in a month or two if you’re on the fence. 
They’ve also said they aren’t sure about the price or their long-term model either, it may be changing.
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