Yep, tab management is tricky to get right. We've designed the experience on Insight to make it really easy to close tabs with one tap for exactly this reason (I personally hate it when my browser has a million tabs open), and to bulk close tabs from the tab manager. Safari handles this really nicely as well, I think we have some room for improvement. I like the idea of not persisting search sessions, that would be interesting to explore on iOS. Thanks for the feedback!
Haha we had a major pivot last year. We started off building a search engine and browser for doctors. We realized they would be much better served through a customized browsing experience. Then we realized everyone could benefit from being able to deeply customize their browsing easily.
Thank you! We’re looking into building sync now (it’s the most requested feature for us right now), trying to make it work not just with Firefox but all popular browsers. Thanks for pointing to Kitt, I’ll check it out.
Thank you!
That's a good catch, our FAQ was slightly out of date, and the privacy policy is the most recent. I've updated the FAQ and apologize for that lack of total clarity.
We want to be as transparent as possible because our business plan is going to work around a paid tier and we have no intention of data exploitation.
Insight does send browsing data to servers to suggest extensions — we'd like to move this logic client side but right now the complexity around search extensions in particular requires server side logic and logging, similar to how even DuckDuckGo has to log.
This is a core value proposition of Insight and how it simplifies the browsing experience. However, you can turn off all communication with Insight servers in the settings if you'd like even more privacy. We want our users to be comfortable using Insight, so let me know if there's anything else that bothers you.
Insight suggests extensions while you browse -- this helps the most useful extensions get discovered at the right time. To enable this, browsing information is sent to Insight servers. However, this is not ever stored in connection to your personal information (email, etc). Also, if you're still not sure, we let you disable all communications with Insight servers entirely in app settings.
We all know how "we will never store this" becomes "we will never sell this" becomes "well, we need to make money", all with privacy policy changes that no-one reads.
Extension suggestions can also be implemented client side.
That’s fair tbh. Implementing this server side has let us iterate faster and get this out the door. I think implementing it client side is better however. Till we get there, we let you turn this feature off entirely and just use client side features, which still lets you utilize extensions.
You can offer this feature without sending unnecessary information to your servers. You did it the easy way instead of the "right way".
You need to re-think your architecture to do these checks locally in-browser in order to protect user privacy. If you're concerned about scaling issues, take inspiration from how Google Safe Browsing works (local hash prefix matching & partial hash queries).
