I also built a canvas-based, multiplayer product during the pandemic (ohyay).
The product was social-event focused (classes, festivals, etc.) so we focused on multiplayer audio-video experiences rather than general purpose browsing.
One of my favorite memories was when someone used our collaborative YouTube playback to set up a karaoke room. WebRTC added a little latency, but it was close enough to work.
so many people did! the whole watching YouTube/streaming things with friends vibe was so fun haha
and now it feels like a bunch of people are building canvas based products again, but for testing different image gen outputs on a canvas, except now you can vibe code them too!
I finally wrote something about my time at sail/muddy, the last startup I was at, where we were trying to build a multiplayer browser, and a few lessons that stayed with me.
I mostly just hope it’s interesting to people thinking about new ambitious interfaces right now. with AI.
This line was golden: Sometimes we were iterating on the vision when we should have been iterating closer to user signal. The difference is subtle but it matters a lot. One converges toward something people want. The other converges toward a more elegant version of something people don't.
I’m building a way for people to build on top of the browser (https://www.hyper-frame.art). One take away for me from your article was GTM is a bigger moat than technicals (which are brutal in the fork route you went)
I would be curious what you think of the idea of Sail and Muddy being... small. Technically complex, but small in the mind of the user. Not lacking in features (you talked about that), but 'feeling small/bounded, and therefore with small divergence' to the user. Does that... fit at all with your mental model of them?
I ask because I feel like Linear, Vercel, Figma, Notion, hell even Airtable... landed 'big' (felt like a big step change) with users when they arrived for most (I was a super super early user of Notion because my friend angel invested).
I used Sail and Muddy back when and... the small vs big distinction feels like my perception of the divergence between those things that get washed out by this effect and those that don't.
Yeah I think that framing fits. The technical complexity in Sail and Muddy was real, but hidden in a way that didn’t translate into perceived user value.
We had some theories for how it could land big, but none strongly resonated. It wasn’t just “put websites in another app.” We were hoping multiplayer would do something similar to what Notion and Airtable did. In my mind, those products “land big” because they feel like docs and sheets on steroids. Blocks, databases, formulas, all inside surfaces people spend so much time in, so the step change feels obvious.
With Sail/Muddy, the bet was that multiplayer browser surfaces would land big and help with collaboration, alignment, handoff, etc. Someone sends you the exact things to click on inside a message, you pin them to come back to later, no more switching tabs, you can see what other people are doing. Some users did see Sail as a tool for big research projects, accumulating tabs and sources spatially, though mostly single player.
In both products, we were also rendering browser tabs and web content inside their own processes. Sail on an infinite canvas, Muddy inside a shared chat workspace. Architecturally, there’s a big difference between “this is an iframe in a web app” and “this is a real browser tab with full capabilities.” But that distinction doesn’t land unless people feel a step change in what they can do. To most users, it just read as embeds. They weren’t thinking about iframe limitations, process isolation, site compatibility, browser architecture, or the experience that enabled. And they shouldn’t have had to.
So yeah, not small in ambition or product theory, but small in perceived divergence. The system was ambitious, but the delta users felt was often more like “a nicer way to look at web stuff inside another interface,” not “this changes how I work with people or how I use my computer”.
Not sure if this fits, but I think that the browser as a portal to the web of all information invites you into a space of so many possibilities, so many user interfaces and experiences that any change to the portal itself in that context exists alongside the sea of other (to the person at least) similar variants, and must necessarily feel small. Also because the browser has perhaps succeeded as a category because it was the thing that got out of the way for all of that content, and so you weren’t just competing with browsers for user mindshare and differentiation, you are competing with the entire Internet. Because peoples’ experience of the browser is not really of the browser as a product. It is what it accesses to. And there may be reasons outside of lack of imagination that all major browsers have converged on essentially the same pattern. Just an idea
This post is a gem. I wanted to build something like this for 10 years but shied away until last year because your journey seemed exactly what would happen going down that road in a world not ready yet.
I started with regular valve inspired "playtesting" with users on prototypes which showed:
- Power users love canvas and multiplayer but only need it in distinct product or company phases which last a few weeks or months max, outside these phases they need that maybe once every one or two weeks which is not enough to stick to a new browser
- outside of the usage, they feel burdened by mental overhead of collaboration or canvas features and much prefer simplicity
- the world does not need another closed source browser, VC is fundamentally incompatible with what is needed, so any step after joining yc was doomed from the start
i'd use a 2D canvas browser. not sure why anyone would need live multiplayer for their browser, just let them save canvas state to file and share it. that's how it works with Blancs. https://blancs.io
I also built a canvas-based, multiplayer product during the pandemic (ohyay).
The product was social-event focused (classes, festivals, etc.) so we focused on multiplayer audio-video experiences rather than general purpose browsing.
One of my favorite memories was when someone used our collaborative YouTube playback to set up a karaoke room. WebRTC added a little latency, but it was close enough to work.
so many people did! the whole watching YouTube/streaming things with friends vibe was so fun haha
and now it feels like a bunch of people are building canvas based products again, but for testing different image gen outputs on a canvas, except now you can vibe code them too!
One of the best interactive designs of the future I keep wishing were fleshed out is Eagle Mode.
: https://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/
Hey, it's a lot like the one from Jurassic Park!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_System_Visualizer
I finally wrote something about my time at sail/muddy, the last startup I was at, where we were trying to build a multiplayer browser, and a few lessons that stayed with me.
I mostly just hope it’s interesting to people thinking about new ambitious interfaces right now. with AI.
This line was golden: Sometimes we were iterating on the vision when we should have been iterating closer to user signal. The difference is subtle but it matters a lot. One converges toward something people want. The other converges toward a more elegant version of something people don't.
I’m building a way for people to build on top of the browser (https://www.hyper-frame.art). One take away for me from your article was GTM is a bigger moat than technicals (which are brutal in the fork route you went)
thanks! hyper-frame seems really cool! I shall try it out on a side project :)
Warms my heart :) lmk if you want an API key: cris@dosaygo.com
Very interesting stuff. Are any builds of Sail still available for use?
I would be curious what you think of the idea of Sail and Muddy being... small. Technically complex, but small in the mind of the user. Not lacking in features (you talked about that), but 'feeling small/bounded, and therefore with small divergence' to the user. Does that... fit at all with your mental model of them?
I ask because I feel like Linear, Vercel, Figma, Notion, hell even Airtable... landed 'big' (felt like a big step change) with users when they arrived for most (I was a super super early user of Notion because my friend angel invested).
I used Sail and Muddy back when and... the small vs big distinction feels like my perception of the divergence between those things that get washed out by this effect and those that don't.
(also DM-ed you!)
Yeah I think that framing fits. The technical complexity in Sail and Muddy was real, but hidden in a way that didn’t translate into perceived user value.
We had some theories for how it could land big, but none strongly resonated. It wasn’t just “put websites in another app.” We were hoping multiplayer would do something similar to what Notion and Airtable did. In my mind, those products “land big” because they feel like docs and sheets on steroids. Blocks, databases, formulas, all inside surfaces people spend so much time in, so the step change feels obvious.
With Sail/Muddy, the bet was that multiplayer browser surfaces would land big and help with collaboration, alignment, handoff, etc. Someone sends you the exact things to click on inside a message, you pin them to come back to later, no more switching tabs, you can see what other people are doing. Some users did see Sail as a tool for big research projects, accumulating tabs and sources spatially, though mostly single player.
In both products, we were also rendering browser tabs and web content inside their own processes. Sail on an infinite canvas, Muddy inside a shared chat workspace. Architecturally, there’s a big difference between “this is an iframe in a web app” and “this is a real browser tab with full capabilities.” But that distinction doesn’t land unless people feel a step change in what they can do. To most users, it just read as embeds. They weren’t thinking about iframe limitations, process isolation, site compatibility, browser architecture, or the experience that enabled. And they shouldn’t have had to.
So yeah, not small in ambition or product theory, but small in perceived divergence. The system was ambitious, but the delta users felt was often more like “a nicer way to look at web stuff inside another interface,” not “this changes how I work with people or how I use my computer”.
Not sure if this fits, but I think that the browser as a portal to the web of all information invites you into a space of so many possibilities, so many user interfaces and experiences that any change to the portal itself in that context exists alongside the sea of other (to the person at least) similar variants, and must necessarily feel small. Also because the browser has perhaps succeeded as a category because it was the thing that got out of the way for all of that content, and so you weren’t just competing with browsers for user mindshare and differentiation, you are competing with the entire Internet. Because peoples’ experience of the browser is not really of the browser as a product. It is what it accesses to. And there may be reasons outside of lack of imagination that all major browsers have converged on essentially the same pattern. Just an idea
I wonder what yc co hyperbeam has to say about this? Are they still in that space?
This post is a gem. I wanted to build something like this for 10 years but shied away until last year because your journey seemed exactly what would happen going down that road in a world not ready yet.
I started with regular valve inspired "playtesting" with users on prototypes which showed:
- Power users love canvas and multiplayer but only need it in distinct product or company phases which last a few weeks or months max, outside these phases they need that maybe once every one or two weeks which is not enough to stick to a new browser - outside of the usage, they feel burdened by mental overhead of collaboration or canvas features and much prefer simplicity - the world does not need another closed source browser, VC is fundamentally incompatible with what is needed, so any step after joining yc was doomed from the start
i'd use a 2D canvas browser. not sure why anyone would need live multiplayer for their browser, just let them save canvas state to file and share it. that's how it works with Blancs. https://blancs.io