I stumbled upon Quiche Browser by chance, while looking for Bluesky devs lists. Quiche Browser is a web browser for iOS, highly customizable, sleek, buttery, and swift.

It has already gotten a place on my first screen, competing with Safari and Arc. Its pricing model is one of the softest I have seen in the market: free forever, pay only for cosmetics, if you want them; on top of that, there is donation area that has common sense. In other words, Quiche is free with all options in. But I suggest you pay for the beautiful icons, it is worth it.

Quiche Browser is also a zero telemetry browser, which nobody else but Orion, from Kagi, can claim.

This is how it looks, with my customization:

Open link customization

Buttons customization

Full page - the bars retain the color of the page, similar to Safari

Tabs layout

Ad blocker is ON by default

La piece de resistance: toolbar configuration

I had the opportunity to talk to Greg, the founder of Quiche Industries and developer of Quiche Browser. He is an ex-Google, a French who moved to Japan and got into minimalistic approach around iOS browsers.

Who are you, Greg, and how have you come to the idea of making yet another browser app?

I’m a French expat who relocated from Paris to Tokyo many years ago. I started in tech building websites as a front-end developer, and was lucky enough to work at Google for five years. But deep inside, especially after the first iPhone was released, building apps on Apple platforms was always my ultimate dream.

My first app idea was born out of the chaos of my tab hoarding and read-later lists getting out of control: a minimal web browser with no tab switcher. On app launch, all you could see was the most recent tab. You could always open a new tab, but to read the next one in queue, you had to close the current tab first. It was simple, very restrictive, but I loved how efficient it was at discouraging some of my bad habits.

Understandably, designer friends were very dubious about this idea and convinced me to turn it into a read-later app instead: Quiche Reader (originally named Reading Queue).

Since I love removing visual distractions and promoting focused reading, Quiche Reader has a very subtle, minimal toolbar showing just what I needed: the page title, domain, read time, and a large tappable area to open an action menu. Reading web pages with this minimal toolbar was so much more enjoyable than with Safari that I started drafting ideas for a fully-fledged web browser.

Until Arc Search was introduced earlier this year, and apart from Command Browser, all mobile browsers have been looking desperately similar for the past 15 years. Billions of people with diverse needs and preferences browse the web daily, so why should all browsers look and behave the same?

Back at Google, I recall seeing ambitious prototypes of Chrome for iOS getting abandoned due to the belief that people would never adopt a bottom toolbar, even though it was common sense as phones were getting larger. At last, Safari succeeded at democratizing this concept since iOS 15, but I can’t help feeling disappointed that Apple abandoned their floating toolbar idea during the beta phase.

All this frustration fueled my desire to build a browser which is both beautiful and customizable, and less than a year later, Quiche Browser was born.

What are your hobbies and passions?

Aside from my obsession with app design and building my quirky indie brand, I enjoy daily long walks through my lovely neighborhoods in Tokyo. They are a great way to unwind but also where I get to solve most of my design, coding, or strategy-related problems. Whenever I’m stuck, moving away from keyboard does wonders.

I also occasionally do road biking, swimming, eat great food, watch comedy shows, listen to comedy podcasts, and stay up late until unreasonable times to watch Formula 1.

What is your opinion about the current browser market, especially after iOS 18 came out?

As a non-EU resident, I haven’t had the opportunity to try iOS 17.4’s browser choice screen. From what I’ve seen, it has only increased the lead of the top third-party browsers, and worse, added unnecessary anxiety and risk to non-tech-savvy people who don’t care about web browsers. If I always recommend Apple devices to my relatives, it’s precisely so that they could trust them blindly without worrying about technical intricacies. I just want them to use Safari, undeniably the safest choice for them.

Regarding allowing third-party browser engines on the App Store, they pose significant privacy and security risks not worth the potential benefits. Just look at the nasty code injections Meta is doing in their in-app browsers with WebKit, and imagine how much worse this could become if they were allowed to use their own unhinged browser engine.

WebKit is great enough and provides the right amount of power to third-party developers, and is already bundled and updated with the system. There’s so much potential to improve how people can browse the web, and they don’t require writing new rendering engines.

What is making Quiche stand out of this market? What makes it special? What are its key differentiators?

• The toolbar is entirely customizable with a wide selection of buttons and visual styles available, but all settings were designed with intention and safeguards. As Niléane from MacStories said, “it is customizable , andit looks really nice whatever you do with it”. For example, it won’t let you cram 15 buttons into a narrow toolbar, or configure it without any way to start a search or show the tab overview.
• Beautiful tab layout options, with convenient grouping and sorting options. This might be the only browser letting you sort your tabs by read time, which could be really useful when deciding what to read.
• Ads, trackers, and other annoyances are all blocked by default.
• Zero usage monitoring.
• As an indie app with very low running expenses, it cannot go bankrupt, run out of VC money, or have product decisions taken over by a board of investors.

Who should use Quiche and why?

• *Minimalists or those who care about aesthetics can customize it to suit their preferences and reduce visual distractions to their desired level. *
• Tinkerers can conveniently place their most frequently used features in the toolbar for quick access, while the least used ones can be moved to a popover menu.
• Privacy-conscious people will surely appreciate privacy policy, which can be summarized to “keep your data for yourself.”

What is the roadmap?

There is a draft roadmap in my Notes app, but it’s always evolving. I frequently rearrange items based on user feedback, the ever-changing browser market, sometimes my own needs (I’m patient zero, after all), or my mental energy levels. After working on a single feature for weeks, I need a full brain reset by switching to a completely different task, even if it’s not the most requested feature, or at the detriment of some short-term business goal. As a solo indie, it’s crucial to nurture my mental energy and motivation, and this approach has been very effective so far.

What I can share is that most of the roadmap items fall into these categories:

• First-time experience
• Browsing basics
• Obvious features offered by mainstream browsers
• Customization options
• Power-user features
• Porting to other Apple platforms

How are you monetizing it?

Quiche Browser is obviously free to use without any restrictions, and will stay this way. People can support my work through tips, and if they want even more customization, there’s a subscription wonderfully named “Quiche+”.

Give us a list of friends, developers that you follow and whose work you respect.

• Mahdi Bchatnia, fellow Tokyoite cyclist and burger buddy, is an incredible iOS developer who also makes great little utility apps aside.
• Stef Kors, Rémi Santos, Mathieu Jouhet, whom I was so lucky to work with at Beam. Never seen people so talented in so many domains.
• Rony Fadel is a God-tier indie hacker level, incredibly talented as a developer and salesperson, on top of being awfully nice and supportive.
• Minsang Choi, a UX designer I met at Google, who recently fell in love with SwiftUI and Metal shaders, and building very creative things with them on the side.

Some designers or design engineers I have the utmost respect for, in no particular order:

• Chan Karunamuni
• Rauno Freiberg
• Janum Trivedi
• Gavin Nelson
• Karri Saarinen

Please add anything that you consider mentioned.

Since I’m not monitoring usage, talking to users is the only way I have to improve Quiche Browser. I always love discussing browser design with enthusiastic people, so please feel free to reach out and share any thoughts you may have, especially if you think this app is not for you 😅

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Disclaimer: I am not paid by Quiche Industries, on the contrary, I am paying for Quiche Browser.