1) We are not developing for Windows yet, just Mac. Small startup, we have to focus our strengths. And we are slightly more bullish on macOS than Windows.
2) Perhaps you missed that we are in beta. You are opting-in your email in exchange for being invited to become a beta tester. You do not need to do that. And if you do, we are going to use your email only to send you the invite.
And the reason why there are so many questions in the form is that we want to deter as many people as we can, and get only the most determined beta testers. If somebody finds a 10 question form intimidating, their value to us as an active, contributing beta tester is likely to be small.
When we are out of beta you will be able to download the browser without submitting anything, and enjoy a zero-telemetry browser out of the box. Makes sense?
Bullish on macOS? Windows isn't going away anytime soon. My apologies if I am misunderstanding what was meant by "bullish" in this context. It does strike me as odd (given your tone here) that you would be requiring users to submit their email address, and answer [a Google-hosted] questionnaire, in order to use your application. "…we want to deter as many people as we can [from using the browser at this time]" (brackets contain my own words) doesn't seem like a great pitch; why not let everybody test the software, and invite (from within the app) users to share their feedback after a day/week of use?
It is a product management decision. We are in the early beta stage and the product is not polished enough for the broader market.
However we are OK to share it with die-hard fans who actually took the time to complete a non-trivial form, hence invite-only private beta. When we move to public beta, there will be no signup requirement.
> Bullish on macOS?
Yes we believe it is an OS and a platform with a bright future. Personally I enjoy it using a lot as a consumer, and I think it makes for a wonderful host platform for a new browser. Note that we also opted to use the WebKit rendering engine (fastest and most power efficient, at least on macOS) and built the rest of the browser from scratch.
2) Perhaps you missed that we are in beta. You are opting-in your email in exchange for being invited to become a beta tester. You do not need to do that. And if you do, we are going to use your email only to send you the invite.
And the reason why there are so many questions in the form is that we want to deter as many people as we can, and get only the most determined beta testers. If somebody finds a 10 question form intimidating, their value to us as an active, contributing beta tester is likely to be small.
When we are out of beta you will be able to download the browser without submitting anything, and enjoy a zero-telemetry browser out of the box. Makes sense?