When I was thirteen, I started building Turbo— a full web browser written in Electron and React. With the rise of a wide variety of developer tools like Postman, I wanted to design a browser engineered specifically for developers. I built tab management, navigation history, custom theming, keyboard-only control, and a working interface around an embedded Chromium instance. Over time, the project grew from a personal experiment into a small community of nearly 300 beta testers on my Discord.

My goal for Turbo was to be a platform where developer tooling was built directly into the browsing environment, allowing people like me to test to port tunnel, send PUT requests, and more just from my browser itself. I canvassed ideas for split-screen tabs, an integrated API client, localhost-to-public tunneling, a built-in terminal, Git integration, Wakatime tracking, a custom devtools layer, SEO inspection, and automatic StackOverflow prioritization in search results. I also explored more experimental ideas like a paywall bypasser, live metadata testing for websites, GPU and memory throttling, and a built-in VPN.

Eventually, I ran into the limits of the stack. Electron is still just a Chromium wrapper, so performance and memory use could never match a real browser engine. Engineering a browser would have required building from a Chromium fork, which I wasn’t yet experienced enough to do. The project never became production-ready, but it taught me a lot about web browsing—and introduced me to the world of open-source software development.