Ask HN: How you would redesign a web browser?

I think that in order to increase privacy and - more importantly - reduce the attack surface of a Web Browser more efficiently, there will have to be two modes of web browsing.

Regular browsing - in my opinion - should default to privacy and security first, whereas trust to web apps should be granted on a per-domain basis. This is basically what I'm doing in a crappy manner in Chromium and Firefox, where I have all my Browser Extensions in regular browsing mode with uBlock Origin, Cookie Autodelete and whatnot... and where I use Incognito Mode to use Web Apps.

Additionally, I believe that a Web Browser that's decentralized has an almost infinite amount of advantages when it comes to bypassing censorship, increasing trust and the ledging aspect of (temporary) online resources.

My idea of building a sane architecture of a Web Browser is that the Browser itself is actually a locally running peer-to-peer web scraper service, and the "frontend or GUI" is a bundled webview that's pointing to localhost:someport. Web Apps can then be used by spawning a new webview instance that's sandboxed with its profile in a temporary folder, so it cannot infect/spread across the regular profile folder that's being used for the "regular private browsing" mode.

This architecture allows all kinds of benefits, as everything can be filtered, cleaned, verified (, and shared with other peers) at the network level before it reaches the webview - whereas Browser Extensions currently cannot filter any HTTP responses because there's no API for that.

AdBlockers currently are based on a disallow-list based concept, which means the advantage is always on the advertising side, and by default nothing is filtered; and scammers/blackhats have always the advantage. Once you add it to a filter list, lots of people's machines have been compromised already. But what if AdBlockers change instead to an allow-list based concept - meaning that the Browser maintains a list of resources that are allowed to load per-domain, and the default being just text and images?

If you want to take a look at where it's at right now [1] [2], my Browser is open source; and I hope to fund development via a access fees for a peer-to-peer "Knowledge Tracker" that allows to share automations for the web with other peers, aka macros, reader-mode like extraction beacons, and other awesome treats (p2p search and recommendations are basically included in this concept).

[1] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth

[2] https://github.com/tholian-network/retrokit

I didn't state that the document can't have audio or video or whatever. I am just sceptical when I see someone sending over the browser some wasm for singal processing or for rendering a video game. Don't get me wrong I think it's is useful but I am really worried that people are basically overcomplicate things with hacks on top of hacks instead of someone saying f#@k it we need a different approach.

My problem is that when I want to do some simple web app the industry standard is to have all these abstraction levels, this makes me think that maybe we are building on the wrong fundamentals. And people instead of refactoring the browser they make more abstractions/hacks on each other.

I would separate the app-rendering and document-rendering, but in a composable way. Document-rendering would be much like reader-mode today where the browser applies a lot of styles to make the text beautiful and readable based on the user's preferences. App-rendering would have incredibly consistent default styles (such as no margins, no padding, no underline on links). Basically I feel that browser default styles are ugly because they are afraid to break the "app-rending". I think separating these would allow the browser to make document-rendering much nice. I wrote a blog post with more detail. https://kevincox.ca/2021/07/14/chrome-and-content-modes-in-h...

On the other side can a major browser fix keyboard shortcuts. I want 1. User controllable keyboard shortcuts. (Ideally with some sort of scripting or macro system) 2. Don't allow websites to override important browser shortcuts. Why can't I open my history when looking at a Google Doc?!

The industry standards are meant for businesses coordinating teams and building sites meant to scale to multiple millions of users. No one is putting a gun to your head and making you do any of that for a simple web app.

Sounds a lot like what we had with Flash. Maybe that's not such a bad thing.