For anyone interested, here are some web browsers that are actually minimalist and not just reskins of chromium: http://surf.suckless.org/ https://fanglingsu.github.io/vimb/ http://www.uzbl.org/
qutebrowser is also worth mentioning:
Ōryōki Web Browser
31–40 of 181 posts
Re: Ōryōki Web Browser
#32I fully support innovation in terms of a new web browser... but this isn't really what I'd like to see. I feel like the web browser should be more of an OS than what it is today. Why does the language attribute in the script tag only support javascript? Wouldn't it be rad if I could write C#, and not have to transpile it... wouldn't it be rad if browsers could add more language support automatically (with your permis…
That last one is already implemented with browser caching. Go to a popular website and check the Requests tab on your dev console, it'll probably show 304s for CDNs. But possibly some companies join many JS files together before publishing.
Re: Ōryōki Web Browser
#33For anyone interested, here are some web browsers that are actually minimalist and not just reskins of chromium: http://surf.suckless.org/ https://fanglingsu.github.io/vimb/ http://www.uzbl.org/
I mean, they all use webkit, so not really that much different from using chromium.
Re: Ōryōki Web Browser
#34This project is solving the wrong problem. It's not the interfaces of web browsers that suck, it's the gigabytes of RAM they consume.
RAM is meant to be consumed. If your browser is using 50MB of RAM and has to swap every background tab to disk then you're not utilizing the resources of your computer, and getting a crappy user experience as a bonus.
>If your browser is using 50MB of RAM
If only that were a relevant remark. The tab with the linked Oryoki web page alone is using 250 megabytes for me. And a second tab of the same page is using an additional 230 megabytes.
Somehow I don't think that that's well utilized RAM for the ~350 kilobytes of web content. This page uses 200 megabytes as a tab, and HN isn't exactly a heavy page.
Re: Ōryōki Web Browser
#35This project is solving the wrong problem. It's not the interfaces of web browsers that suck, it's the gigabytes of RAM they consume.
To be fair, the biggest offender in all this IS javascript in webpages. Though even more Javascript in the browser UI isn't going to solve the Javascript problem when it comes to performances.
Anybody can shift+Esc on Chrome and see how Javascript heavy pages consume a shocking amount of Memory.
Re: Ōryōki Web Browser
#36Using this made me realize how much I rely on search suggestions/autocomplement.
Re: Ōryōki Web Browser
#37I don't think "small web browser" can refer to anything built on Chromium. Maybe "unobtrusive" would be better.
Re: Ōryōki Web Browser
#38For anyone interested, here are some web browsers that are actually minimalist and not just reskins of chromium: http://surf.suckless.org/ https://fanglingsu.github.io/vimb/ http://www.uzbl.org/
I mean, they all use webkit, so not really that much different from using chromium.
It's true that they use webkit (which is certainly not ideally minimalist), but even that is much lighter than using Chromium.
Re: Ōryōki Web Browser
#39Here's another tiny browser: http://www.netsurf-browser.org/
At a previous job, we built and installed and ran a system test with that faster than Firefox unpacked the source tarball. OTOH, it's quite limited, and Javascript support isn't really there yet.
Re: Ōryōki Web Browser
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
RAM is meant to be consumed. If your browser is using 50MB of RAM and has to swap every background tab to disk then you're not utilizing the resources of your computer, and getting a crappy user experience as a bonus.
Yes, RAM is meant to be consumed, but I still find it incredibly hard to believe that my browser NEEDS multiple gigabytes of memory. Regardless of how much I have to spare.
I see your point, but I don't find the state of things incredibly surprising anymore. Consider how huge modern web pages have grown, with a ton of poorly compressible media attachments, an embedded programming language that keeps track of plenty of state, and dozens of external resources that pull their own media and have their own state. Not to mention that we're in the middle of a responsiveness space race between browser vendors, and doing less CPU work by keeping more things in memory is one of the basic performance optimizations. With that said, as developers we have obviously been spoiled by the embarrassment of riches in terms of available hardware resources and have also contributed to the problem.