Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Hotdog web browser and browser engine

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 148 posts

Re: The Hotdog web browser and browser engine

#41

Post by Ygg2 »

swsieber wrote: post #29
creshal wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When the specs are constantly churning in order to keep one gigantic company's browser an effective monopoly, maybe it isn't really that important to follow them so closely... The notion breaks as soon as your users want to use youtube or gmail, which for some mysterious reason keep insisting on using all these useless "standards" even though they have no benefit to the user.

Youtube and gmail will mysteriously break for people on Firefox too, so it's not that much worse. /sarcasm (sort of...)

Pretty sure those sites break in Edge and Brave as well...

Re: The Hotdog web browser and browser engine

#42

Post by silly-silly »

csande17 wrote: post #31
surround wrote: post #16

How come entire operating systems are able to be developed on community-supported efforts (like Debian) but browsers can only be developed by monoliths like Google and Apple (and Mozilla, which has ~750 employees and makes most of its money from Google)?

In practice, many of the components used in desktop Linux distributions are developed by an IBM subsidiary called "Red Hat" which has 12,000 employees. Systemd, GNOME, PulseAudio, X and Wayland, all of these are primarily maintained by Red Hat employees operating under various shell organizations.

Most of these were developed and created when "Red Hat" had no ownership by IBM.

Re: The Hotdog web browser and browser engine

#43

Post by brabel »

userbinator wrote: post #10

It's great to see yet another attempt at writing a web browser --- and I say this as someone who has been (slowly) working on one myself. The browser is far from stable, spec-compliant, or even really useful, but, I'm slowly working on bringing more features and supporting more sites. When the specs are constantly churning in order to keep one gigantic company's browser an effective monopoly, maybe it isn't really th…

The idea of "minimal browsers" is a popular one and there are thriving communities based on this idea:

Gopher is a dead simple text-based protocol:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)

Project Gemini is a slightly more powerful protocol for the small web:

https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

The tilde (~) community, which makes the small web social:

https://tilde.club/

I recommend you have a look at James Tomasino's Youtube channel, where he shows a bunch of cool stuff going on around Gemini, Gopher and tilde:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoEI6VzybDk

This is not for everyone, but if what you want is just basic text and functionality that can work from a terminal (though there are GUI browsers too), then this is perfect.

Re: The Hotdog web browser and browser engine

#44

Post by cookiengineer »

userbinator wrote: post #10

It's great to see yet another attempt at writing a web browser --- and I say this as someone who has been (slowly) working on one myself. The browser is far from stable, spec-compliant, or even really useful, but, I'm slowly working on bringing more features and supporting more sites. When the specs are constantly churning in order to keep one gigantic company's browser an effective monopoly, maybe it isn't really th…

I feel ya. I'm refactoring my CSS parser the third time now, because I needed to support nested media queries (and therefore the logical condition "spec").

It's amazing how complex even CSS has gotten. And implementing HTML without the ISO SGML spec and the SGML handbook is close to impossible.

So many edge cases, so much layouting overhead, and so much damned flow root types.

Honestly in the beginning I thought "how hard can it be, it's just like XML"... I was so wrong about this.

Re: The Hotdog web browser and browser engine

#45

Post by yoz-y »

csande17 wrote: post #30
Santosh83 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only general purpose, open source operating system that can now compete with the commercial giants, Linux, is now mainly driven by corporate backed contributors. If all corporate backed efforts were to stop overnight, I doubt it could keep up with MacOS/Windows/Android with just community contributions. The entire hardware/software industry is controlled by giants. Disrupting this can no longer be done by a group…

What's there to "keep up with"? UI-wise, desktop operating systems have been pretty much stagnant for a decade, and software-compatibility-wise, people already weren't expecting Linux to run all their newfangled commercial software.

Drivers and security would be my guess.

Re: The Hotdog web browser and browser engine

#46

Post by CaptArmchair »

admax88q wrote: post #27
vicda wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lightweight sandboxed applications in the browser. No admin password needed since there's nothing to install. Sure it may be bloated overkill for something that could have just been a plain text file, but it is nice to have real time and interactive visualizations. Plus it is nice to have the choice to use mobile websites instead of using the access hungry native apps.

Figma, docs, sheets. All great apps I can use for any device with a web browser. No install needed, no updates needed. Easy to collaborate with. No "install this application" just "open this url" Application delivery though the web browser is just hella convenient. It's really hard to give that up for some "native apps and static documents" utopian dream.

The idea of "web applications" is almost as old as the Web itself. Java Web Applets, Flash, Silverlight,... were all attempts to bring application functionality to the browser. Billions have been invested in this strategy.

Why?

Because desktop computing used to be a battlegrounds for commercial vendors in the late 20th century, and the goal was establishing market dominance. Being able to control who can run what on a platform was / still is part and parcel towards establishing that goal.

Web browsers changed the game. They are a threat and an opportunity at the same time. A threat because gave anyone a chance to escape from a native context and run whatever you want in a browser regardless of the platform your on. No more having to compile and distribute the same application for a dozen potential targets.

Microsoft was so adamant on having Explorer bundled with their OS in order to establish control over the future evolution of web applications on the information highway. And they got famously burned for it in that 1999 anti-trust case.

Application delivery as you know it today is convenient, but that came at a price. Vast amounts of resources have been poured into Chromium over the past two decades to bring that experience to billions. And it didn't happen out of sheer altruism on the part of Google.

Re: The Hotdog web browser and browser engine

#47

Post by sanxiyn »

cookiengineer wrote: post #44
userbinator wrote: post #10

It's great to see yet another attempt at writing a web browser --- and I say this as someone who has been (slowly) working on one myself. The browser is far from stable, spec-compliant, or even really useful, but, I'm slowly working on bringing more features and supporting more sites. When the specs are constantly churning in order to keep one gigantic company's browser an effective monopoly, maybe it isn't really th…

I feel ya. I'm refactoring my CSS parser the third time now, because I needed to support nested media queries (and therefore the logical condition "spec"). It's amazing how complex even CSS has gotten. And implementing HTML without the ISO SGML spec and the SGML handbook is close to impossible. So many edge cases, so much layouting overhead, and so much damned flow root types. Honestly in the beginning I thought "how…

Eh, SGML spec is entirely unnecessary. Use HTML5 parsing spec. ("The HTML syntax" chapter.)

Re: The Hotdog web browser and browser engine

#48

Post by [deleted] »

marakv2 wrote: post #22
Daegalus wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

honestly, I have been toying with the idea of building a web browser project that has no JavaScript. just completely ignores the script tag or any JavaScript related things. like onclick, and other attributes.

Really what did JavaScript bring us? (And there goes my points!) I want to search for information and share information with people. I don't want any more from the net. It feels like what we want is being surpassed by those who want to monetise us.

[deleted]

Re: The Hotdog web browser and browser engine

#49

Post by sanxiyn »

fartcannon wrote: post #38

Does it pass the Acid3 test? I haven't thought about that in a long time. Not since I was using Konqueror + khtml engine.

Fat chance. It doesn't implement any CSS selectors at all.

Servo passed Acid2 in 2014: https://research.mozilla.org/2014/04/17/another-big-mileston... This is really far behind.

Re: The Hotdog web browser and browser engine

#50

Post by marcthe12 »

surround wrote: post #16

How come entire operating systems are able to be developed on community-supported efforts (like Debian) but browsers can only be developed by monoliths like Google and Apple (and Mozilla, which has ~750 employees and makes most of its money from Google)?

First Debian is a distro composed of several third party software. The closest equivalent to browsers in scope in Xorg and that has gone in maintaince for being unmaintainable. Web browsers could be simplified if designed differently(internal architecture). We browser are monolithic programs but with stuff like nodejs, gjs, web view, pwa, etc. , Parts of browser must really become system library (that has some stability) and daemon that run on login. Aka the solution to the bloated web is modularisation of certain components.
Post reply on HN