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

61–70 of 148 posts

Re: The Hotdog web browser and browser engine

#61

Post by astrange »

brabel wrote: post #43
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 Tom…

Is there a modern version of lynx/links using an engine like WebKit? I always thought this would be useful but must admit I never got around to writing it.

Re: The Hotdog web browser and browser engine

#62

Post by mariusor »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #36
rstat1 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just see regular words there. What's the big deal?

It seems fair enough to me to warn people about rude words. There are still some people who are offended by them (to be fair, I can't imagine many of them are here), and there are quite a lot on that page.

Thank you for the warning, Aussie... erm... Wog...

Re: The Hotdog web browser and browser engine

#63

Post by chriswarbo »

jan_Inkepa wrote: post #55
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…

> Maybe if enough of these "minimal browsers" show up, people might even realise that basic HTML and CSS is quite sufficient for a lot of things and start creating simpler, more efficient sites, thus dissolving the monopoly. I feel like some initiative to establish a super 'light' version of the html/css specs might be a very good thing...browsers are so far gone out of the hands of individual coders or even small te…

Piggybacking on this: there's a lot of redundancy in the Web specs, so it may actually be fruitful to start with features which are more expressive/consistent and leave the older ones to polyfills.

For example, if we want JS then it might be worth tackling that first, and bootstrapping the rest (e.g. rendering to one big canvas to begin with).

Re: The Hotdog web browser and browser engine

#64

Post by Cthulhu_ »

Ygg2 wrote: post #41
swsieber wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

They break them on purpose so people will switch to Chrome. And the worst part is, there's no evidence (yet?) that there's malice behind it. Maybe we'll get a whistleblower at some point, but that'll only happen when their income no longer covers buying off their conscience.

Re: The Hotdog web browser and browser engine

#65

Post by swiley »

TomGullen wrote: post #59
panic wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dream browser would have two engines -- a simple, very fast engine for "document-like" web pages and a more complex engine that can be loaded on demand using a UI similar to NoScript.

Do normal document like web pages render slowly in modern browsers for you?

IME: most pages that are poorly controlled enough to include "tag managers" are unusable with javascript enabled.

Re: The Hotdog web browser and browser engine

#66

Post by matteqa »

eitland wrote: post #35
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've been arguing this for a while: I want a browser that deliberately cannot run random scripts; only from a vetted source. That source will contain stuff like autocomplete and htmx or similar. If something doesn't work with that it asks you if you want to enable "bloat mode - warning: unsafe" and I the user chooses it enables a full browser engine.

LibreJS is probably what you're looking for.

Re: The Hotdog web browser and browser engine

#67

Post by jmercouris »

astrange wrote: post #61
brabel wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Tom…

Is there a modern version of lynx/links using an engine like WebKit? I always thought this would be useful but must admit I never got around to writing it.

It depends by what you mean. Do you mean Command line accessible version? If so, there are several that work in terminals. Do you mean text only? If so, there are several browsers that can do this for you :-)

Re: The Hotdog web browser and browser engine

#68

Post by mythz »

Interesting they've got a screenshot of SerenityOS.org at the end of their home page, curious if their looking at SerenityOS's home grown LibWeb [1] C++ implementation for inspiration in their Go code-base?

SerenityOS is another Indie OS effort which plans to build the entire POSIX OS, Kernel and core Apps from scratch, one of the Apps their is their LibWeb browser engine complete with their own LibJS JS VM which already passes the vast ECMAScript test suite [2]. One of its USPs of SerenityOS is being able to make changes to its code-base and instantly reboot the OS in seconds with the changes, never seen this done for an OS before, the turn around time allows for some impressive dev iteration speed.

Andreas videos on developing LibWeb/LibJS is one of the best resources I've found explaining how to implement a web browser, e.g. in this video he goes through the HTML Specs which have enough info in them to develop a HTML spec parser whose behavior is the same across all browser engines:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZdKlyXV2vw

Most of the interesting parts of LibWeb/LibJS is captured on video that has a unique skill of being able to write code really quickly whilst explaining each step. There must be close to 100 videos on implementing different parts of the Web Browser on his YouTube channel, e.g:

https://www.youtube.com/c/AndreasKling/search?query=html

https://www.youtube.com/c/AndreasKling/search?query=js

https://www.youtube.com/c/AndreasKling/search?query=css

https://www.youtube.com/c/AndreasKling/search?query=canvas

[1] https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Userland/...

[2] https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Userland/...

Re: The Hotdog web browser and browser engine

#69

Post by scaladev »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #64
Ygg2 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They break them on purpose so people will switch to Chrome. And the worst part is, there's no evidence (yet?) that there's malice behind it. Maybe we'll get a whistleblower at some point, but that'll only happen when their income no longer covers buying off their conscience.

Do they only break for users in the United States? I've been using Firefox exclusively since about 2.0, and I've never had any of the Google projects break for me. Not once. Yet this seems to be a pretty common problem around here.
Post reply on HN