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The Hotdog web browser and browser engine

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Re: The Hotdog web browser and browser engine

#91

Post by pridkett »

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.

Browsh[0] might come close to what you’re looking for. It’s not strictly designed to be less memory or faster - better for bringing up a browser on a remote system as it still uses a headless instance of Firefox behind the scenes.

[0]: https://www.brow.sh/

Re: The Hotdog web browser and browser engine

#92

Post by tomcam »

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…

> someone who has been (slowly) working on one myself.

Well... that's kind of exciting! Is your work public? Would love to see it.

> maybe it isn't really that important to follow them so closely... especially if you're aiming for something more like an actually-user-friendly (i.e. with the UI and controls you actually want, not some designer's flavour-of-the-month) hypertext document viewer than a web application runtime/OS. From that perspective, even HTML4+CSS2 would probably be quite sufficient.

Yes. So much yes.

Re: The Hotdog web browser and browser engine

#93

Post by jan_Inkepa »

pabs3 wrote: post #84
jan_Inkepa wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Isn't that what Google AMP was meant to be?

Google amp is not designed to be simple to implement to my knowledge, just to be fast to load and to tie you to google services.

Re: The Hotdog web browser and browser engine

#94

Post by tomcam »

tediousdemise wrote: post #78

Love the food-centric naming conventions for all the components. Can we take a moment to appreciate themed naming conventions in software ecosystems? It’s a great conversation starter, and it’s something that will keep us smiling even when things get serious.

I upvoted not because I agreed (I found the naming conventions distracting and inconsistent) but because why the fuck was your perfectly innocuous comment downvoted?

Re: The Hotdog web browser and browser engine

#95

Post by smt1 »

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…

Don't forget that Webkit (e.g, Safari) and Blink (Chrome) are quite different these days.

Re: The Hotdog web browser and browser engine

#96

Post by jefftk »

pabs3 wrote: post #84
jan_Inkepa wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Isn't that what Google AMP was meant to be?

No; AMP includes the whole CSS spec with a few exceptions: https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/learn/spe...

Re: The Hotdog web browser and browser engine

#97

Post by nicklecompte »

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?

Some disclaimers: I am not an expert on Chromium or even web development and this is all quite ignorant and subjective.

But I have noticed that plain text is sometimes very slow to render in Chromium browsers (Chrome, Edge, Vivaldi) under heavy load. The issue may to be related to a process-per-browser-tab architecture: a bloated and fragmented block of memory attached to a tab/process can’t be easily freed / allocated. So if you’re on a tab that was previously loading lots of stateful JS, then switch to plain text, Chromium might get stuck in memory management for the tab instead of short-circuiting its architecture by allocating memory solely for the page.

I am not at all an expert here and don’t know how Chromium works under the hood. I don’t think it’s literally one-process-per-tab, I just have a vague sketch of what the problem might be here. But I think “idiots like nicklecompte have 700 tabs open and complain that tab 361 doesn’t load plain text quickly” is a problem that’s very difficult to solve in general, even if a dedicated “simple” engine might offer a lot of case-specific fixes.

Re: The Hotdog web browser and browser engine

#98

Post by ktpsns »

tediousdemise wrote: post #78

Love the food-centric naming conventions for all the components. Can we take a moment to appreciate themed naming conventions in software ecosystems? It’s a great conversation starter, and it’s something that will keep us smiling even when things get serious.

I also like it, despite I have to admit: As a vegan person, I would not like to contribute to software parts named after sausage ;-)

Re: The Hotdog web browser and browser engine

#99

Post by tediousdemise »

tomcam wrote: post #94
tediousdemise wrote: post #78

Love the food-centric naming conventions for all the components. Can we take a moment to appreciate themed naming conventions in software ecosystems? It’s a great conversation starter, and it’s something that will keep us smiling even when things get serious.

I upvoted not because I agreed (I found the naming conventions distracting and inconsistent) but because why the fuck was your perfectly innocuous comment downvoted?

I'm not sure, but it made me sad. I don't think we are supposed to talk about downvotes, so I just grinned and bared it.

Thanks for offsetting that vote for me.

Re: The Hotdog web browser and browser engine

#100

Post by ktpsns »

marcthe12 wrote: post #50
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 stabil…

Interesting idea, but what would be the advantage of having, for instance, the javascript engine running as a system daemon? This reminds me of Windows Script Host, which was some similar idea but didn't make it. What we see instead are JITs or VMs such as the JVM, node or any other language (such as raku or julia) which just work standalone, in the same way as a browser does.
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