Show HN: We launched a new web browser • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: We launched a new web browser

#191

Post by mike_hearn » Wed, Apr 27, 2022, 6:39 PM UTC

bogomipz wrote: post #190

mike_hearn wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before the 2000s-era machine learning revolution, AI was assumed to be solvable via symbolic reasoning. Pure logic, in other words. See: Cyc. Cyc was/is an attempt to encode all of human knowledge using predicate logic. If you have knowledge in this form then you can use the standard rules of logic to infer new knowledge and do reasoning. TBL/W3C felt like the next big upgrade for humanity would be AI that could unde…

This is fantastic historical information. It's even more fascinating(and horrifying) to think that these things collided the way they did and derailed the evolution of a maintaining a proper HTML spec and that ultimately one company - Google shifted both the direction of AI movement as well as the direction of the browser. Thanks for the wonderfully detailed responses, I really appreciate it.

You're welcome!

Re: Show HN: We launched a new web browser

#192

Post by gwbas1c » Thu, Apr 28, 2022, 1:05 PM UTC

mike_hearn wrote: post #185

gwbas1c wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To do (2) it really helps to have a good, easy to use deployment technology. That's why I suggested "Canvas and WASM." It's very trivial to get a "Canvas and WASM" program running in the browser. All you need to do is plan the API inside of WASM very carefully, because... > That means to make a competitor to HTML5 you need to go outside the browser and build new kinds of browser and document/app technology. ... the…

I can't email you because the email link on your website is broken unfortunately. But sure, would love to chat about this stuff. You can find my email in my profile if you want to say hello. I'm putting together a list of people who have some interest in the post-web space with the goal of starting a little community, or maybe a podcast series. Would be great to have you take part! Re: canvas+HTML5. Yeah, you can def…

Thanks, I'll follow up. (And fix the email link)

FYI: You can do GC in WASM. I'm actively working in Blazor right now, which is C# compiled to WASM. Even though it's GC, it still relies on the Dispose pattern. (IE, if an object has a resource or needs explicit cleanup, it can't rely on the garbage collector to know when to release its resource or otherwise do its cleanup.)

But I'd be careful about being too opinionated about forcing a language onto the consumers of an API. I believe WinForms (the first C# UI API) was a thin wrapper around the Windows UI API, but I never did a Windows UI in Win32 directly to fully validate my assumption.

Re: Show HN: We launched a new web browser

#193

Post by buffrr » Fri, Apr 29, 2022, 8:17 AM UTC

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #14

What problems did you face that made you decide to create a browser fork of Chromium instead of a web browsing extension or a separate application that could utilize any other web browser as a client for using these protocols?

We already built a separate application and wanted to avoid making a browser for a while. The idea for Beacon started when we wanted decent support for iOS and android, which nowadays is like the majority of users.

It's easy to install an app and start browsing. No hacks or workarounds and the UX can be much more tailored (even for desktop).

Re: Show HN: We launched a new web browser

#194

Post by blacklion » Tue, May 03, 2022, 7:51 PM UTC

jjcon wrote: post #181

blacklion wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blink is the standard for rendering now just as Linux is the standard for web servers. It is THE problem. Software should not be "standard".

Without community supported and adopted standards software wouldn't have progressed all that much in the past 20 years

Standards must be standards. Software must implements standards.