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The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser

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Re: The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser

#21
post #3

am i taking crazy pills? > Arc, which has been in an invite-only beta for more than a year, is trying to rethink the whole browser UI no one is ever going to dethrone chrome unless they start selling hardware filled with their crapware at a loss solely to suck ppl into the ecosystem and/or start giving away laptops as fast as possible for the same reasons & no one is ever going to compete with firefox or brave on UI…

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Re: The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser

#22

Reinventing the browser should be simplifying it to only what it needs to be: executing + rendering remote code in a sandboxed window. Make a new browser that is just WebGPU + WebAssembly, no more DOM. Would already run the next wave of games that will come targeting that. Then for regular websites, have them deliver a HTML rendering engine written in Webassembly for how they want to be rendered. No more need to test…

There was an idea for this in 2011: "Atlantis"

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/atlanti...

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/atlantis.pdf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uflg7LDmzI

Re: The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser

#23
post #6
post #3

am i taking crazy pills? > Arc, which has been in an invite-only beta for more than a year, is trying to rethink the whole browser UI no one is ever going to dethrone chrome unless they start selling hardware filled with their crapware at a loss solely to suck ppl into the ecosystem and/or start giving away laptops as fast as possible for the same reasons & no one is ever going to compete with firefox or brave on UI…

Nobody thought anybody could dethrone IE when Firefox came around. I don't think the goal of Arc is to be the browser that everybody uses, so much to be a useful browser for a lot of power-users. With the industry standardizing (for better or worse) on a handful of rendering engines, it's not a big stretch to imagine a world where you can choose between different browsers and still experience the same web as everybod…

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Re: The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser

#24

Reinventing the browser should be simplifying it to only what it needs to be: executing + rendering remote code in a sandboxed window. Make a new browser that is just WebGPU + WebAssembly, no more DOM. Would already run the next wave of games that will come targeting that. Then for regular websites, have them deliver a HTML rendering engine written in Webassembly for how they want to be rendered. No more need to test…

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Re: The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser

#25

I'm glad to see Darin working solely on the browser, and excited to see him in the SWE role! When I was working on Chrome I had a strange leftover 1:1 with him (was a VP at that point.) He always impressed me with the deep understanding of the Chromium code stack and he did unblock my work as a SWE with that - An example: At at time I was struggling with an extra latency some callback incurred. He rightly pointed out…

> My problem was solved, by a VP, in the code!

Thats proper tech leadership right there. Thanks for sharing, shame this is not the norm.

Re: The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser

#26

Reinventing the browser should be simplifying it to only what it needs to be: executing + rendering remote code in a sandboxed window. Make a new browser that is just WebGPU + WebAssembly, no more DOM. Would already run the next wave of games that will come targeting that. Then for regular websites, have them deliver a HTML rendering engine written in Webassembly for how they want to be rendered. No more need to test…

That sounds genuinely awful and detestable.

"Oh, you're bored of a tenth of a gigabyte of React and TypeScript every time you load a web page? Here, we're going to ship you the entire browser every time you reload!"

Re: The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser

#27

Reinventing the browser should be simplifying it to only what it needs to be: executing + rendering remote code in a sandboxed window. Make a new browser that is just WebGPU + WebAssembly, no more DOM. Would already run the next wave of games that will come targeting that. Then for regular websites, have them deliver a HTML rendering engine written in Webassembly for how they want to be rendered. No more need to test…

> Then for regular websites, have them deliver a HTML rendering engine

I think this is a dealbreaker, that is simply too much data to have to send over every time you want to load a webpage. It kills mobile immediately since most users have data caps.

Re: The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser

#28

If we have to rethink the browser is not because of the UI. We have to take the browser to the smartphones ecosystem and dethrone app platforms. Maybe, an app-able solution that mimicks most or all of the stuff one can get from developing for app platforms — because it would provide crossplatform, it would create the necessary incentive to develop for it. Also, user privacy first and open source.

Well, there was the proposal for WebUSB I think. I like it but seem to get shouted down.

If the browser was a little tighter to the hardware would be easier to dethrone App - with feature that currently can only be in app.

Re: The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser

#29

Reinventing the browser should be simplifying it to only what it needs to be: executing + rendering remote code in a sandboxed window. Make a new browser that is just WebGPU + WebAssembly, no more DOM. Would already run the next wave of games that will come targeting that. Then for regular websites, have them deliver a HTML rendering engine written in Webassembly for how they want to be rendered. No more need to test…

> Then for regular websites, have them deliver a HTML rendering engine I think this is a dealbreaker, that is simply too much data to have to send over every time you want to load a webpage. It kills mobile immediately since most users have data caps.

The idea is you cache a rendering engine. It just isn’t core in the system layer

Re: The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser

#30
Interesting that their prototype looks a lot like my browser: which is Firefox using:

- Tabcenter Redux (last update 2018) https://github.com/eoger/tabcenter-redux-- creates a (searchable) left tab column including pinned tabs on top of the column, just like what they are showing. And

- Auto Tab Discard -- saves memory (but not perfectly) by writing out tab contents to disk if the tab is inactive for a settable amount of time, then seamlessly reloading the tab when it's clicked.

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