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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

#71

Post by moron4hire »

wruza wrote: post #54
moron4hire wrote: post #13

I've been using "install this webpage as an app" in Edge for about a year now for the vast majority of sites I visit on a regular basis. The site doesn't need to have an app manifest or service worker to use the feature, you can just use it with any site. I also develop a Web-based VR app at work, have been doing WebXR and VR development for a while now. The two experiences together have me about convinced that tabs…

It sounds great until I remember the experience with winhlp32.exe. Opening something in a new tab and bookmarking or pinning a location is a good idea on its own, web or not. And like the article suggests, if there were as many windows (apps?) as tabs my browsing session often has, I’d like to see a tab/side bar at least for all the apps which I have absolutely no intent to “install” or thread-navigate separately in…

Yeah, that's what I mean. OS vendors have almost completely stagnated on UI design for nearly 20 years now.

Mozilla popularized tabbed browsing back in 2003. OS X Leopard released stacks in the dock in 2007. I'm much more of a Windows user, but I had to look up that it had taskbar grouping all the way back to Windows XP in 2001, so I don't think it was enabled by default, because I really don't recall using it until Windows 7 in 2009.

What was it about tabbed browsing that was so much better than MDI? We've had MDI available for app developers since as long as I can remember. I don't know if it was in Win3.1, but I do know I used it in Win95. I think tabbed browsing is a key linchpin in this issue because I think it created an inflection point in how many open documents a user could expect to manage with ease. Before tabs, I don't think a lot of people tried to run more than a handful of apps with multiple windows at the same time, even with MDI. Nowadays, it's not unheard of to see someone completing about their browser crashing and taking it dozens, if not low-hundreds of tabs.

So there is a huge window here that feels like the two most popular desktop OSes couldn't be counted on by cross-platform app developers to provide a good means to manage dozens of documents in working space, because their vendors just kinda sat on their hands. "You want TDI? We have MDI at home." Ooooh, transparency effects on windows. That's really improving workflow /s

Honestly, stacks and taskbar groups aren't that good. Are they kind of junk because it's inherently impossible to do at the OS level? I don't think that makes sense; it's a pretty high level abstraction. It seems much more likely that folks at Microsoft and Apple just didn't feel any pressure to dramatically improve UX. We didn't get the first major, single-page-like web apps until round about 2005, but I don't think it really took off until 2008: smartphones giving people Internet access on the go, the popularity of the iPhone giving mindshare back to Apple so they might become a desktop contender again, and the desire by many developers to never have to ever ever ever touch Java Swing again. What real innovation and proliferation have we seen in desktop OS window managers since then?

So I'm imagining an alternate universe where OS vendors didn't cede control of UI R&D to browser vendors.

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

#72

Post by phailhaus »

enos_feedler wrote: post #69
phailhaus wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having to store all the different versions of rendering engines out there doesn't really solve the problem, because space isn't unlimited either. Imagine: Facebook just upgraded to v1.3.2 of PopularEngine but Google still lags at v1.3.0, now you have to store both!

What your saying is I should thank browserland for saving me all this disk storage. Looking over at you Electron

Yeah exactly. It's not great, because getting a website to work consistently across browsers is a bit of a pain, but it's gotten much better in recent years. Especially after IE was finally shut down.

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

#73

Post by vanshg »

I've been using a new WebKit-based browser called Orion. It is super snappy, has compatibility with Chrome and Firefox extensions, has power-user features built-in, is privacy focused (collects 0 telemetry as a tenet -- they are donation based), and continues to add features at super fast pace. I highly recommend giving it consideration if you are looking to move away from Chrome.

Some features I love: tree-style tabs. cross-window pinned tabs. low power mode which auto suspends tabs. in place editing of websites. profiles are their own application instance. extensions work on iOS. per-page user-agent. built in notes. preventing auto-playing videos. all this while retaining a native macOS UX.

https://browser.kagi.com

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28799049

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

#74

Post by baconmania »

Is this actually a reinvention of the browser, or just another self-interested organization trying to grab a slice of the pie?

I download Arc and am immediately greeted with a mandatory account creation page (which asks for my name, even) with a footnote that says `tl;dr we don't spy on you`.

A web browser should be a purely clientside application; no logins required. Building a chromium riff that maintains serverside state about you as a user while saying "trust us :)" is in no way revolutionary, it's just another player in the nightmarish arena that is the modern web.

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

#75

Post by aliqot »

pcmaffey wrote: post #49
aliqot wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the AMA. Is there a link to a git repo of current progress?

Not currently, but will be sharing early experiments here as soon as ready.

This AMA has concluded.

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

#76

Post by meheleventyone »

Vermeulen wrote: post #67
paxys wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great idea, every website should write its own WebGPU-based rendering engine from scratch. But that will be way too much effort for every kind of project, so what can really happen is some large players write engines and define interfaces for them, and we can all use them for our sites. But different engines rendering the same data differently is probably going to be confusing (what if I want to swap them to compare…

You have definitely missed the entire point. Of course there are some advantages of just putting it all in the browser for rendering current standard web sites. The point is to rethink the browser so it isn't just a single tech company setting what the web is with Chromium. A WebGPU+WebAssembly engine would be simple enough for there to be many.

Right but this misses the point that you’re not removing complexity by shuffling it down a layer. Is it really an advantage to have multiple “thin browsers” if there are only two or three “browser engines” anyway due to their complexity? Further by pushing the complexity down a layer you inevitably make it slower.

Aside from which from a market perspective most small browser projects already are a thin layer on top of Chromium. So really what’s gained here?

Particularly if you want to write a novel app using WASM and WebGPU/WebGL only you can already with the tiniest amount of glue to spin the handle. And this can be a useful approach but should it be the default?

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

#77

Post by giantrobot »

Vermeulen wrote: post #67
paxys wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great idea, every website should write its own WebGPU-based rendering engine from scratch. But that will be way too much effort for every kind of project, so what can really happen is some large players write engines and define interfaces for them, and we can all use them for our sites. But different engines rendering the same data differently is probably going to be confusing (what if I want to swap them to compare…

You have definitely missed the entire point. Of course there are some advantages of just putting it all in the browser for rendering current standard web sites. The point is to rethink the browser so it isn't just a single tech company setting what the web is with Chromium. A WebGPU+WebAssembly engine would be simple enough for there to be many.

Having a browser be just WebGPU+WebAssembly is basically just Flash and all the dog shit UX and terrible performance it forced on people. Responsiveness entirely up to the developer, giant binary blobs of content mixed with code, and 100% CPU usage all the time.

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

#78

Post by musicale »

Vermeulen wrote: post #17

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…

This is one of the endgames of the ad blocking arms race (another being server-side rendering.)

In both cases ad blockers become computer audiovisual processing systems.

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

#79

Post by Markoff »

userbinator wrote: post #12

New rendering engine? Or yet-another-Chrom(e/ium)-clone with a different UI? Honestly, even the latter might be better if it's closer to what older browsers had, with a lot of options to configure and not the dumbed-down useless-UI trend that seems to be gradually infecting everything. That's one of the reasons I use Firefox, although it seems to be slowly going down the same path too.

You should try Vivaldi, way more customizable than Brave or Edge, let alone Chrome.

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

#80

Post by Markoff »

defrost wrote: post #68
Egrodo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you checked out Vivaldi? Incredibly customizable UI over Chromium, if you do make the switch from FF.

I like Vivaldi and was seriously considering a switch away from Chrome as I'm a past Opera fan ... but it's still "just another" Chromium-based browser likely to be affected by the upcoming Manifest v3 changes that will limit adblocking browser extensions. I'm running more and more with Firefox these days and trialing AdGuard Home, Blocky, Technitium in parallel in anticipation of having to recommend solutions to fri…

both Vivaldi and Brave claim to keep supporting MV2 extensions
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