At this point in market concentration, any sufficiently brave or delusional soul that ventures into even the most rudimentary web browser development is a hero to me !
[deleted]
Opossum: Cross-platform web browser written in Golang, optimized for Plan 9
61–70 of 98 posts
Re: Opossum: Cross-platform web browser written in Golang, optimized for Plan 9
#62At this point in market concentration, any sufficiently brave or delusional soul that ventures into even the most rudimentary web browser development is a hero to me !
Even though Go is unlikely to be an ideal choice for a web browser, I had definitely wanted to venture into it just as a toy project. Unfortunately, it's obviously an enormous project, so I am absolutely nowhere on it.
That said, shameless plug: if anyone wants a reasonably complete but immature ECMA262 parser in Go, I did do that. You can see how (un)finished it is here, with the wasm build: https://cleansheets.io/parser/ - source here. https://github.com/jchv/cleansheets
The truth is, I'd like to still work on this and even see if it's plausible to build a decent JIT without going too far into the weeds (I wouldn't tolerate a requirement on Cgo personally) but given that I never even pushed up an interpreter (I had an AST-based interpreter, but it was so ugly that I scrapped it :) I doubt I'll get anywhere near Opossum. Oh well.
It'd still be fun to at least get some pages rendering. Probably no chance in hell I'd ever get over to milestones I'd actually like to (like booting GMail for example.)
Re: Opossum: Cross-platform web browser written in Golang, optimized for Plan 9
#63Nice! I'm glad to see more people are interested in creating browser from scratch. Tho like the "OS from scratch" trend, most of those browsers won't be as nearly as performant or complete as those market-leading browsers without ton of work put into it. Making a browser is not a one man job.
But it's certainly fun to make a browser! I happen to keep track of the open-source browser projects & resources here if anyone is interested:
Re: Opossum: Cross-platform web browser written in Golang, optimized for Plan 9
#64Nice! I'm glad to see more people are interested in creating browser from scratch. Tho like the "OS from scratch" trend, most of those browsers won't be as nearly as performant or complete as those market-leading browsers without ton of work put into it. Making a browser is not a one man job. But it's certainly fun to make a browser! I happen to keep track of the open-source browser projects & resources here if anyon…
Wow, I didn't realize so many people were interested in this. I've been wanting to make a hobby browser for a couple of years now but haven't gotten past some basic steps, but seeing this really does make me want to go deeper. If only I had more time.
At least I will enjoy checking out other projects in the meantime.
Re: Opossum: Cross-platform web browser written in Golang, optimized for Plan 9
#65At this point in market concentration, any sufficiently brave or delusional soul that ventures into even the most rudimentary web browser development is a hero to me !
Or the devil because if they succeed we'll need to check rendering on yet another target!
Re: Opossum: Cross-platform web browser written in Golang, optimized for Plan 9
#66At this point in market concentration, any sufficiently brave or delusional soul that ventures into even the most rudimentary web browser development is a hero to me !
I think what's been achieved in a little over a year with the Ladybird Browser from the SerenityOS project shows that it's quite possible to build a new browser from scratch. And yes, they are absolute heroes for doing it! https://awesomekling.github.io/Ladybird-a-new-cross-platform... https://linus.dev/posts/ladybird-browser-year-in-review-2022...
It's definitely impressive, and it shows it is possible to build a new browser. I don't think it shows it is possible to build a new browser that ordinary people will use though. That requires implementing a gazillion niche features that Chrome supports, and compatibility with a gazillion broken websites.
Probably with web browsers the last 0.1% is 99.9% of the work.
Re: Opossum: Cross-platform web browser written in Golang, optimized for Plan 9
#67ROBLOX
Re: Opossum: Cross-platform web browser written in Golang, optimized for Plan 9
#68Nice! I'm glad to see more people are interested in creating browser from scratch. Tho like the "OS from scratch" trend, most of those browsers won't be as nearly as performant or complete as those market-leading browsers without ton of work put into it. Making a browser is not a one man job. But it's certainly fun to make a browser! I happen to keep track of the open-source browser projects & resources here if anyon…
Wow, I didn't realize so many people were interested in this. I've been wanting to make a hobby browser for a couple of years now but haven't gotten past some basic steps, but seeing this really does make me want to go deeper. If only I had more time. At least I will enjoy checking out other projects in the meantime.
Yeah I think you should definitely go for it. I was hesitated for a long time as well but decided to just throw myself into it & use it as a learning experience. After about two years, I got myself a very basic browser & ton of useful knowledge about browsers & their quirks.
It wasn't an easy journey but I really enjoy it.
Re: Opossum: Cross-platform web browser written in Golang, optimized for Plan 9
#69At this point in market concentration, any sufficiently brave or delusional soul that ventures into even the most rudimentary web browser development is a hero to me !
Amen to that --- and those who do will quickly lament the state of the "Modern Web"; fuckings to CloudFlare and the like for gatekeeping and calling everyone who doesn't use even slightly non-mainstream browsers or configurations (no JS? Filtering proxy?) a bot. A disappointingly large percentage of sites are behind such walls, and another large number of them are otherwise static content that requires JS to display.
But not giving up is the first step to success. I probably wouldn't use a browser in Go either, but as someone who has also been working on one of my own intermittently and knows how much opposition there is, I certainly encourage any attempts at increasing actual browser diversity.
Re: Opossum: Cross-platform web browser written in Golang, optimized for Plan 9
#70Nice! I'm glad to see more people are interested in creating browser from scratch. Tho like the "OS from scratch" trend, most of those browsers won't be as nearly as performant or complete as those market-leading browsers without ton of work put into it. Making a browser is not a one man job. But it's certainly fun to make a browser! I happen to keep track of the open-source browser projects & resources here if anyon…
If you don't care about JS and just want a good hypertext document viewer with decent HTML and CSS support, I think it shouldn't be too hard to beat mainstream browsers on performance.