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We're building a browser when it's supposed to be impossible

awesomekling.substack.com

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Re: We're building a browser when it's supposed to be impossible

#11

Post by samwillis »

I think a potentially interesting use case for Ladybird is as a "contenteditable" polyfill. With their dependancy free stack I'm guessing it's not out of the realms of possibility to compile it to WASM and HTML canvas.

Having to only target one rendering engine when developing a rich text editor would be much better than the current nightmare it is.

(There would be an accessibility problem to solve, we need some new APIs for screen readers and canvas)

It's a lot of fun to watch them build Ladybird, and a testament to what a small passionate team can do.

Re: We're building a browser when it's supposed to be impossible

#13

Post by michelledepeil »

severak_cz wrote: post #9

I think there is an important aspect of it which Andreas glimpsed over - do it incrementally. While Ladybird is not yet on par with more mature engines it already works for a lot of webpages just fine.

He calls that "Focus on vertical slices".

Re: We're building a browser when it's supposed to be impossible

#14

Post by dmarcos »

anileated wrote: post #3

It’s not that difficult to build a browser, but it’s very difficult to build your own browser engine, and kudos to Ladybird devs for that undertaking!

Yes. Never been easier to build a browser than today with great open source engines. Writing an engine from scratch is the hard part. Extremely labour-intensive to build and then maintain. People usually conflate both.

edit: clarify

Re: We're building a browser when it's supposed to be impossible

#17

Post by skrebbel »

tester756 wrote: post #4

I'm finding it weird that unlike other non-trivial projects like OSes or compilers, people often discourage building web browser engine because it is "hard" or something like that like... how is it different from building a compiler? You gotta build HTML parser, CSS parser, figure out a fancy structure to represent those concepts and modify at fly. Also there's difference between making it work and making state of th…

You forgot about the rendering and the user interaction.

Re: We're building a browser when it's supposed to be impossible

#18

Post by pedrogpimenta »

hydroid7 wrote: post #6
rvz wrote: post #2

Web browsers are a moving target, just like operating systems. Anyone can 'build there own'; but I'd also say that it is close to impossible to build a secure and viable competing web browser that correctly implements the specification better than Chrome. The two most important keywords in Drew's blogpost is *serious* and *security*. There is not one mention of either of those words in this blog post; hence Drew's po…

Sure, keeping up with all the new fancy Chrome standards is hard. Even Mozilla can't do it.

"Chrome standards"? Those are not standards. Those are things Chrome builds on their own.

Re: We're building a browser when it's supposed to be impossible

#20

Post by alkonaut »

The fact there are better specs doesn’t help if a large part of the work is handling things that are outside the spec. You better show every “buggy” page similar to how the major browsers show them or the new browser will be considered defective. That’s the unfortunate reality of web tech (I wish every page with an js error or incorrectky closed tag would be a big fat error message but it isn’t). And that’s still a lot of slow guesswork I imagine.
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