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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

#21

What we all REALLY care about: they went with C++ and Qt https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Ladybird

The cross-platform version of the browser uses Qt

The version of the browser native to SerenityOS hopefully still uses the SerenityOS GUI libraries

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

#22

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…

Son what i'm hearing is that you're looking forward to browser-in-a-browser as if that's somehow not the most depressing trend I didn't know about

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

#23

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…

It’s the work of Google’s PR team, there’s no competition if everyone thinks making a browser is impossible, so don’t even try, ~wink wink

I’m only half joking but I’m pretty sure there are some PR companies pushing “trends” on the behalf of big corps.

It would be stupid and uncapitalist not too…

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

#26

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.

So did Google, Microsoft and Mozilla.

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

#27

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…

I think the distinction comes from the fact that a compile that's unfinished is unfinished but as a devloper you knew that and either you contribute or you suck it up.

A browser that's unfinished really cant be used by users at all. Either it lacks security, so nobody should use it, or it lacks vital features (of the spec, not end-user features), so nobody can really use it because every time a website relies on that API something doesn't work.

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

#30
Others have already mentioned performance is one of the hard part.

Another aspect is that for any complex, large-scale project like browser, lots of, if not most of, effort is actually in the long tail: to make 90% or even 99% websites work probably is as hard as making the rest 1%.

So while the team probably could cruise through when working on current gen spec and popular sites like Discord/Twitter, it's what left is going to be a nightmare to manage at the end.

But again, nothing is impossible, and I really look forward to having a new browser engine in the wild.

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