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

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

#31

Post by samwillis »

themoonisachees wrote: post #22
samwillis wrote: post #11

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

Happy to admit it's a crazy idea, and it's not something that I would want to see as a usual way to built sites. But for small areas of web apps where compatibility is difficult it does make sense.

Google Docs used to be contenteditable based, but moved to a custom rendering engine. They are a large enough company to be able to invest in that. Small businesses aren't, and have to rely on content editable.

Ladybird as a contenteditable polyfill would help smaller teams, or single developers, achieve the same, while also building on the existing tooling and APIs for contenteditable.

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

#33

Post by hayleox »

BurningPenguin wrote: post #28
epilys wrote: post #8

Chrome wasn't built in a day.

Chrome used an already existing render engine and improved on it.

More specifically, Chrome used Safari's rendering engine, and Safari used Konqueror's rendering engine, because even in 2001, starting a browser engine from scratch seemed like too much work.

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

#34

Post by KeplerBoy »

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…

Isn't that the real problem here? Nobody cares if your browser fails to render that page, because you strictly adhere to the standard while Chrome just happily deals with broken documents (or worse: Chrome requiring documents to be slightly broken).

Chrome is the sole benchmark. If it works in Chrome, it's fine, if it doesn't the site is broken. Standards never enter the discussion.

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

#35

Post by eastbound »

ryanjshaw wrote: post #15

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

I thought unsafe language were a no-go in the context of extremely vulnerable pieces of software like the web?

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

#37

Post by swexbe »

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…

Most new compilers build on LLVM/GCC, no?

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

#38

Post by postdb »

hulitu wrote: post #25
mkl95 wrote: post #12

Building a web browser is a difficult, but attainable task. On the other hand, getting the UX right is a gargantuan task that even big tech struggle with.

They don't "struggle". They just don't care ( to put it litely).

UI/UX are made for big tech to lock in their user rather on a better/simpler, security/privacy oriented user experience.

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

#39

Post by Hendrikto »

pedrogpimenta wrote: post #18
hydroid7 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unfortunately, given its market share, they become standards.

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

#40

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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.

I mean I don't see highly advanced / complicated features like webgl used in my day to day browsing, it's tech demos and the like linked from HN at best. A new browser can do without that for a long time.
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