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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

#92
post #91

It must be impossible, Mozilla spent more than $5billion for a 3% market share.

I wonder, was Linus Torwalds having a market share in his mind when he was starting linux...

Not when I copied boot.tgz and root.tgz from the internet.

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

#93

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 l…

> The fact there are better specs doesn’t help if a large part of the work is handling things that are outside the spec

The way that web specs are handled means that better specs actually bring a lot of those things into the spec. i.e. browser implementers will define a new spec that clearly explains the quirk, and then align on the implementation. There is also a huge test suite which can be used to test conformance.

It's not perfect, but it's definitely a significantly better situation than we had.

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

#95

> So instead of [building the browser one feature/spec at a time], we tend to focus on building “vertical slices” of functionality. This means setting practical, cross-cutting goals, such as “let’s get twitter.com/awesomekling to load”, “let’s get login working on discord.com”, and other similar objectives. Seems similar to how Wine is developed: instead of just going down the list of API functions to implement, the…

Do we really pretend this is a architecture decision? This is the classic Agile Management wants to show result for reward fast, that leads to huge tech debt build up, as layers are not properly designed and reuseable.

It’s neither. There’s no management or promotions or really any incentive to do this other than it’s fun. It’s also not an architectural decision, just how they as a team decide what to work on.

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

#98
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This approach works better for Wine where the Windows binaries are a fixed target. On the web, you may get Twitter's feed rendering acceptably, and then two days later they ship an insignificant redesign that happens to use sixteen CSS features you don't have and everything is totally broken again.

You can then just set the same goal again. I don't see the problem.

[flagged]

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

#99

honestly the web is so broken, i think it is beyond repair, i just want to run the website through some LLM to get the content out and show it in lynx and be done i dont want to consent to be tracked, i dont want to login, i dont want a presonalized feed, i dont want to subscribe to your news letter, i dont want your ads, ethical or not js is still an issue, but maybe a day will come when i can say to the model 'pret…

The web is still a great place to build something and show it off to your friends

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

#100
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.

Maybe for you. A lot of people use safari. Ever iPhone owner for example.
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