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Show HN: Firefox in WebAssembly

developer.puter.com

91–100 of 134 posts

Re: Show HN: Firefox in WebAssembly

#91

Loosely related to porting the Firefox engine in unusual places: here is a project that ports Firefox's Gecko rendering engine to iOS as a sideloadable app (normally Apple only allows its own WebKit rendering engine in iOS apps): https://github.com/minh-ton/reynard-browser

Starred, very cool!

Re: Show HN: Firefox in WebAssembly

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine it is 25k tokens not dollars

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48927724 seems to say dollars? Although yes the phrasing could be clearer in the post

Well that's a lot of money. Cheap considering what that may have cost a few years ago I suppose.

Re: Show HN: Firefox in WebAssembly

#93

Loosely related to porting the Firefox engine in unusual places: here is a project that ports Firefox's Gecko rendering engine to iOS as a sideloadable app (normally Apple only allows its own WebKit rendering engine in iOS apps): https://github.com/minh-ton/reynard-browser

Indeed. This is both the best and the only actively maintained way for older versions of iOS to use modern js.

Re: Show HN: Firefox in WebAssembly

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox should really bundle ublock origin as-is. I install it afterwards anyway but I don't understand Mozilla here. They seem to want to stay behind Google.

In 2024, "search royalties" brought in approximately $585 million for Mozilla, largely from Google. It's not hard to see why they tread very lightly around ad blocking. It's actually impressive that ublock remains easy and painless to install as an extension.

Wouldn't the whole point of Google propping up competition browsers to avoid antitrust be completely undermined if Google was influencing the development of said browsers?

Re: Show HN: Firefox in WebAssembly

#96
> This is fully end to end encrypted! We use the WISP protocol for TCP-over-websockets.

Umm, that doesn't sound right. By definition, i dont think you can be end2end encrypted in a web browser, since your server controls what code is run by the web browser. Puter would fully be able to spy on you if they were so inclined because they control what wasm you load.

Re: Show HN: Firefox in WebAssembly

#97
post #48
post #23

All the network traffic from that browser is routed through a server. My IP inside that browser was in India and on CloudFlare network. I don’t particularly trust Puter. Why not route traffic through my actual browser?

>Why not route traffic through my actual browser? Because you can't. Not even an Extension is able to. Browsers don't want you to bypass their content enforcement. I wish we had at least one hacker friendly browser.

> Browsers don't want you to bypass their content enforcement

I for one am happy that browsers dont let any random web page i visit port scan my internal network.

Re: Show HN: Firefox in WebAssembly

#98

Browser sandboxing is now fully solved.

In mean... It kinda feels like this is legitimately true? An attacker trying to do anything on a user's machine through this would have to find a Firefox vulnerability and a vulnerability in the wasm runtime, which is such a high bar that I would actually feel remarkably safe running this thing. The only question is how performance works and whether there are any pain points using as a daily driver, but those feel li…

You are forgetting that this is largely edited by AI as a fun project. Finding a bug in that firefox probably is a lot easier than usual.

Re: Show HN: Firefox in WebAssembly

#99

>This port cost over 25k in opus/fable tokens for debugging and JIT research > This was just a fun experiment to push the boundaries of WebAssembly I'm a huge fan of the project, but I have to ask. If spending $25k is a "fun experiment", where exactly is your threshold for serious work?

This naturally begs the question, would a human be willing to do the same thing for $25k, and how long would that take?

I've ported complex applications (not as complex) in about a month. So I could see someone already deeply familiar with Firefox and we assembly to get something working in a month or two, which 25k covers in almost all markets.

But the fact remains that those individuals are few. Whereas any schmuck can get Claude to do it (no offense to OP) so at this point I don't even think the money argument is worth discussing even it comes to LLM. For the majority of people a LLM is the difference between being able to do something or not being able to do it.

Re: Show HN: Firefox in WebAssembly

#100

>This port cost over 25k in opus/fable tokens for debugging and JIT research > This was just a fun experiment to push the boundaries of WebAssembly I'm a huge fan of the project, but I have to ask. If spending $25k is a "fun experiment", where exactly is your threshold for serious work?

Research is when you don't know if it's serious work or fun experiment beforehand.
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