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Shadow: New browser engine made almost entirely in JavaScript

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Re: Shadow: New browser engine made almost entirely in JavaScript

#111

Post by danielheath »

autoexec wrote: post #91
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The next step in the arms race is to provide hosted ad blocking, where the action happens (however nested) in a headless server and an AI looks it over and relays only the stuff that looks like content into a cleaned up session for the user. It would eventually start looking like a CDN where the ad blocker caches the content so it doesn't have to bother contacting the underlying site so often. I would pay for such a…

I wouldn't, because sending all of your browsing history to any third party is going to result in them mining and selling it, or exposing it to state actors or someone else for direct surveillance/malware injection. Eventually, AI will be something we can run locally on a typical desktop, or even a cell phone, and at that point we could locally host that kind of ad blocking, but trusting all of your traffic to some r…

I’ve been interested in a desktop AI ad blocker for awhile, but it doesn’t solve the issue of malware being distributed via ad networks, or the performance impact of all that extra js and network traffic.

Re: Shadow: New browser engine made almost entirely in JavaScript

#112

Post by mananaysiempre »

Terr_ wrote: post #66
quelsolaar wrote: post #50

When desktop applications running in electron, just doesnt have enough web abstraction to keep up with mores law, a hero comes along, to ensure there can always be one more level of java script between you and a responsive UI.

Speaking of Electron... when I start my Slack client for work, there are a series of processes where at least one reports 1.130 terabytes of virtual memory. (Shown in top as "VIRT".) Now, maybe that's just a potential usage that trust-me-bro it'll never actually try to use or access in RAM or on disk... but how on earth is that number for a chat client so much bigger than either Firefox with 100+ tabs or even Java-ba…

Sounds like somebody is playing tricks with virtual addressing, yeah. See BIBOP (1980) [1] for an example, though it is not used literally in current garbage collectors as far as I am aware. Or look at what AddressSanitizer does with its nominal terabytes of “shadow memory”[2]. Chrome has a bewildering variety of low-level stuff in it, to save memory among other things[3], so it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to learn there was virtual-memory tagging somewhere in there, too.

[1] https://foldoc.org/Big+bag+of+pages

[2] https://github.com/google/sanitizers/wiki/AddressSanitizerAl...

[3] https://v8.dev/blog/oilpan-pointer-compression

Re: Shadow: New browser engine made almost entirely in JavaScript

#114

Post by jjtheblunt »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #30

There's a product here that's been waiting to happen for awhile. I've been anticipating somebody cross-compiling another browser engine to WASM but this works, too. Deliver your site only to the "inner browser" (that the user has no control over because it's heavily obfuscated and tricked-out with anti-debugging code) and you eliminate all ad blockers. Throw some DNS-over-HTTPS w/ certificate pinning in for good meas…

It sounds really slow?

Re: Shadow: New browser engine made almost entirely in JavaScript

#115

Post by moffkalast »

DarkNova6 wrote: post #2

This guy knows his audience well. He answers the question of "but why?" in the first sentence: > So I started making a browser engine (for fun) a few days ago, it felt kind of inevitable so here we are And I got to admit, it is pretty neat.

This all reminds me of that description of the gigantic rover wheel from KSP:

> The RoveMax Model 3 was developed in total secrecy by Kerbal Motion's R&D team over the course of a year and a half. When it was finally revealed to the company's chairman, he stared in shock, screamed 'WHY', and subsequently dropped dead on the spot.

The reaction is about the same, anyway.

Re: Shadow: New browser engine made almost entirely in JavaScript

#118

Post by doublerabbit »

I_Am_Nous wrote: post #99
basch wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pre-render the whole site to a server side canvas and then redraw it.

iFrame 2.0

Not sure why the downvotes. iFrames does need a revolution.

iFrame, yet how clunky, ghastly to work with; is what driving the web. Gmail, Facebook all use them in their apps.

It's a feature that if deprecated would cause a broken World Wide Web; as if it isn't broken already... One could say.

Re: Shadow: New browser engine made almost entirely in JavaScript

#119

Post by simondotau »

simondotau wrote: post #76
leblancfg wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think GP meant "the minority browser we bend our logic for, in order to accommodate"

> "the minority browser we bend our logic for, in order to accommodate" The web is dead. All hail the Chrome Platform, where the official definition of correct behaviour is “whatever Chrome does.” How dare Apple force web developers to target more than one browser engine. Interoperability and platform agnosticism is for losers.

Oh and before anyone says anything, I'm a staunch Firefox user and have been continuously since its first release. And in the last few years I'm starting to see a marked growth in sites which don't work in Firefox, usually because of something like a bug in their Content Security Policy which Firefox correctly rejects and Chrome doesn't.

It's becoming increasingly clear that the vast majority of web developers are now exclusively using Chrome and resent the idea of testing elsewhere.

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