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I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser

adayinthelifeof.nl

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Re: I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser

#121

Post by opless »

jongjong wrote: post #120
jaytaph wrote: post #59

OP here. Thanks for the pos/neg/neutral comments everybody. Some remarks: Yes, there are a lot of browsers out there where I can contribute to which would be more efficient. But that would result in just a few browsers instead of a lot of browsers. I'm all for the last one, as this would give people options. This IS a pet project. I never told anyone otherwise. I would start writing it even when I wasn't fed up with…

This is great. Would you be interested to add support for a custom blockchain-based DNS instead of the current centralized hierarchical mess? I've been thinking about this a lot and it's clear that a multi-blockchain-based solution would be perfect for this (and far simpler than the current system). Each blockchain could have its own top level domain. People would buy domains using the blockchain's own tokens on the…

Blockchain is a solution looking for a problem. DNS isn't it.

Sorry

Re: I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser

#122

Post by trollied »

jongjong wrote: post #120
jaytaph wrote: post #59

OP here. Thanks for the pos/neg/neutral comments everybody. Some remarks: Yes, there are a lot of browsers out there where I can contribute to which would be more efficient. But that would result in just a few browsers instead of a lot of browsers. I'm all for the last one, as this would give people options. This IS a pet project. I never told anyone otherwise. I would start writing it even when I wasn't fed up with…

This is great. Would you be interested to add support for a custom blockchain-based DNS instead of the current centralized hierarchical mess? I've been thinking about this a lot and it's clear that a multi-blockchain-based solution would be perfect for this (and far simpler than the current system). Each blockchain could have its own top level domain. People would buy domains using the blockchain's own tokens on the…

> Blockchains are great for this use case as they are infinitely scalable in terms of reads (since you can always add more nodes which are essentially replicas).

Oh, right. Maybe they should modify the current DNS setup to allow for more than 1 node.

Re: I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser

#123

Post by koprulusector »

jaytaph wrote: post #59

OP here. Thanks for the pos/neg/neutral comments everybody. Some remarks: Yes, there are a lot of browsers out there where I can contribute to which would be more efficient. But that would result in just a few browsers instead of a lot of browsers. I'm all for the last one, as this would give people options. This IS a pet project. I never told anyone otherwise. I would start writing it even when I wasn't fed up with…

I just want to thank you for sharing your politics views. These are the same ideas and views, as an American, that I’m struggling with. It helps so much to know other people in other parts of the world are going through the same thing and have the same thoughts and ideas.

Re: I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser

#124

Post by jefc1111 »

jaytaph wrote: post #59

OP here. Thanks for the pos/neg/neutral comments everybody. Some remarks: Yes, there are a lot of browsers out there where I can contribute to which would be more efficient. But that would result in just a few browsers instead of a lot of browsers. I'm all for the last one, as this would give people options. This IS a pet project. I never told anyone otherwise. I would start writing it even when I wasn't fed up with…

This is an inspiring attitude. I used to be stuck in a rut of "there's no point starting to build / learn a thing because there will almost certainly never be a result of substance". After a while I realised that every unfinished thing results in learning, which is applied in the future, etc etc. What truly got me out of the rut was the realisation I was not only not finishing anything, I was not _doing_ anything. And one sure fire way to never finish anything is to never start anything. The corporate world is results-orientated, which is fair enough. Doesn't have to be that way all the time though - it's fun to be playful with technology.

Re: I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser

#125

Post by manicennui »

Sakos wrote: post #106
ilaksh wrote: post #24

"Writing a browser" (from scratch) at this point basically means you are implementing a type of portable operating-system-in-a-box (the web platform) and that it will be compatible with whatever Google decides to add to theirs. The browser is so comprehensive in functionality and APIs, and such a challenge to keep up with Google's constant churn of new features and total dominance, that not even Microsoft could do it…

Am I wrong in thinking the only thing we're missing for a rich ecosystem of browsers is a modular, independent Javascript runtime/interpreter similar to Java? Java has a bunch of JVMs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines Maybe we need Mozilla (and others) to make an independent Javascript "VM" that everybody can use.

There are many:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ECMAScript_engines

Mozilla's:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpiderMonkey

Re: I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser

#126

Post by gus_massa »

> I do like to follow tech news, and for me, this is done 98% through Ycombinator’s hacker news. But I started to get the same feeling I had ten years ago: it’s all negative. Companies are pushing unwanted updates, [...]

My recommendation is to go to https://news.ycombinator.com/newest and try to find personal projects and other interesting post that need an upvote, and perhaps make some comments to the author. I like more the discussion when there are 10 comment than 100 comments.

Re: I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser

#127

Post by jsnell »

I guess what I'm confused by here is that the author seemed to recognize that news is inherently biased to be negative, that negative (general) news was never actually important or actionable to them, and that getting that news was just bad for them overall.

Then he got annoyed at tech news being bad, and came to the opposite conclusion. That all the negative tech news must be correct, and that they have the agency to change it.

But the reality is the opposite. Just like for general news, tech newd has a bias for the negative, and the reality is a lot better than you'd think if you just take the HN frontpage at face value.

The scenarios that motivate the author are so improbable that they border on absurd. And if they were to happen, the plan of writing your own browser wouldn't help anyway, or at least would not be anywhere near the best way of addressing it.

Want to write your own browser as a hobby? Great, go for it! But the justification isn't even internally confident.

Re: I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser

#128

Post by lr4444lr »

jaytaph wrote: post #59

OP here. Thanks for the pos/neg/neutral comments everybody. Some remarks: Yes, there are a lot of browsers out there where I can contribute to which would be more efficient. But that would result in just a few browsers instead of a lot of browsers. I'm all for the last one, as this would give people options. This IS a pet project. I never told anyone otherwise. I would start writing it even when I wasn't fed up with…

Ignore the naysayers, and keep posting back when you have major updates. Also keep in mind that it doesn't have to be full featured to be incredibly usable and useful. Would love to have a minimalist browser that can run HTML/CSS/JS, keep cookies/localStorage, and that's about it. Maybe an anonymous browsing mode.

I am rooting for you!

Re: I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser

#129

Post by jiggawatts »

speps wrote: post #20

If Rust is a must, surely contributing to Servo[1] and learning by sending small PRs to start with would be more beneficial. However, I do understand as I've done this kind of "from scratch" project before just because I thought I could do it better or because I couldn't get into reading the existing codebase easily. To each their own... [1] https://github.com/servo/servo

Rust and Servo started out together, which means Servo had a lot of pre-1.0-Rust code written, affecting its style in some less than ideal ways.

Similarly, Servo was designed to replace parts of the Firefox browser, which means that it had to be made to fit into "Gecko shaped" hole. For example, it uses UTF-16 strings in many places for compatibility with the rest of Firefox.

Servo could probably be rewritten now using modern Rust to be smaller, leaner, and maybe even faster.

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