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Kristall – a browser without support for CSS/JS/WASM or graphical websites

kristall.random-projects.net

131–140 of 198 posts

Re: Kristall – a browser without support for CSS/JS/WASM or graphical websites

#131
post #91

I'm a fan of Lynx. React and angular have destroyed the semantic web.

React and angular are definitely the wrong tools for the job if one is trying to make a semantically-parseable page. They're tools for human interaction, not machine interaction. It turns out humans care about things that HTML and CSS alone weren't sufficient to account for (like delaying streaming of data until it's actually needed, saving on bandwidth, which humans have to pay for).

Re: Kristall – a browser without support for CSS/JS/WASM or graphical websites

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're "selling" a TV as a TV when the world has switched to using full-blown mind-control shopping malls as TVs.

IMO the better comparison is selling a 9” black and white TV with only an OTA antenna as input as a TV in 2023: technically correct, wildly out of whack with customer expectations.

It's a project that offers support via IRC, the average internet customer/consumer is not the target user base.

Re: Kristall – a browser without support for CSS/JS/WASM or graphical websites

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He means sell as in persuade people to use

Which they're also not trying to do. It's just a cool project, shared for those that want to use it.

Exactly this, someone shared a project they thought was cool and that they thought others might find cool as well.

The hostility displayed towards an open source project in this submission is completely excessive just because it doesn't meet the requirements of many/most users. I'd feel awful if I were the creator of it and read the comments here, which are being extremely harsh about what is otherwise a very nice little project.

Personally I find it very useful, but I'm the type of person who would.

Re: Kristall – a browser without support for CSS/JS/WASM or graphical websites

#135
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing about HTML/CSS/JS that prevents simplicity. It is purely how it has been used and abused. You can also disable JS and use user agent stylesheets in any modern web browser.

> There is nothing about HTML/CSS/JS that prevents simplicity You're right, there isn't yet here we are. Where I need to download and run a React program every time I want to read an article.

It would be great if React could be built directly into browsers, but it would greatly curtail the current flexibility of server-vended React. The project is able to evolve quite quickly unshackled from a w3c process and the pulse of major browser updates.

(IIUC, there was a proposal in Firefox decades ago to make the engine into several flexible modules and a page could declare which modules it depended upon, then the browser would either cache them and use them for multiple sites or already have them builtin. You'd get the best of both worlds: rich and expressive pages without the frequently-paid cost of poly-filling the gap between how the developer wants the render engine to work and the actual implementation of the render engine.

Sadly, I suspect the actual complexity to implement would have made for a worse overall situation than what we have now).

Re: Kristall – a browser without support for CSS/JS/WASM or graphical websites

#136
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Opening a browser and going immediately to a search engine" is how most users use the Internet (proxy statistic; google.com is the most visited web page by a country mile, followed immediately by YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter). A browser that doesn't work with the most popular web pages is not a "browser" for practical purposes of most people. ... which is fine, but I suspect the headline is throwing readers here o…

It's not a browser for "most users", and with your logic there are just two "computers" Apple and Windows. I also have a File-browser on my system and it has nothing todo with html or google. >they're equating "browser" to "web browser" Yes they also also say Cloud = Google-Drive, do you really want to go that route?

Well, Apple, Windows, and various GNU/Linux distros (as they can also run Chrome and Firefox, i.e. two of the most popular apps, plug in a mouse and keyboard, do 99% of the "computer stuff," so they're fine). Chromebook is probably on the fence since you really have to beat it with a hammer to run Excel on it (depending on how you turn your head and squint, that's maybe true for Linux also, but you can get Excel running on there if you really shoulder into getting your compatibility layers working).

... but nobody considers the Arduino a "computer" in the same sense they consider a Raspberry Pi a "computer" because it can't run general-purpose apps.

Re: Kristall – a browser without support for CSS/JS/WASM or graphical websites

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Restricted functionality is a security benefit - could be interesting in some scenarios... Not mentioned by the project's presentation, but there has to be an audience there.

> Restricted functionality is a security benefit This is a common trope I hear but I'm not sure it's true any longer. One of the reasons Google login requires JavaScript to be enabled is to fix flaws in non-JS HTML that allow for hijacking passwords. It's why they took a much harder line on simple auth a few years back; too many instances of people being tricked into handing their Gmail account to scammers.

Webdevs are aware of flaws in their browser so that they have to hack up a bunch of javascript in order to safely login instead of cooperating with the browser developers, which are their employees.

On the other side chromium devs need to develop quirks/hacks for specific sites in order to support their bloated javascript hacks (:

I find it bizzare.

Re: Kristall – a browser without support for CSS/JS/WASM or graphical websites

#138
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a browser for "most users", and with your logic there are just two "computers" Apple and Windows. I also have a File-browser on my system and it has nothing todo with html or google. >they're equating "browser" to "web browser" Yes they also also say Cloud = Google-Drive, do you really want to go that route?

Well, Apple, Windows, and various GNU/Linux distros (as they can also run Chrome and Firefox, i.e. two of the most popular apps, plug in a mouse and keyboard, do 99% of the "computer stuff," so they're fine). Chromebook is probably on the fence since you really have to beat it with a hammer to run Excel on it (depending on how you turn your head and squint, that's maybe true for Linux also, but you can get Excel runn…

Yeah let's stop here, you say people think Linux can run "general-purpose apps" but a raspi cant. Just stop try to prove your right...by moving the goalposts.

Arduino is a Micro-controller, Raspberrypi is a SBC -> Single board computer.

>>and user community that designs and manufactures single-board microcontrollers

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

>>Raspberry Pi (/paɪ/) is a series of small single-board computers (SBCs)

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

And no, don't start with your "but normal people blabla"...because "normal" people go to wikipedia to learn something ;)

Re: Kristall – a browser without support for CSS/JS/WASM or graphical websites

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Restricted functionality is a security benefit This is a common trope I hear but I'm not sure it's true any longer. One of the reasons Google login requires JavaScript to be enabled is to fix flaws in non-JS HTML that allow for hijacking passwords. It's why they took a much harder line on simple auth a few years back; too many instances of people being tricked into handing their Gmail account to scammers.

Webdevs are aware of flaws in their browser so that they have to hack up a bunch of javascript in order to safely login instead of cooperating with the browser developers, which are their employees. On the other side chromium devs need to develop quirks/hacks for specific sites in order to support their bloated javascript hacks (: I find it bizzare.

It's not flaws in the browser; it's flaws in the design of HTML and CSS (i.e. "Oops nobody realized that a real right bastard could bend the static rendering tools to make this happen; well that's a problem"). I'm having difficulty sourcing the details right now, unfortunately; I believe the issue was that non-JavaScript HTML combined with CSS lets you frame-in the target site's login page but situated in such a way that the user thinks they're doing something else, and their clicks and keyboard input go into another page's content / security domain. Breaking this attack requires the framed-in site to be able to use JavaScript to detect that they were framed-in and break out.

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

It's one of those situations where "This was mis-designed with insufficient eye towards how right bastards could use it, but the cat is out of the bag. We can't change the spec because it'll break legitimate uses of this technology, so this is the best option we have." Similar to how images were naively scoped to be embeddable from any web domain and then people invented pixel bugs, but you can't change the security model around image loading without breaking vast swathes of the existing web.

Re: Kristall – a browser without support for CSS/JS/WASM or graphical websites

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Restricted functionality is a security benefit - could be interesting in some scenarios... Not mentioned by the project's presentation, but there has to be an audience there.

> Restricted functionality is a security benefit This is a common trope I hear but I'm not sure it's true any longer. One of the reasons Google login requires JavaScript to be enabled is to fix flaws in non-JS HTML that allow for hijacking passwords. It's why they took a much harder line on simple auth a few years back; too many instances of people being tricked into handing their Gmail account to scammers.

What flaws allow sites to hijack passwords if pages aren't programmable? Are you talking about phishing, and how would js help?

My mental model here is that the browser's password manager autofills a password that the user doesn't even know, and without scripting or dynamic resources, it's not possible to exfiltrate that data automatically. Without styling, form buttons would have a standard look so it's harder to trick the user into submitting something without knowing (c.f. the recently posted fake captcha that tricks users into revealing the visited state of links).

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