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Look, Another AI Browser

manuelmoreale.com

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Re: Look, Another AI Browser

#131

Post by kccqzy »

username223 wrote: post #65
bengoodger wrote: post #10

Genuinely curious - what do people want to see from a new/different rendering engine? The web is crazy complex these days because it is an entire app platform. The incentive for anyone building a browser is to use the platform that gives you the best web compat especially at the outset when you don’t have enough users of your app to be able to make big changes to the platform. Even Chrome didn’t start from scratch -…

> The web is crazy complex these days because it is an entire app platform. I'd prefer something that's not crazy complex, that's not "an entire app platform" designed and implemented by Google. Google essentially controls the W3C (Mozilla would vanish if Google stopped funding it), and controls the monopoly rendering engine. Half of websites are better without JavaScript and web fonts, and 99% are just text, images,…

> 99% are just text, images, and videos

This actually reminds me that early in the HTML5 era one of its key selling points was that you could play videos using just the element. There would not be a need for Flash, Silverlight or JS. However these days it is extremely rare to come across a site that can successfully play videos with JS turned off. Complicated JS has de facto become a requirement for videos but it doesn't have to be.

Re: Look, Another AI Browser

#132

Post by Ferret7446 »

d3Xt3r wrote: post #129
Ferret7446 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That "good" reason is thanks to Google's monopoly. Chromium is only technically opensource That accusation is instantly disproven by the fact that the parent post literally cites 4 competitors that forked and extended it. Unless you can cite Google illegally shutting down attempts to produce a competing fork, your accusation has no basis. (If you can cite such a thing, I'd rather you bring them to court instead.)

It's trivial for any Tom, Dick and Harry to fork an opensource project and "extend" it - but none have so far actually extended the engine - have they implemented any new W3C standards or fixed any compliance bugs? Have they made any improvements to the rendering engine? I'm not aware of any of the forks doing anything significant, besides just superficial UI features and preventing merging certain pieces of code (li…

More than half of the committers on Chromium aren't Google employees. I assume the reason they haven't gone off and forked it is because they have no reason to.

Re: Look, Another AI Browser

#133

Post by d3Xt3r »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #132
d3Xt3r wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's trivial for any Tom, Dick and Harry to fork an opensource project and "extend" it - but none have so far actually extended the engine - have they implemented any new W3C standards or fixed any compliance bugs? Have they made any improvements to the rendering engine? I'm not aware of any of the forks doing anything significant, besides just superficial UI features and preventing merging certain pieces of code (li…

More than half of the committers on Chromium aren't Google employees. I assume the reason they haven't gone off and forked it is because they have no reason to.

They probably haven't forked it because they know it's a futile effort to maintain and develop something as complex as Blink. Anyone who's ever worked on a large project like that knows very well it's easier to start from scratch, even if it's going to take a herculean effort.

Re: Look, Another AI Browser

#134

Post by Yizahi »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #127
d3Xt3r wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chromium is an industry wide open source project like linux for good reason That "good" reason is thanks to Google's monopoly. Chromium is only technically opensource, it's still very much a Google project that's steered by them, ocassionally trying to sneak in anti-features like Web Environment Integrity, Manifest V3 etc. > We're at an interesting point in browser development Yes but that's only because of project…

> That "good" reason is thanks to Google's monopoly. Chromium is only technically opensource That accusation is instantly disproven by the fact that the parent post literally cites 4 competitors that forked and extended it. Unless you can cite Google illegally shutting down attempts to produce a competing fork, your accusation has no basis. (If you can cite such a thing, I'd rather you bring them to court instead.)

There is letter of the law and there is spirit of the law in the legal space.

Same here - technically there are "forks" of the Chrome browser. Just like technically when I press a button on GitHub page, I've created a Doom 3 "fork". Yay, look at me, I'm the next Carmack! Behold my programming skills! Then I click another button, and now I've "forked" Servo. Now I get to be a browser creator too!

The fact is that I did no work in forking that code and as soon as real Doom 3 or Servo code changes, I would need to either accept all those changes or abandon this silly notion. Same with so called Chrome "forks". They all accept anything that Google pushes into the original Chrome, regardless of the change. Google wants some new protocol they have invented to be put in Chrome? All Chrome "forks" accept it. Google wants to limit adblocking? All Chrome clones accept it of course. And so on. Any real fundamental changes to the Chrome are pushed to all so called "forks".

So yeah, there are countless "forks" of Chrome in the letter of the word, just like I have a Doom 3 "fork" too. But there are no real forks of Chrome in the spirit of the word.

Re: Look, Another AI Browser

#135

Post by zamadatix »

labrador wrote: post #74
zamadatix wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building on top of a bunch of things works well, and is pretty much what Chromium itself is anyways. Building something "new" that is 99% the old thing so you can add your 1% is a different kind of building, and can't be lumped with the former by default. More powerful extensions is definitely the answer, just not one Google wants to allow. The main problem with this is if browser A adds feature 1 and browser B adds…

I've been very impressed by the open source Ladybird project for several years now. I wasn't up to date and didn't realize it had 8 full time engineers working on it now with project leader Andreas Kling. This is truely more promising than "slapping things on Chromium" and competing with Google Chrome. I didn't explicity state but was implying that a new plug in archeticture to the open source Chromium project might…

A "community" collaboration would run into the same problems as Chromium - the companies making these skins want the browser to be based around their product instead of having the browser be the product.

Re: Look, Another AI Browser

#136

Post by jazzyjackson »

jdiff wrote: post #70
jazzyjackson wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zen is a really nice Firefox fork. Ladybird is coming along.

Zen is an incredibly thin layer on top of Firefox, with some rather glaring performance and battery life issues. Battery life in particular was already not one of Firefox's strong suits. It looks nice, there's some interesting and useful ideas there, but Zen is ultimately "just Firefox" the same way that all of these AI browsers are "just Chromium." Ladybird's the only new kid on the block for a decade.

Didn't mean to position Zen as an alternative to Firefox, just that it adds viability to recommending a non-chromium browser cause it has nicer usability than the competition (imo, + arc was a pretty big hit before they pivoted but of course every YC start up was encouraged to use it so that might have helped with the hipness)

Re: Look, Another AI Browser

#137

Post by thyristan »

horseradish7k wrote: post #118
thyristan wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Genuinely curious - what do people want to see from a new/different rendering engine? It should be fast when rendering HTML/CSS. I don't really care about JavaScript performance, because where possible I switch it off anyways. It should be customizable and configurable, more than Firefox was before Electrolysis and certainly much more than Chrome. It should support addons that can change, override, mangle, basicall…

> I don't really care about JavaScript performance, because where possible I switch it off anyways. your needs are not the majority's and you know it

Maybe. But it was, as i've understood and answered it, a question about /my/ needs, not what my guess about the majority is.
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