Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Shadow: New browser engine made almost entirely in JavaScript

goose.icu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 303 posts

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

#151

Post by matheusmoreira »

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…

Hopefully that will be literally illegal due to accessibility concerns.

Doesn't matter either way. Can't wait for AI-powered ad blocking. Just imagine it. AI parses content and filters out ads, brands, even subtle PR text from pages automatically. Not just textual content either. It also kills ads in audio, video, images.

If I can imagine it, it must be possible. I'm sure someone much smarter than me will create this at some point. Perhaps this comment will inspire that person.

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

#152

Post by streakfix »

CitrusFruits wrote: post #128
bobajeff wrote: post #60

I think it's pretty cool. Maybe browsers are the kind of thing that should be written in s high level language like js. Except for the JavaScript engine of course.

Alot of the UI in browsers is actually written in HTML/CSS/JS.

Yes and that component of Firefox is called chrome. It was named before Google Chrome was created.

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

#154

Post by canadahonk »

tedunangst wrote: post #33
jameslk wrote: post #15

There’s something really beautiful about creating a browser that can run in a browser. We can finally steamroll a lot of those cross browser incompatibilities by replacing the host browser engine entirely. It’s like the nuclear option to fight against the new IE (Safari)

What features does shadow implement that are missing from safari?

CSS light-dark() function heh ;)

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

#155

Post by matheusmoreira »

postalrat wrote: post #133
mjfl wrote: post #117

Why do people love JavaScript and want everything written in it?

Because it's a great language that many people use every day.

I actually agree with that. Javascript has a good heart. Just wish they'd stop trying to add classes to the language.

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

#156

Post by I_Am_Nous »

doublerabbit wrote: post #118
I_Am_Nous wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reaching into my pessimistic, dark side - if we transition to most processing being done in the cloud, such that we eventually give up powerful devices for simpler cloud AI terminals in general, I could see the concept of the "client" side also living in the cloud, similar to cloud gaming. In that case, the internet would be more like cable where you just accept the commercials because you can also watch ninja turtles in between them.

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

#157

Post by minitech »

autoexec wrote: post #96
ta8645 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was worried from the very start of the WASM tech, that it would lead to the end of the user-controlled client. You don't even really need an embedded browser, a motivated provider could create a completely proprietary protocol for rendering their pages.

Taking power away from the user seems to be a large part of the appeal of WASM. Wasn't it just a year or two ago that it was being reported that 75% of WASM modules are malicious? A study from a previous year had said 50% of all websites using it were malicious so the trend line isn't looking great. I don't know how we got from "don't download and install random software from untrusted sources on your devices" to "le…

It has exactly the same potential in the control and code-running respects as (minified) JavaScript. It’s overrepresented in malware because it’s faster, i.e. better for cryptominers. (Many sandbox breaches come from JavaScript’s complexity.)

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

#158

Post by aldanor »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #146
chii wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and stop participating in online society? Are you going to stop buying from ecommerce sites, viewing youtube, and reading your gmail? I think it's an inevitable future tbh. The users have lost - they just dont know it yet. Google's WEI [1] is their first foray into this, and i dont doubt there will be future iterations they try to push through. The browser-in-browser is but one alternative idea. [1] https://en.wikipe…

> and stop participating in online society? Sure. This site is one of very few sites I can bear to visit. I come here for the comments, I don't even open the links anymore, I just assume people will quote anything important. When I made my own website, I deliberately set out to avoid as many of these obnoxious dark patterns as humanly possible. The result was basically a marginally improved motherfucking website and…

Ha, I'm not the only one. Barely ever visit the links unless that's something I'm actually personally interested in, by coincidence. Mostly come here for the comments.

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

#159

Post by Arch485 »

monomere wrote: post #17
Aardwolf wrote: post #11

First of all, very neat! Text selection doesn't work. I guess it's rendered to canvas... but would there be any way to make this work?

you would need to implement it manually, as with all the other features (shouldn't super complicated)

> (shouldn't be super complicated)

Famous last words

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

#160

Post by akoboldfrying »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #151
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…

Hopefully that will be literally illegal due to accessibility concerns. Doesn't matter either way. Can't wait for AI-powered ad blocking. Just imagine it. AI parses content and filters out ads, brands, even subtle PR text from pages automatically. Not just textual content either. It also kills ads in audio, video, images. If I can imagine it, it must be possible. I'm sure someone much smarter than me will create this…

If AI-powered ad blocking becomes ubiquitous, it will mean the end of high-quality free services like Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Translate and YouTube, for all of which I much prefer to pay with my attention rather than cold, hard cash.

I have no doubt that current AI is capable of this (in fact I'm sure it would be trivial for GPT-3.5 and well within reach of even locally-run LLMs), the question is what fraction of users can be bothered -- and I don't see any reason why AI would lead to an increase there.

Post reply on HN