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

161–170 of 303 posts

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

#161

Post by WirelessGigabit »

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…

I don't think wasm can do sockets. So for now we're safe from this dystopian future.

For now.

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

#162

Post by matheusmoreira »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #160
matheusmoreira wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

> it will mean the end of high-quality free services

So be it. If those services can't survive without ads and surveillance capitalism, they don't deserve to exist.

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

#164

Post by snoman »

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 believe (but do not know) that ad networks already do some of that.

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

#165

Post by toast0 »

chii wrote: post #140
bhaney wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ad companies would get approximately every website in the world to use this technique I really doubt it, but if that did happen then I could simplify my filter list to just a single wildcard. Silver lining.

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…

When ecommerce becomes unweildy enough, I'll just go to walmart in person. I can pay my credit card bills by mail.

I'd be ok losing youtube. There's some good content there, but there's so much garbage and I can only hear people begging me to like and subscribe so many times. I've got more dvds and blu-rays than I can watch, and there's so many at good will too.

All I get in gmail is transactional mail for other people. It would be no loss. My personal email is at fastmail, and I'd expect them not to participate in the browser in browser thing, but if they do... That's fine. Email isn't that important anymore. What am I going to miss? If you want to contact me, send me a letter or call me or text me or ... ?

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

#166

Post by akoboldfrying »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #162
akoboldfrying wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

> it will mean the end of high-quality free services So be it. If those services can't survive without ads and surveillance capitalism, they don't deserve to exist.

I guess we disagree on whether advertising goods and services to people should be considered a crime.

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

#167

Post by josephg »

tentacleuno wrote: post #137
josephg wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully, the biggest ad company - Google - would hate it because it would dramatically reduce page performance. And webpage performance apparently has a big impact on ad clickthrough rates.

Couldn't they just optimize Chromium to work (faster for APIs they require, etc.) around performance problems?

If chromium can write special case detection & optimizations for this javascript code, ad blockers can probably do the same.

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

#168

Post by toast0 »

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.

I mean, I wrote an IRC client in mIRC script... It was fun (and not very usable)

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

#169

Post by ksherlock »

kube-system wrote: post #14
_Algernon_ wrote: post #6

The inevitable question then: Can you run this browser engine within itself, and if so, how many layers deep can you get before the universe implodes?

> https://shadow.goose.icu/?https://shadow.goose.icu > Fatal error Not quite!

It's indistinguishable from Netscape running on MacOS 8.

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

#170

Post by jraph »

Beijinger wrote: post #63
jraph wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get it. Uzbl is a webkit-based browser. Can you expand on this? It's not like one of those browser engines that are promising but not quite there yet, like NetSurf, Servo or Ladybird.

"The core component of Uzbl is written in C, but other languages are also used, most notably Python." Man, this thing was small and fast

This was by virtue of WebKit itself being (relatively) small and fast. I don't know what they call "the core component", it is quite misleading.

I used the last version of Uzbl in an old Debian container to debug a game I made specifically supporting the iPad 2, which is quite resource constrained, because Uzbl was based on a similar version of WebKit. WebKit somehow had to fit the iPad 2 and still be quite fast, so Uzbl, which is very bare-bones, felt very fast indeed on a decent computer.

I was looking at similar browsers, apparently epiphany (Gnome Web) is the only remaining open source browser based on WebkitGTK+ that's still maintained. Last version of Surf was released in 2021, Midori is actually a Gecko browser which I need to check out [1]. I guess someone could contribute and update Surf or Uzbl or fork the old Midori.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38047006

Post reply on HN