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We're building a browser when it's supposed to be impossible

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Re: We're building a browser when it's supposed to be impossible

#191

Post by ilyt »

mcbits wrote: post #163
ilyt wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but Wine is a tool where if 90% of the stuff user wants to run in it works, it's still great. Say if you use it for gaming you can play most of the games and only boot into windows every few months once you hit one you can't. But that's not how you use web. If 90% of the pages worked in browser I wouldn't use that browser, ever, because chances are I'd hit one that didn't at least once every few days.

It depends on the types of bugs and inconsistencies that show up in practice. If a page (or worse, the whole browser) crashes, that's a problem. If a column of ads doesn't scale right and gets bumped down to become its own lonely row below the main content, that's kind of ugly but almost a feature.

I've seen pages where buttons outright not worked. In firefox.

Re: We're building a browser when it's supposed to be impossible

#192

Post by spookie »

ilyt wrote: post #156
actionfromafar wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on if your actual goal was getting twitter to work. If Twitter rendered fine, chances are some other site render fine today. The same it was with Wine.

Sure but Wine is a tool where if 90% of the stuff user wants to run in it works, it's still great. Say if you use it for gaming you can play most of the games and only boot into windows every few months once you hit one you can't. But that's not how you use web. If 90% of the pages worked in browser I wouldn't use that browser, ever, because chances are I'd hit one that didn't at least once every few days.

I come across a variety of sites that show unusual behaviour every day. And as others pointed out, the page is mostly degraded, not unusable.

There are many grievances when using the web today, some are down to the lack of a set CSS spec. Others due to the complete and utter disregard for browser compatibility. I'm not going to tackle the monopoly of Chrome as a browser. However, there are a number of specific uses of this collection of ever changing specs and implementations that eventually lead to page-breakage in every new browser release.

The web is complex to tackle because everyone seems to think that they've a better idea of what a page is. Some of it is fair, some of it unfair. Nevertheless I would take this approach any day.

Re: We're building a browser when it's supposed to be impossible

#193

Post by hanselot »

illiarian wrote: post #159
chrismorgan wrote: post #135

Since “The reckless, infinite scope of web browsers” is depicted at the start of the article, I think it’s worth pointing out that its claim of W3C having 1,217 specs totalling 114 million words is wildly wrong, probably by 2–3 orders of magnitude in the total. The considerable majority of the documents considered were not specs or not web-relevant, and dozens of versions of the same thing were often counted. Source:…

Worth noting the discussion at the link. Given that he omitted huge specs like WebGL etc. I wouldn't say it's wildly wrong. But I'd love to somehow arrive at a better estimate.

Given that someone that needs to develop a browser probably needs to hunt and peck through all that trash to find the relevant bits of information, is it not actually more damning that such a vast quantity of irrelevant cruft exists?

Is this not the corporate equivalent of creating a walled garden (perhaps not the right phrase here, gastric moat sounds more apt), by exhausting the resources of all that should choose to attempt to scale this mountain of junk?

That being said, I can't make any suggestions as to how you could shortcut through that other than just having decades of experience in the field.

Re: We're building a browser when it's supposed to be impossible

#194

Post by illiarian »

chrismorgan wrote: post #176
illiarian wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth noting the discussion at the link. Given that he omitted huge specs like WebGL etc. I wouldn't say it's wildly wrong. But I'd love to somehow arrive at a better estimate.

I believe it’s still wildly wrong. Had arp242 not spoken up at that time, I’d have been saying something similar, because the numbers were to me blindingly obviously extremely unrealistic. The entire HTML Standard (which is somewhat of a misnomer now, it covers much more than just HTML, quite a bit of CSS interactions, other web platform functionality, JavaScript APIs, and the likes) is now about half a million words…

> and I suspect it’s bigger than everything else put together, apart from ECMAScript

The thing is, it's not just the HTML standard. It's also all the standards it references. And all the standards they reference, and all the standards those standards reference, ad infinitum.

For example, HTML 5 references SVG 2 which references CSS 2 which references Unicode and XML 11. Or, to go the same route, HTML 5 references SVG 2 which references CSS 2 which references CC.1:2004-10 (Profile version 4.2.0.0) Image technology colour management which references (normative) ISO/IEC 646:1991, Information technology — ISO 7-bit coded character set for information interchange, IEC 61966-2-1 (1999-10), Multimedia systems and equipment — Colour measurement and management — Part 2-1: Colour management — Default RGB colour space — sRGB and TIFF 6.0 Specification, Adobe Systems Incorporated among other things.

Yes, some of those overlap (as many standards will reference many the same standards), but the number of those standards is definitely non-trivial. Some of them you can probably pull in as system libraries or external libraries. The question is, how many?

Edit: and some of them are definitely not relevant to the web, but how would you know until you read through the spec that references it, and through the referenced spec to find and understand the relevant bits?

Re: We're building a browser when it's supposed to be impossible

#196

Post by ClawsOnPaws »

chrismorgan wrote: post #153
tzekid wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do mostly Python on my dayjob, but for low-level side-projects I've gotta say C++ with the C++17 or C++20 standard it's way faster to iterate with than say Rust or even something like Zig. For me iteration speed's a big selling point that (plus the fact that's easier to find contributors) might also be important for projects like these.

I’m puzzled by your comment. I am expert in Rust for almost a decade, but only mildly conversant in C++, and have no interest in actively learning more C++. Rust seems to me far easier to learn and get going in due in major part to its incontrovertibly superior standard tooling. I can’t see any place for any meaningful difference in iteration speed between the two, save that you may well have to iterate more in C++ d…

I have a hard time deciding where in this thread to drop this link, but maybe here is a good spot. Andreas has a video about this topic, and I believe it's this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAZvTFoSIFU

Re: We're building a browser when it's supposed to be impossible

#197

Post by illiarian »

arp242 wrote: post #189
illiarian wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth noting the discussion at the link. Given that he omitted huge specs like WebGL etc. I wouldn't say it's wildly wrong. But I'd love to somehow arrive at a better estimate.

The question is what exactly is needed for a useful and functional browser. You certainly don't need all features from Chrome, but you do need more than, say, Lynx or Dillo. Is WebGL needed? I've browsed the web for years with it disabled and have not suffered any inconvenience. I'd probably say it's not needed, but I'm a bit on the fence about it and can understand if people would disagree. All browsers implement XS…

> I think most of the complexity stem not just from the word count, but rather that everything interacts with everything else.

That is definitely the main issue.

And you're completely correct on the needed/non-needed/subjective front. Many of the standards reference (in a recursive manner) a lot of other standards. A listed some here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35524018 As an outsider it's impossible to know whether TIFF spec or ISO 7-bit coded character set for information interchange are relevant, an need to be studied, or are there just because they define some minor values referenced in some more higher-level spec.

Re: We're building a browser when it's supposed to be impossible

#198

Post by UncleEntity »

swexbe wrote: post #37
tester756 wrote: post #4

I'm finding it weird that unlike other non-trivial projects like OSes or compilers, people often discourage building web browser engine because it is "hard" or something like that like... how is it different from building a compiler? You gotta build HTML parser, CSS parser, figure out a fancy structure to represent those concepts and modify at fly. Also there's difference between making it work and making state of th…

Most new compilers build on LLVM/GCC, no?

Most new languages maybe.

Most new compilers are somebody’s hobby project that will never see the light of day, I have like four of them in various states of unfinishedness.

Re: We're building a browser when it's supposed to be impossible

#199

Post by illiarian »

cxr wrote: post #175
illiarian wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth noting the discussion at the link. Given that he omitted huge specs like WebGL etc. I wouldn't say it's wildly wrong. But I'd love to somehow arrive at a better estimate.

It's not hard. Start with the WHATWG's spec, then incorporate the other specs it references using a reasonable heuristic to determine if a given item should be included or not. If you don't think the estimate from Reckless, Infinite Scope is wildly off, then you either didn't read the methodology and do a spot-check of the dataset, or you really don't understand the scope of what gets published by W3C and how little…

It may not be possible to come up with a "reasonable heuristic": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35524018

Re: We're building a browser when it's supposed to be impossible

#200

Post by bogwog »

GaggiX wrote: post #112
eastbound wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought unsafe language were a no-go in the context of extremely vulnerable pieces of software like the web?

The biggest problem IMO with using C++ when I tried the browser is that it crash, it crash a lot and I would imagine they are segmentation fault.

Can you recommend a language that doesn't crash?
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