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Shadow: New browser engine made almost entirely in JavaScript

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

#211

Post by superdug »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #205
superdug wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Therein lies the rub (or more precisely the problem) advertising at its core does _NOT_ have to be evil. Taking into account that the onus of every advertisement is to entice you to do something that you may have otherwise not considered we still do not negate the need for an advertisement to be evil. Now, you may very well be enticed to do something that is not in absolutely everyone’s best interests in mind, which…

> Therein lies the rub (or more precisely the problem) advertising at its core does _NOT_ have to be evil. Interestingly, I agree that it doesn't have to be evil, but in practice it is , so close to 100% of the time that the exceptions are actually not worth discussing.

That’s not an invalid personal opinion but does not make it true for absolutely everyone else at the same time.

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

#212

Post by matheusmoreira »

superdug wrote: post #210
matheusmoreira wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what your point is but I'll respond to this: > advertising at its core does _NOT_ have to be evil Advertising has inherent and irreconciliable conflicts of interest that make it worthless to any rational person. They're trying to sell you stuff, it's literally guaranteed that they will be overstating the pros and downplaying the cons. When you want to make an informed decision, the last person you want t…

But again, why is selling stuff abhorred by you as an absolute. A transaction which is facilitated by money is the key component to guaranteed assertion that a single valued skill can be exercised for any good or service at any time so long as everyone agrees that the compensation is fair and reasonable by all concerned parties. It’s one of fundamental components of an interdependent system that furthers the entire r…

I have no problem with buying and selling stuff or with transacting in general. I have a problem trusting sellers. I refuse to take them at their word. I do not want to hear what they have to say at all. I want to decide what I want to buy based on completely independent factors and then, after I have decided, come to the seller to finalize the purchase. I do not want or need advertising, I need its antithesis: quality, trustworthy information.

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

#213

Post by seanhunter »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #191
matheusmoreira wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

An argument I read that has merit is that ad supported services does democratize the web for developing countries. If for example youtube with all of its information or even Google search required a subscription, suddenly a lot of people who make significantly less than the average for the developed world would no longer be able to access those resources. I still hate the ad surveillance everywhere, but it was a poin…

> An argument I read that has merit is that ad supported services does democratize the web for developing countries.

You know who has seeded that argument into the public domain? PR agencies working for the advertising industry. It doesn't have any merit whatsoever. People in developing countries don't like ads any more than anyone else.

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

#214

Post by chiggsy »

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…

>I'm sure someone much smarter than me will create this at some point.

Such a person is the very last creature I want parsing every byte of content delivered to me. in order to make this service a reality it must be local.

What we need is data poisoning. Have the AI watch ads, spoof responses, while we watch ad free content. Run it like SETI, during our devices downtime. They'll try to raise fraud concerns. Understandable. Accusations of piracy? Certainly possible. Convictions, though? Probably not.

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

#215

Post by kaba0 »

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…

It’s much easier to just ship a WASM blob that renders to canvas. You can throw in a bit of obfuscation (LLVM can do that).

But even without WASM, there is the “tiktok strategy”, of pushing bytecode to a self-made interpreter, that frequently changes its semantics.

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

#216

Post by leventonportera »

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…

I don't use google search (most of the time) as it's inferior - it ignores what I'm searching for, and substitutes what it thinks I should be searching for - and it's been doing that for years. There were free search engines before there were ads.

I don't use gmail because why would anyone want to use gmail for anything but temporary throwaways that'll get spammed.

I don't use google maps. nokia heremaps and openstreetmap (I use magic earth) are better in most ways, worse in others. When I go to a different country, I click "download country" and have a fully searchable map. No, I don't want a map that needs a data connection. No, I don't want to have to visually search the map for the thing I'm looking for, because someone barfed up a salad of dots that are place ads for things unrelated to my search. Google maps is not usable to anyone who has used something else. People who always use google maps don't know any better.

I do use google translate. This does not support your argument, because that's a service that is free, and does not display ads. You saying that the current ad-free service will disappear if ads were blocked from it... Can't make the comment on here that I want to make, so I'll let you imagine

Youtube... Who give a crap. There were sites with videos before, there are other sites now. No, no one can host a huge expensive platform like that for free. So how about the people posting stuff, pay for their stuff being hosted. Then those people can inline talking ads or put a coke can on their desk, in their videos. You know, how ads in videos have been done since the existence of the video format, in 1920 all the way up to right now.

Google products, google customer service, and google the company, are inferior to the competition in almost every way. Except for google translate. Which again - has no ads.

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

#217

Post by Beijinger »

jraph wrote: post #170
Beijinger wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Not sure why my original post was downvoted.

By looking into it, I found this browser:

qutebrowser is a keyboard-focused browser with a minimal GUI. It’s based on Python and Qt and free software, licensed under the GPL. It was inspired by other browsers/addons like dwb and Vimperator/Pentadactyl. https://qutebrowser.org/

It is fast!

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

#218

Post by superdug »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #212
superdug wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But again, why is selling stuff abhorred by you as an absolute. A transaction which is facilitated by money is the key component to guaranteed assertion that a single valued skill can be exercised for any good or service at any time so long as everyone agrees that the compensation is fair and reasonable by all concerned parties. It’s one of fundamental components of an interdependent system that furthers the entire r…

I have no problem with buying and selling stuff or with transacting in general. I have a problem trusting sellers. I refuse to take them at their word. I do not want to hear what they have to say at all. I want to decide what I want to buy based on completely independent factors and then, after I have decided, come to the seller to finalize the purchase. I do not want or need advertising, I need its antithesis: quali…

But again, why can’t one of the factors be advertising first followed by due diligence before finalization? Especially in the instance of stated facts that can be fairly easily verified by anyone’s personal definition of a trusted source, most especially when presented with simply an incentive to use a stored resource that neither you or any of your trusted sources of truth were even aware existed at all to begin with? Again with specificity at advertisements on a digital medium where there is an enticement to spend money suggested by a third party and they are not evil?

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

#219

Post by tempodox »

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!

At least that fatal error comes at 60 fps. Failing fast!

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

#220

Post by sirk390 »

maciekpaprocki wrote: post #29
klysm wrote: post #27

We are sorely lacking inner browser virtualization. This way web pages can virtualize other web pages internally via canvas and get true micro-front ends! Every component can be fully isolated from every other component and they will communicate via network requests to each other

wait. why not iframes?

For example you could set cookies before visiting another website. This is currently impossible in an iframe but possible in a browser. I've wanted to do this to automatically login users on some external websites.
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