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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

#291

Post by LocalH »

mhuffman wrote: post #248
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…

>Doesn't matter either way. Can't wait for AI-powered ad blocking. It would seem that it is just as likely that browser producers would add AI "watchers" to the browser to make sure you are not using any ad blocking! AI doesn't see any ads or marketing copy for 30 mins, sorry browser temporarily unusable ... unless you have a business account, then no ads for 8 hours.

AI turtles all the way down

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

#292

Post by xp84 »

dirtyhippiefree wrote: post #59
xp84 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interesting. Chrome is the new i.e. as i.e. was in 2002, namely, most people regarded it as “the only browser any normal person would ever use.” Safari is the new i.e. in the sense that i.e. was in the late 2000s/early 2010s, meaning it’s the browser that we would like to ignore due to how weird it is compared to the browser we normally target. And how stubborn the vendor is in neither acting like the majorit…

I see: in the case of iOS, even allowing a different engine to run I’m hearing: iOS is •considerably more secure• like Blackberry was.

I’m not hearing that. Safari has its share of CVEs, including many of the jailbreak methods of the past, meaning one click to root the device. Apple isn’t any better at software than any other html engine vendor. And by having a monoculture on iOS, every time there’s a WebKit bug 100% of iOS users are guaranteed exploitable. There’s zero net security benefit to banning Gecko and Chromium (and any upstart innovators).

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

#294

Post by cxr »

phito wrote: post #200
postalrat wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't know how people can say that JS is a great language with a straight face. Sure it has a lot of advantages mostly due to how widespread it is. But it's really obviously not a great programming language by itself...

Reality: JS is a great language, and that's why it won. The idea that it's merely the case that it was everywhere and that that is the reason it won is something that people who are sore tell themselves to avoid grappling with the truth. JS's ubiquity (a) was neither a fait accompli, and (b) is insufficient to completely explain its success—it only explains it if you're willing to overlook a lot of confounding factors.

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

#296

Post by cxr »

peter_d_sherman wrote: post #209

First of all, looks awesome! Second: I'd love to be able to see it access Wikipedia! (Wikipedia should be a fairly "low-hanging fruit" in terms of functionality that must be implemented to achieve compatibility -- if I were writing a web browser, I'd always start with Wikipedia compatibility first, then once that has been obtained, move on to more challenging, technologically complex sites... But that being said, Wik…

Good point.

1. Wikipedia changes so rarely that it's almost considered a short of a misfeature, so it's hardly a moving target the way that other stuff would be

2. Even despite the breadth of subject matter, most pages are fairly similar, and the more exotic stuff will be used infrequently via templates and confined to supplementary items like infoboxes

3. Your bang-for-buck once you have a passable implementation will be enormous (not to mention: doesn't outright contribute to the decay of society), in contrast to e.g. a social networking site where a quarter of the world uses it and 3/4 either revile it or are indifferent to it when stacked up against their preferred platform

One thing to be considered is that the general look of unstyled pages that is common to almost all browsers isn't actually prescribed by any spec—browsers are free to come up with their own UA style sheets—so anyone developing a new browser should just make unstyled content look by default like what it would look like under reader mode. Pretty crazy that mainstream browsers haven't changed the way unstyled content is presented.

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

#297

Post by leventonportera »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #221
leventonportera wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 openstre…

>No, I don't want a map that needs a data connection. Google Maps has had the ability to download maps for offline use as long as I can remember -- at least since 2013. >This does not support your argument, because that's a service that is free, and does not display ads. All Google services are ad-supported, at least indirectly. That's because Google pays for their development and upkeep, and Google's primary income…

So when I go to Australia I can click "download Australia" in google maps before I board my flight? Or does it still let you only download a little zoom square like it did in the year 2013 to which you are referring? Does search work in those maps as it Didn't back then? I specifically gave an example, you then purposely ignored most of what I wrote to create a claim I did not make, and then said that claim is false. Do you do this often? Word on advice - this works on fox news where people only see the out-of-context sentence. It does not work when the people who read your reply, first have to read what I actually wrote.

Now, speaking of reading, I unfortunately stopped reading after your first sentence. This is because you immediately made it clear you are not communicating in good faith.

You have a good day, and enjoy winning all those arguments you yourself made up. The adults in the room ignore people like you and just move on.

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

#298

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

danielheath wrote: post #111
autoexec wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’ve been interested in a desktop AI ad blocker for awhile, but it doesn’t solve the issue of malware being distributed via ad networks, or the performance impact of all that extra js and network traffic.

I think it does.

Run the whole thing in a sandbox and have the AI exfiltrate the content (but not the ads) as a static DOM (no js). Once you know which DOMs go with which URL's you can gossip those peer-to-peer and not bother actually talking to the site at all (although one of us should hit the actual site every now and then, just in case the content changes). Isn't that more or less how cloudflare works?

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

#299

Post by Cyphase »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #282
iforgotpassword wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still can't bypass the outer browser's network stack, so any request based ad blocking is still possible.

The inner browser is doing websockets w/ certificate pinning to its server. It's network access is totally opaque.

The cryptographic keys are in memory, at least.

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

#300

Post by account42 »

Thorrez wrote: post #287
bluescrn wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s only censorship if you stop other people reading/consuming the censored content. Choosing to block ads is more like choosing to not read a book. Or skipping a boring chapter to get to the action.

Well you didn't write the filter lists yourself. It's kind of like someone creating a list of bad books, and you looking avoiding reading any books on that list.

You choose to use the filter lists though. That's what makes it not censorship.
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