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I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser

adayinthelifeof.nl

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Re: I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser

#301

Post by astrobe_ »

jaytaph wrote: post #59

OP here. Thanks for the pos/neg/neutral comments everybody. Some remarks: Yes, there are a lot of browsers out there where I can contribute to which would be more efficient. But that would result in just a few browsers instead of a lot of browsers. I'm all for the last one, as this would give people options. This IS a pet project. I never told anyone otherwise. I would start writing it even when I wasn't fed up with…

To me the logical conclusion of what you write is not to write yet-another-web-browser, because browsers are rotten to the core by terrible protocol designs, terrible specifications, politics, greed etc. Browsers did not spontaneously start to degrade, it's what the key actors at different times did that made it happen.

The only hope, IMO, is to build something much more sane that cannot be abused. Something like Gopher or Gemini. Simple specs that make it possible for a single person or a small team to implement something decently working without them spending their like on it like Middle Age monks spent their life mapping and cataloging stars.

I would start with a feature-limited markup language that's good enough to display text - maybe images if you really insist - and leave all media and interactive stuff to external programs; if your browser ends up being a virtual machine and a universal media player, it is doomed to degenerate into a WWW browser if it ever gets popular.

But of course if one builds something that cannot be abused or monetized easily, the big content creators won't be interested. It will take a lifetime or two to gather a critical mass of users, and only if the WWW overloads abuse their power so much that the average WWW serf actively starts to look for a better place to be, and only if at this time the alternative has more and bigger advantages than drawbacks.

Re: I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser

#302

Post by seabass-labrax »

PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote: post #234
nonrandomstring wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I get angry about not being able to do anything about anything. And this is my way of trying to do something about it. It's the best I can do. This attitude is gold, and it's what changes the whole world. What you said about the misery of "news" resonates with me. In psyops we call it "sapping". Propaganda designed to demoralise, dispirit and corrode resistance used to come from our enemies . The classic example wa…

For me it's a bit like the whole "woke-ism" thing. The vast majority of people enjoy each other and don't subscribe to the vitriol that comes from both sides. In that manner, the internet is a bit of an echo chamber where if you get all of your impressions of the world from it, you'd think people were constantly at each others throats. The news is the same way, they report negativity, so it has a real tendency to mak…

There's a positive aspect to employing police officers to be present even when there is no tangible risk of crime or danger.

Where I live, it's extremely unusual to ever see a 'bobby on the beat', so when I recently visited a city with thirty or more police officers with riot vans congregated at the docks, ironically I felt slightly uncomfortable - what mortal danger could be present around the corner to justify so much police attention? It turned out to just be a big football match, so there was not such a huge danger after all and the police would no doubt be able to diffuse any disturbance immediately.

If there had been no police around, it would never have occurred to me that there was a risk, even though I would have been tangibly less safe without their presence.

Re: I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser

#303

Post by jimbokun »

digging wrote: post #255
jwr wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! Making >> Not Making, always. You make, you learn, perhaps one day you will make something better, perhaps not — but at least you've been building something. Ignore the armchair critics, criticizing is so much easier than building.

I'm not upset at the OP, but I wouldn't say this is a golden rule. Some people make some really atrocious shit. People should, in general, be at least a little critical of what they're making.

Being critical of what you're making...is infinitely better than being critical of what other people are making while not making anything yourself.

The making part is the key.

Re: I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser

#304

Post by bigstrat2003 »

phkahler wrote: post #156
nonrandomstring wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I get angry about not being able to do anything about anything. And this is my way of trying to do something about it. It's the best I can do. This attitude is gold, and it's what changes the whole world. What you said about the misery of "news" resonates with me. In psyops we call it "sapping". Propaganda designed to demoralise, dispirit and corrode resistance used to come from our enemies . The classic example wa…

>> As you do, I find the discourse around tech to be a pit of dismissiveness, avoidance, denial, resignation, and learned-helplessness. Do you think this is why people are abandoning the GPL license in favor of MIT/BSD? Something about the fight the GPL aims to win being a hopeless fantasy? In the face of the sentiment you and OP express, I'd think GPL usage would be widespread.

I don't use the GPL (and never have) because, like another poster said, it is less free. When I put work out there for someone to do what they wish with it, I don't think I should then say "oh unless you do xyz, I don't approve of that". That strikes me as hypocritical, and so I don't do it. I don't harp on anyone who uses the GPL, they gotta do what they think is right. But for me, the GPL was never a good choice for software licensing.

And before anyone says "someone can make a closed fork of your code and then charge for it", I am aware of this. I also don't see the problem. My goals when sharing code are to share my work and help others by doing so. If some company uses my work to profit, I still have accomplished my goals. Moreover, others can still download my original code if they wish and reap the same benefits as the for-profit company did. This is a great outcome. Everyone benefits, nobody is harmed. While this scenario is often used as an argument that permissive licenses are bad, I think it is a very poor argument indeed.

Re: I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser

#305

Post by bigstrat2003 »

binary132 wrote: post #201
ynniv wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a developer my problem with the GPL is that it's less free than other licenses. It's an interesting legal hack, but it can only succeed in its goals by boiling the ocean. I just want to write things, and sometimes making money involves not publishing all of your source code. Having to choose between options and idealism limits the popularity of GPL projects.

Isn't that kind of the point? The purpose of GPL and Free Software (which it has actually had resounding success in) is to develop a free commons which will stay free and not be exploited. It's not for you to exploit to make a buck, and if that excludes your project, that's fine. There are lots of things I would never consider free-licensing, but I think people badly miss the point of free software because they are s…

The GPL is not required for such a commons to flourish. Most Rust projects are published under a permissive license, and that scene is flourishing just fine. I think that open source software as a whole, not the GPL specifically, is what has enabled the flourishing you mention. It seems to me that in the counterfactual world where Linus chose to use the BSD license for his kernel, Linux would thrive just as much as it does today.

Re: I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser

#306

Post by phendrenad2 »

rdlw wrote: post #287
surajrmal wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a wild conjecture. Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty? The fact they jumped on it means that someone was paying attention to these metrics, but assuming chrome has any influence on YouTube is laughable.

People are innocent until proven guilty. Corporations are driven by greed and profit until proven otherwise.

That's just a trite saying, that doesn't logically follow. "Driven by" is not the opposite of "innocent". If you want to blindly believe what random people say on the internet, simply because said thing was said about a corporation you dislike, that's fine by me. But don't get frustrated when people prefer to look at the available evidence first, and the available evidence is an (alleged) div breaking Edge around the same time as an (alleged) announcement that Chrome was faster. Also the original poster admits that they aren't 100% sure it was related. But you are, I guess?

Re: I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser

#307

Post by georgeecollins »

pipeline_peak wrote: post #199
BobbyJo wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

-"I'm building a hot rod!" -"Why wouldn't you just go hang out on the factory line at Ford instead?"

More like "I'm building a soap box derby racer!"

yes- which is usually fun and teaches you a lot!

Re: I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser

#308

Post by Ono-Sendai »

SanderNL wrote: post #115

Is there some reason why browsers aren't split into a million pieces and worked on seperately? Most browser projects I see are tackled like giant monolithic projects. For example, CSS seems like a constraint solver that has nothing to do with parsing HTTP requests. Even parsing CSS itself has nothing to do with laying it out. Rendering is another step altogether that also has very little to do with anything. I can se…

They are split up. Take a lot at the chrome source, it pulls in dozens (hundreds maybe?) of c++ libraries.

Re: I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser

#309

Post by mylidlpony »

mongol wrote: post #70

I can relate. I have also stopped following the news, and almost all social media as well. I don't know if it is an age thing, or just the state of the world. But the past year, opening a news site have given me stress symptoms. And news sites love to feed it. Someone burns a koran? It is only news if it is reported. If someone does it in their basement alone, it would not matter at all. But instead it becomes a glob…

>Someone burns a koran

You should look up who gives money to people who do that, and what political movement they represent. You should then look up this book [0] and who also gets money from the same group of people. I'm sure a lot of things would become more clear to you.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

Re: I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser

#310

Post by [deleted] »

jwells89 wrote: post #188
phkahler wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> As you do, I find the discourse around tech to be a pit of dismissiveness, avoidance, denial, resignation, and learned-helplessness. Do you think this is why people are abandoning the GPL license in favor of MIT/BSD? Something about the fight the GPL aims to win being a hopeless fantasy? In the face of the sentiment you and OP express, I'd think GPL usage would be widespread.

I think a lot of distaste towards GPL comes from devs with corporate day jobs who feel frustrated that anything GPL licensed is functionally off-limits at work because there’s no way legal would approve of using it, and certainly would not approve of open sourcing whatever project is built with the GPL thing. I can see where such an individual might think to themselves, “I don’t want to put other devs in my position…

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