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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

#361

Post by emodendroket »

grishka wrote: post #181
ilaksh wrote: post #24

"Writing a browser" (from scratch) at this point basically means you are implementing a type of portable operating-system-in-a-box (the web platform) and that it will be compatible with whatever Google decides to add to theirs. The browser is so comprehensive in functionality and APIs, and such a challenge to keep up with Google's constant churn of new features and total dominance, that not even Microsoft could do it…

> The browser is so comprehensive in functionality and APIs Not really. If you limit your scope by saying that you're building a hypertext document viewer , it suddenly becomes approachable. A lot of the functionality is all that PWA stuff no one asked for and no one is using for anything good anyway. WebSQL? IndexedDB? Service workers? WebGL? WebGPU? WebBluetooth? WebRTC? Just act like it all doesn't exist. 99% of a…

Yes, if you arbitrarily define “Web site” to exclude most Web resources it is easy to declare victory. Maybe you can even have fun browsing some archived versions of Geocities pages.

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

#362

Post by emodendroket »

zdunn wrote: post #249
ilaksh wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Study the Microsoft and Firefox projects to see why it turns out that way. The basic thing I am saying is that if you call it a web browser and use the same core protocols etc., you have a practically infinite (for an individual) set of requirements to implement and will never be truly compatible. What ideas like Tersenet and systems like Gemini propose is similar to what you say, except even simpler. HTML and ECMASc…

> The basic thing I am saying is that if you call it a web browser and use the same core protocols etc., you have a practically infinite (for an individual) set of requirements to implement and will never be truly compatible But what the parent is saying is you don't have to be compatible with 100% of websites. If you build a browser with good HTML/CSS/Javascript handling, you'll be compatible with the large majority…

> If you build a browser with good HTML/CSS/Javascript handling, you'll be compatible with the large majority of the web.

Will you? I very much doubt this is the case.

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

#363

Post by emodendroket »

darepublic wrote: post #259
ilaksh wrote: post #24

"Writing a browser" (from scratch) at this point basically means you are implementing a type of portable operating-system-in-a-box (the web platform) and that it will be compatible with whatever Google decides to add to theirs. The browser is so comprehensive in functionality and APIs, and such a challenge to keep up with Google's constant churn of new features and total dominance, that not even Microsoft could do it…

> The browser is so comprehensive in functionality and APIs, and such a challenge to keep up with Google's constant churn of new features and total dominance, that not even Microsoft could do it. I always suspect that it's not that they couldn't do what you describe per se, it's that they couldn't do that within other shareholder driver parameters to make them want to do it.

Well, sure, if they were happy to burn money with no tangible result they could probably keep going as long as people are buying other MS products.

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

#364

Post by distract8901 »

trinsic2 wrote: post #327
distract8901 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyleft was a good idea, but its real world utility is a lot less than anyone would like. I once inherited a GPL project, but I couldn't muster any community interest in working with it. Plugin authors would have been compelled to use GPL and no one seemed interested. We had to burn the project to the ground and start over with a new MIT licensed project. Now there's a flourishing community of plugin authors working…

I don't think that's the fault of the license, its the fault of the world going in a less free direction.

That doesn't really add up. The core problem of GPL is that it's viral and takes away freedom from downstream developers in favor of upstream freedom.

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

#365

Post by strunz »

px43 wrote: post #267
irrational wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why Linus is trying to write a new OS, we already have OSes. It's not like this Linux thing is going to go anywhere.

No one said that. At the time there was a massive gaping hole in the OS market begging to be filled. OS vendors were gouging everyone, and GNU/Hurd kept experiencing delays.

Actually Linus himself proclaimed it as a hobby that would never be big and professional:

>I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.

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

#366

Post by dogcomplex »

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…

Great philosophy. What were the pain points so far - where's the real moat? In the not-too-distant future when we sick some AI coder programs on the problem to just mass-implement features in a banal repetitive way, which are the really complex ones they're gonna get stuck on? What are the ridiculous "this feature only exists to keep google in power" features you've found?

What made you want to make a browser instead of something much simpler like - an OS?

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

#367

Post by aleign »

The spelling mistake in the first sentence really throws me off. I'm not trying to be overly picky or pedantic but after reading only 7 words into a multiple-thousand word long post and seeing an error, I begin to think that this may be a tough read. I also subconsciously begin to assume that the browser this person wrote must be riddled with bugs. Whether that's fair or not.

"This blogpost starts with me switching of my car radio..."

of != off

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

#368

Post by jraph »

forgotpwd16 wrote: post #152
jraph wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Falkon uses QtWebEngine, which uses Blink, Google Chrome's engine. Which is a shame, because as a KDE user, I would consider using Falkon otherwise. It's extra painful knowing that KDE built KHTML, used by Apple to build WebKit, used by Google to build Blink…

Writing and maintaining a state-of-art browser engine is hard. Using an existent one is best choice unless you don't care about people actually using your browser or they're fine with accessing a part of the web.

> Writing and maintaining a state-of-art browser engine is hard

I know. And the KDE team would know too, having tried (and succeeded at the time! but could not keep up)

> unless you don't care about people actually using your browser

Why so dismissive?

Blink is not the only existing browser engine that works with most of the Web.

I'm not arguing for Falkon authors to build their own engine. That would be fantastic, but I understand they don't. I also understand their choice to use what Qt provides. Embedding another browser engine would be less straightforward or even outright painful / impossible (Gecko). Still, I don't want to strengthen Chrome dominance on the Web.

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

#369

Post by cedilla »

aleign wrote: post #367

The spelling mistake in the first sentence really throws me off. I'm not trying to be overly picky or pedantic but after reading only 7 words into a multiple-thousand word long post and seeing an error, I begin to think that this may be a tough read. I also subconsciously begin to assume that the browser this person wrote must be riddled with bugs. Whether that's fair or not. "This blogpost starts with me switching o…

Considering the .nl domain, the author probably isn't a native speaker. Homophones can easily trip us up.

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

#370

Post by tredre3 »

rambambram wrote: post #49

I'm not used to this kind of negativity on HN about browsers and the open web. I think it's a very worthwhile endeavor, whether he succeeds or not. If the result is only half a browser that is not incentivized by big tech, than it can be useful for the moment my reliance on Firefox has to stop. I hope it doesn't get there because I like my Firefox very much, but I came to realize that my browser is a sort of bottlene…

> I'm not used to this kind of negativity on HN about browsers and the open web.

Really? It's a given that any thread about browsers on HN will have a dozen highly upvoted replies that claim it's impossible to make a new browser.

Even though we have evidence that it is indeed possible. Ladybird is made from scratch (originally all the way down to the C++ stdlib!) and can now run Discord (poorly) after 3-4 years of part time work (it now has full time devs).

Based on their cargo.lock, GoSub doesn't seem to want to implement everything from scratch, they'll probably use off-the-shelves image decoders and whatnot, so it has the potential of growing even faster!

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