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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

#41

Post by friend_and_foe »

Writing a browser means writing a rendering and layout engine. That's a pretty tall order, not that you can't do it.

But there's so much you could do that would be more likely to be fruitful. Port Servo to Nyxt Browser. Fork WebKit or servo or gecko and pull out the invasive web standards that have been injected by the ad company over the last decade that hurt users. It's all work you're going to have to do anyway building from scratch, might as well not start at the bottom and start with an existing community of people already willing to work on it with you.

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

#42

Post by cookiengineer »

friend_and_foe wrote: post #41

Writing a browser means writing a rendering and layout engine. That's a pretty tall order, not that you can't do it. But there's so much you could do that would be more likely to be fruitful. Port Servo to Nyxt Browser. Fork WebKit or servo or gecko and pull out the invasive web standards that have been injected by the ad company over the last decade that hurt users. It's all work you're going to have to do anyway bu…

That's what I did with WebKit [1] because it turns out servo is not as modular as it was before. And Gecko is the definition of monolith, so removing the attack surfaces is impossible, even TOR has a crappy replace-with-stubs approach that breaks with every internal API or bridge change.

Need contributors and other maintainers though, because keeping up with upstream is impossible as a single dev.

I tried to document the attack surfaces [2] from my cyber security perspective as good as possible, with tasks left to do and which need to be eventually removed. It's probably pretty opinionated because I want to use RetroKit as the webview for my own Browser Stealth which acts as a filtering proxy, scraper and decentralized cache [3]

[1] https://github.com/tholian-network/retrokit

[2] https://github.com/tholian-network/retrokit/blob/main/SECURI...

[3] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth (ongoing rewrite in golang)

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

#43

Post by popcorncowboy »

ilaksh wrote: post #26
dexterlagan wrote: post #9

I wrote a couple custom browsers for both pro and personal reasons. I found out that there is a tiny niche market for a privacy-focused, minimalist browser that a) does not understand cookies, b) executes JS only when allowed to and c) is capable of displaying most decent Web sites without garbling them. I had good success with using Chromium as backend, and slowly adding the stuff we do need (download manager, passw…

If you used Chromium to "write a browser" then in no way did you write a browser. You wrapped Chromium.

There's a joke about the latest wave of "AI" companies in here somewhere...

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

#44

Post by pacifika »

clouddrover wrote: post #2

You'd be better off using and contributing to Firefox. Less work, more result.

It seems to me the author seems unhappy with the lack of control of how external content affects their well-being and by creating their own software hopes to influence this. With that in mind, they’re unlikely to influence a massive established project.

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

#46

Post by rizky05 »

jokoon wrote: post #38

I'd rather advice people to reinvent a new html js format. Preferably serialized to binary so it can fast and save battery on mobile. Html was not designed for applications, it carries a lot of debt, and it's an ambiguous language, which makes it very expensive to parse for browsers.

[dead]

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

#47

Post by kybernetikos »

sshine wrote: post #18
dexterlagan wrote: post #9

I wrote a couple custom browsers for both pro and personal reasons. I found out that there is a tiny niche market for a privacy-focused, minimalist browser that a) does not understand cookies, b) executes JS only when allowed to and c) is capable of displaying most decent Web sites without garbling them. I had good success with using Chromium as backend, and slowly adding the stuff we do need (download manager, passw…

> I found out that there is a tiny niche market for a privacy-focused, minimalist browser You mean like Orion by Kagi, Mullvad Browser, Brave, Falkon, Safari, DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser, Firefox Focus, Midori? I feel like the best browser in this market has yet to show itself. I doubt it will be one where the author claims it will fail.

"just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu".

At the start of a project, it can be difficult to know if it will snowball, and since most projects don't, creators often feel like they have to get in ahead of the negativity and set expectations.

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

#48

Post by gjvc »

prox wrote: post #6

It would be cool to see a browser being made in the Blender/Godot style of open source. Set milestones, encourage a friendly community to gather around, raise funds, manage it well, and back to step one again. I certainly would love to see more options of browsers.

I certainly would love to see more options of browsers.

How about more options of different content-types and plugins into a browser framework which is little more than a piece of chrome (no pun intended by me) for them?

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

#49

Post by rambambram »

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 bottleneck for me accessing the web. There are always other websites I can go to for the same content, there's also always another computer brand that I can use, but it's always Firefox in the middle. I know there are other browsers, but they always seem to be based on Googlium or whatever the name is today.

So I wish him luck and hope he succeeds. (RSS feed followed, so I can take a look at his project now and then)

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

#50

Post by pacifika »

What an interesting article. For me I can relate to the central tenet of trying to exert control over the level and kind of content I consume on a daily basis. I’m sure that will help mental health.

The Twitter clients of years past have shown how using filters and regexes, muting and blocking, it is somewhat possible to shape this content stream. Also I think local AI has some power to weed out content it can detect would negatively affect you.

I think though this would work well as a feed reader, the browser is simply too flexible as a source of input. Although it’s certainly worth trying, bravo!

I’ve experimented with a “feed of feeds” and receiving a daily digest of this and this could be the layer on top that it needs. But until this article I had not realised my motivation for it, so thanks author!

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