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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

#401

Post by freedomben »

distract8901 wrote: post #289
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.

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…

Why would plugins have to also be GPL? The whole point of plugins is (typically) to allow distribution separately. IANAL but it would seem to me that unless you distribute your "plugin" as a statically linked binary that includes the main app, then the GPL would be irrelevant. If I'm wrong I'd love to be informed

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

#402

Post by freedomben »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #304
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 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 fo…

You're only looking at it from the perspective of the developer. The GPL freedoms are for the end user, not the dev.

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

#403

Post by jonny_eh »

irrational wrote: post #254
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…

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.

Did he write a blog post (or newsgroup post) in advance of writing the first version? I'm all for pet project tinkering, but seems strange to publicly make a pronouncement before starting. There's no "news" here, why is it on the front page?

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

#404

Post by jonny_eh »

seanw444 wrote: post #251
gumby wrote: post #171

> I do not expect ANYTHING to come from this project. I do not expect to finish this project. And I do expect that - if nobody will follow me into helping the project - the project will be dead quite soon. I do not expect this project to become the dominant browser that will topple all the big players in the market. This sounds like Linus' original announcement of Linux on comp.os.minix: > Hello everybody out there u…

Crazy to read his announcement all those years ago, and yet, here we are. Linus is still spearheading the project diligently (which is also crazy to me), and now it's the backbone OS of the internet. Almost every server room of almost every large corporation is comprised mainly of servers running Linux (or a custom internal derivative).

> Almost every server room of almost every large corporation is comprised mainly of servers running Linux

Even at Microsoft. Truly incredible.

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

#405

Post by hutzlibu »

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…

"A lot of the functionality is all that PWA stuff no one asked for and no one is using for anything good anyway"

It is really hard to engage with your comment in a constructive way, if you start by insulting everthing on the web, that is not a simple document (with comments).

So I get it, you don't like the web as a plattform for apps. And it surely is not perfect. But do you have a better plattform independent alternative to offer?

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

#406

Post by rdlw »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #306
rdlw wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> "Driven by" is not the opposite of "innocent"

I agree, that's why I didn't say driven until proven innocent. I'm just pointing out that the concept of innocent until proven guilty does not apply, as we have no moral imperative to treat corporations fairly. We're not claiming that any person at Google did something immoral, but that the structure of the corporation resulted in an immoral act. An 'unjust conviction' (so to speak) would not result in a person being imprisoned without cause, so we are free to make the most reasonable decision without the burden of "beyond a shadow of a doubt".

For the record, I'm still not claiming that it was 100% done intentionally, I'm just explaining why I'm inclined to believe something based on circumstantial evidence. Courtroom procedure is designed to protect people (in a perfect world), so I'll only adhere to it if there's someone to protect. I don't think Google is deserving of my, or anyone's, protection.

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

#407

Post by kelnos »

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…

I think this project is a fantastic idea! I've toyed with the idea of writing a browser for years, but when I consider the amount of human-years that have gone into Firefox, Chrome, etc., I get scared and back off of it.

I wanted to give it a try, but it looks like main isn't building right now, so I'll check back periodically. Hopefully I will even find some time to contribute, as a Rust-based web browser sounds like a project I'd be interested in working on. One thing I'm a little bummed about is the license: I've gone back and forth on this topic a lot in the past couple decades, and more recently I have actually been releasing stuff under more permissive licenses like MIT. But if I were to work on a browser, I'd want to GPL that. For a work of that magnitude, someone forking it and making proprietary changes would be intolerable to me.

Regardless, I think there is absolutely room in the world for more than just ~2.5 dominant browser engines (Gecko, and Blink/WebKit, which I guess aren't the same any more, but have the same provenance, hence the extra 0.5). Sure, contributing to something that already exists would be "more efficient", but since when was efficiency a requirement for doing something that you believe matters?

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

#408

Post by Calavar »

surajrmal wrote: post #262
clucas wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are picking the least important detail of the story. The deal is, Google found a simple way to kill the performance of a rival browser... so they exploited it and immediately started advertising how slow the rival was. By the time the rival fixed the performance issue, the damage was done. If true, that's pretty dirty, and it directly contributed to the growing browser monoculture.

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.

I would be skeptical too if it was just a one time thing, but it wasn't. Around the same time as that HN comment, YouTube rolled out a redesign of their frontend that used the Polymer framework. At the time, Polymer depended on a deprecated web standard that was implemented in Blink and WebKit and used a polyfill elsewhere. This completely killed performance on Firefox and Edge. That isn't unsourced or anonymous information like the invisible div. You can search back and find people complaining on multiple forums that YouTube started running at a crawl out of nowhere and ID'ing Polymer as the culprit [1, 2, 3].

[1] https://hub.packtpub.com/youtubes-polymer-redesign-doesnt-li...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17612139

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/91i0mc/youtube...

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

#409

Post by hutzlibu »

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.

They just realized they didn't really needed their own rendering engine. It would have been a nice to have, like in the old days of IE6, where they could decide over the direction of the web.

But more valuable to them is that people are using a browser they control (no matter the tech within) - which is why they try to push you to edge however they can.

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

#410

Post by progmetaldev »

domador wrote: post #315
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.

I have the same problem with GPL, specifically in that as far as I can tell it doesn't give one the freedom of making a living out of making software as a product. I'd love to be proven wrong and find out that there are practical, viable ways to develop new GPL software and be paid strictly for doing this. However, what I tend to hear is that people don’t get paid for this, but rather for customizing that software (o…

You might be surprised. Unless you are dealing with clients that have been burned by software licensing, or have attorneys knowledgeable in software patent/licensing law, you could charge clients for building software and release it as GPL. You then also provide the setup of that software, which you can include in the total cost. There is lots of GPL software out there, but not many people that understand how to setup or support that software. It is very possible to make a good living off the setup and support of GPL and other open source software.

If you don't feel right for open sourcing software you wrote for someone else, you could always offer your client a discount to let you open source the software. There are quite a few companies that now make their money supporting open source software, even when they aren't writing it themselves. I've done this myself, and I think it's a lucrative business model that still gives everyone involved freedom.

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