461–470 of 501 posts
I would love a browser that sticks to the original use, to render simple html documents.
No Javascript or bloated features. Would break a lot of websites but that is ok.
It might even be good for accessibility on some sites
"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…
I mean, LadyBird is extremely young and coming along at a pretty decent pace. Though, to be fair, the main author does have some extensive experience in the realm. I, personally, would love to see some alternative engines to the monoculture of Blink and it's WebKit cousin, other than just Gecko/Quantum. Something to take the place of what KHTML used to have before being gobbled up into WebKit; or just another (ideall…
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Please make your points yourself. Generated comments aren't allowed on HN and we ban accounts that post them. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But just to clarify, this is the first time I have generated a comment, and it was a collaborative effort between me and GPT-4 that lasted like fifteen minutes. It wasn't just a lazy "here is the comment, reply to it".
I was trying to make a better comment. In particular the point I was trying to make was about the sheer scope of web platform functionality and APIs. Which there are so many web APIs that I was using ChatGPT as a research tool. Even GPT-4 said "wow, I can't list _all_ of the APIs, there are too many of them".
Also, I don't see anything on that guidelines page that says anything about AI-generated content being disallowed, so you might consider updating it.
Also, how do you determine if a comment is AI-generated or not? Because the previous version which I had asked it to refine to be in my voice was closer to my writing voice but actually less substantive.
So I had a slightly worse comment ready to go (didn't make the point as well) but I decided to reply with the comment that was better even though it was easier to detect as AI-generated.
I don't think you would have threatened me if you really wanted me on the site. I make a lot of comments on HN, probably spending too much time on here. And I can be fairly, lets say, bold about the content of the comments.
I do remember a recent incident where someone was advertising that they would spend two weeks to build out a basic chatbot for a minimum of $10,000. I can guarantee that person was hoping to spend a half-day or less if they found a customer for a truly simple bot. So the advertisement and business model was dishonest and borderlining on a scam because it misrepresented the time and effort involved and deliberately overcharged for a simple project. That's why I commented on that post.
But I understand that you don't have time to try to parse out how some comments that are obviously on shaky ground might be warranted in some cases.
If you do ban me then I will miss HN. But also, if I am investing a lot of time into this and the comments or submissions aren't appreciated overall, then even for myself, I should reevaluate the use. Maybe socializing just isn't for me, even on a web forum.
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…
IMO it's better to have few rock-solid open source systems than multitude of half-baked projects reinventing the wheel. But good luck!
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> As you do, I find the discourse around tech to be a pit of dismissiveness, avoidance, denial, resignation, and learned-helplessness I have a whole tirade on this, but I completely agree. It seemed while going through college that the whole prescriptivism and general attitudes in tech are built in such a way so as to discourage certain mindsets which the industry DESPERATELY needs, and my hypothesis is that not havi…
An unfortunately large subset of too-comfortable tech workers have decreed the right way is to: never reinvent the wheel, always import, and avoid 'the hard stuff'. The sad bit? They're well compensated for this learned inability, so arguably they made the truly smart choice here. To the blessed few who reject this apathy and continue building new innovations? I salute you o7
But these are obvious lessons, don't you think?
If your goal is to launch a product or deliver a feature, why on earth are you going to waste time, say, writing a message broker from scratch or an improved Redis clone or a fork of nginx that supports some feature? Is that where your value-added lies or what will get you to launch faster? No. That's stuff you can easily live without.
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"but you can't write your own layout algorithm." Of course you can - in javascript. What is stopping you? (except that you don't like it) You can also ditch the DOM alltogether and only use the canvas/webgl and maybe your language of choice via emscripten and wasm, if you really cannot stand js/ts. The web as a plattform is very, very powerful. The app you make, you can ship by simply sending a link. And people can j…
> Of course you can - in javascript. What is stopping you? (except that you don't like it) If you mean by setting `position: absolute` and then using left/top/right/bottom to position your element, that won't work. You can't plug your code into the browser's layout dispatching mechanism to correctly react to size changes, reflows and all that. You can do that in any native UI framework. > The app you make, you can sh…
Erm, but it does? You can listen to resize events and you can get the exact width and height values of all the elements in the DOM. I am using that technic since I switched to the web (when box layout did not exist yet).
The only problem with this is, that you can create performance bottlenecks easily, as reading clientWidth might trigger a forced reflow. So it might not be easy at first to get everything right, but it is totally possible.
Also you can just use a different GUI framework or build your own.
"Not everyone's goal is to simply have as many users as possible."
Mine neither, but those who do (the majority) made sure, the web is suitable to be used by even the most tech illiterate people. My mother can surf the web to get mostly what she wants - but she cannot use a file browser, nor does she really know what a file is (and she does not want to know).
"> The app you make, you can ship by simply sending a link.
Depends on what it does."
Sure, if you want native file system access, you would be breaking the sandbox. And yes, this is my biggest pain point with the web as well - that it often cannot decide whether it serves untrusted websites or enables app developement where the user trust the app. For example there is no (easy) way to get the pixel data from html elements, because of security. Which makes sense for malicious add filled websites, but not when developing something real, where the user could give permission. Here the focus on the dumbest users who just all allow everything, so the browsers have to protect them and allow no one to use proper permissions is really annoying. Because yes, I also would just like to have file access and other things permissions don't allow.
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The reason we have custom roms on android phones, is because of Linux's copyleft license: Phone vendors are required to publish their kernel modifications shipped with their devices. This already reduces e-waste by lowering the purchases of new phones, when old ones are perfectly functional. Thus, copyleft helped the environment
To me this is also an example of how the GPL fails. The requirement for phone vendors to publish their Linux source trees does in part enable custom ROMs, but vendors still have found ways around the license in the form of proprietary kernel modules. This gives these phones a shelf life: after the latest OS version requires a kernel newer than the one the proprietary modules are shipped with, and efforts to write shi…
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> The GPL is a contact that takes away some rights of the people using it, and that makes everyone freer? It is not that simple. The GPL "takes away" some rights of the distributor of the software (their ability to restrict redistribution for example), but grants rights to the end user (the ability to modify and redistribute) of the software. It's all perspective. As the developer the GPL may feel limiting, but as a…
I don't think you've really clarified anything. It is a trade: ensuring greater freedoms for the end user by adding restrictions -- by definition "not freedom" -- to developers/distributors. I'm not saying that's a bad trade off to make, but it is absolutely a fact that the GPL takes away some rights. Or, since it is a copyright license, where the default in copyright is you get no rights, you might instead say it do…
Expressing it like you did is misleading. One man's freedom is another man's restriction. It's two sides of the same coin.
It is absolutely a fact that laws against murder take away some rights. Suddenly you are not allowed to kill other people. You do not have that "freedom" anymore. Flipside is that others now have the freedom to walk around without fearing that they can lawfully be killed by others. You pay for granting one "new" freedom by removing another, opposing freedom.
The GPL grants new rights for a party by restricting rights of another party. Just like all licenses do.
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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 Gop…
The problem with gopher, Gemini, etc is a lack of people using the service. The point of a browser is to browse . What are you going to browse if there is nobody creating content? And vice versa, most people won’t put large amounts of time and effort into creating content nobody will see. Gopher appears to have declined some 20% in content between 2021 and 2022. I believe I’ve taken a peek at Gemini and there wasn’t…
Yes. But one should remember that some services that are popular today started with a very small user base. Programming languages have to start from one user (starting from zero is orders of magnitude harder - if you are not the first regular user, your project will most likely fail).
One way to achieve that is to have a "killer feature" or maybe a unique combination of existing features. For instance, a subject related to browsers is discoverability and search. If you are going to compete with the WWW without funding or support from companies/institutions, there's little hope that someone will provide a search engine. This means that users will have to pay for that service with their time (that's how Wikipedia emerged). One could think, for instance, about a content tagging system that users could share, to solve this problem.
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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…
These two things are pretty unrelated.
For Android apps, a common model to have a paid version in the play store and still publish the source code on github with GPL. Here the GPL actively protects you against somebody coming, doing some minor modifications and then pushing their own paid-for version to the app store while not publishing the source code (which they could easily do with other licenses).