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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

#71

Post by huijzer »

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…

Nice! Just go for it, man! History often needs only one person. Who would have known that Guido van Rossum would write the language in which most of modern AI would be written while the servers run on some operating systems created by Linus Torvalds. Both just had a crazy idea and started working on it.

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

#72

Post by nonrandomstring »

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 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 was Lord Haw-Haw [0]. Today our own mainstream news channels and technology giants seem determined to keep the population in perpetual hopeless anxiety.

As you do, I find the discourse around tech to be a pit of dismissiveness, avoidance, denial, resignation, and learned-helplessness. I've been doing a lot of interviewing people lately, and careful sentiment analysis. The results are horrifying. The very word "tech" is becoming synonymous with "Resistance is futile".

To stand up and do something, anything, not because you hope for success, but as an example, and for your own sanity, is the most positive and human of responses.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Haw-Haw

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

#74

Post by vidarh »

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…

> This IS a pet project

I think that is a great attitude to start with.

When you build something with the attitude that it's for you and not "meant to be big and professional like GNU" to paraphrase Linus Torvalds, you can often achieve a lot with far less effort.

It allows you to be pragmatic and accept things that you otherwise might not, and you can get to something useful to you whether as a learning experience or to actually use with a tiny fraction of the effort you'd want to invest if you intended to build a "product".

A lot of my personal projects have involved stumbling over a project like yours and repurposing parts, and often veering off in entirely different directions, because it's often so much easier to pick up someones small pet project that is "close enough" than trying to pare down or adapt a huge, feature-complete beast.

With a browser, a huge part of the complexity comes from needing to support every site out there, and every usage scenario, but when you build for you, already just being able to focus on making sites you care about work well enough pares the problem back enormously...

And this is a long way of saying I think more people should take on "impossible" projects. Maybe the full thing won't be useful for other people anytime soon, but maybe parts of it will be, and sometimes something bigger comes out of what starts as a small pet project (like Linux did...)

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

#75

Post by davedx »

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…

> "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.

I'll bite... why? Most websites follow HTML and ECMAScript. Why do you need to do anything Google does? Isn't the whole point of this project to decouple from what big tech companies do?

The vast majority of websites don't want to follow whatever Google-only shit they've come up with most recently, whether it's adtech, AMP, DRM, or whatever.

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

#76

Post by davedx »

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…

But I mean your rendering and layout engine don't need to pass all ACID tests out of the gate, right? You build it up gradually. You start by getting reasonably simple HTML websites to render. There's no rush, and there's no hard and fast rule saying you have to implement every corner of the standard.

Web browsers and the web are gloriously human.

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

#77

Post by davedx »

budafish wrote: post #7

There are a lot of words the author used to simply say, "I'm going to start my pet project, which I also believe is going to fail very soon for a number of reasons" Not much actual good content here.

Ugh, go post your negativity somewhere else. Awful comment.

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

#78

Post by davedx »

speps wrote: post #20

If Rust is a must, surely contributing to Servo[1] and learning by sending small PRs to start with would be more beneficial. However, I do understand as I've done this kind of "from scratch" project before just because I thought I could do it better or because I couldn't get into reading the existing codebase easily. To each their own... [1] https://github.com/servo/servo

Servo is an amazing project and I love everything Mozilla has done, but it's also financially coupled to Google, right?

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

#79

Post by zem »

robertlagrant wrote: post #57
d--b wrote: post #30

Anyone doing this for cars? I feel cars are much worse than browsers in terms of screwing their buyers and much easier to topple. Way to go. Godspeed.

> I feel cars are much worse than browsers in terms of screwing their buyers Feelings aside, why do you think this?

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/article...
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