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The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser

theverge.com

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Re: The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser

#81

Post by defrost »

Markoff wrote: post #80
defrost wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like Vivaldi and was seriously considering a switch away from Chrome as I'm a past Opera fan ... but it's still "just another" Chromium-based browser likely to be affected by the upcoming Manifest v3 changes that will limit adblocking browser extensions. I'm running more and more with Firefox these days and trialing AdGuard Home, Blocky, Technitium in parallel in anticipation of having to recommend solutions to fri…

both Vivaldi and Brave claim to keep supporting MV2 extensions

Good to know, I'll keep an eye on that.

As someone in the " ~60, programming since 12, former usenet pre WWW " bracket I'm troubled(?) | perturbed by the convergance toward an all Chromium browser engine aspects here, Mv3 is but a single example of what can occur when there's a borg dominated domain.

Re: The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser

#82

Post by jsemrau »

paulgb wrote: post #19
jsemrau wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that IE6 got worse and didn't keep up with developments while Firefox got consistently better. Firefox' problem as "only" that is was really slow and that's what Chrome solved. Yet, I also think that a new UI doesn't really change the browser experience much. It must be a completely different UX.

Firefox came at a time when the web was really annoying to use, and had features to make it better. I don't think IE had even shipped a pop-up blocker at the time. But FireFox's extensibility also made things like ad blockers and Grease Monkey scripts possible, which was the only way to stay sane as a power user in that era. And tabs! That was a big one. I think the web has gotten annoying again, in different ways, b…

I agree with you. However, these are not UI changes.

Re: The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser

#83

Post by taf2 »

flakiness wrote: post #2

I'm glad to see Darin working solely on the browser, and excited to see him in the SWE role! When I was working on Chrome I had a strange leftover 1:1 with him (was a VP at that point.) He always impressed me with the deep understanding of the Chromium code stack and he did unblock my work as a SWE with that - An example: At at time I was struggling with an extra latency some callback incurred. He rightly pointed out…

Extremely proud of my big brother - a true super hero.

Re: The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser

#84

Post by taf2 »

grizzles wrote: post #70

The feature I most want in a browser is for them to enable client side ssl certificates for password free signin. The UI is actually quite trivial to implement and it would turn the entire internet into a single social network, sidestepping the awfulness [1] of existing solutions like openid-connect. [1] It's awful because it gives a company's entire customer list to google, facebook, etc. That used to be called good…

I believe you are describing what is Webauthn. As more websites adopt this and more devices include things like Touch ID, Face ID, etc… what you want is maybe a few years from being normal

Re: The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser

#85

Post by origin_path »

imoreno wrote: post #41

There is certainly more than one person who wants to reinvent browsers, even among web pioneers, I'm sure :-) Some things I'd like to see in the next generation of browsers: - Modular design. Many things like rendering engine, history/cookie/cache mechanism, configuration framework, UI, sync system, download manager, privacy enhancements, ad blocking/request filtering, extensions should be separate programs (with ind…

Totally agree with the first.

The last one - isn't that already the case? The browser treats the server as hostile and often overrides what it wants to do with extensions.

The issue with additional modularity would seem to be that things would become less hackable in general, because you'd have less insight into the internals of modules as there would be more variety and they might not be open source. How does ad blocking work if the core infrastructure doesn't know much about what's being rendered?

Re: The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser

#86

Post by amadeuspagel »

> Chrome exists in large part to put a search engine front and center, which Fisher describes to me as like “a brick wall” for all kinds of browser innovation.

Chrome used to have this tab-to-search feature. When you visited a website like HN, it would use OpenSearch[1] to check whether it had a search engine, and then show "tab to search" in the address bar. That always seemed to me like a sign that the chrome team was working independently to make a great browser, even when that meant supporting other search engines. But today, you have to set this up manually in the settings.

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/OpenSearch

Re: The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser

#87

Post by webmobdev »

vanshg wrote: post #73

I've been using a new WebKit-based browser called Orion. It is super snappy, has compatibility with Chrome and Firefox extensions, has power-user features built-in, is privacy focused (collects 0 telemetry as a tenet -- they are donation based), and continues to add features at super fast pace. I highly recommend giving it consideration if you are looking to move away from Chrome. Some features I love: tree-style tab…

> extensions work on iOS

Not yet, many extensions are broken on it - even uBlock Origin doesn't work at all. Hope they fix it soon.

Re: The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser

#88

Post by tinus_hn »

paxys wrote: post #61
Vermeulen wrote: post #17

Reinventing the browser should be simplifying it to only what it needs to be: executing + rendering remote code in a sandboxed window. Make a new browser that is just WebGPU + WebAssembly, no more DOM. Would already run the next wave of games that will come targeting that. Then for regular websites, have them deliver a HTML rendering engine written in Webassembly for how they want to be rendered. No more need to test…

Great idea, every website should write its own WebGPU-based rendering engine from scratch. But that will be way too much effort for every kind of project, so what can really happen is some large players write engines and define interfaces for them, and we can all use them for our sites. But different engines rendering the same data differently is probably going to be confusing (what if I want to swap them to compare…

That’s called an App Store, not the web.

Re: The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser

#89

Post by Vermeulen »

meheleventyone wrote: post #76
Vermeulen wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have definitely missed the entire point. Of course there are some advantages of just putting it all in the browser for rendering current standard web sites. The point is to rethink the browser so it isn't just a single tech company setting what the web is with Chromium. A WebGPU+WebAssembly engine would be simple enough for there to be many.

Right but this misses the point that you’re not removing complexity by shuffling it down a layer. Is it really an advantage to have multiple “thin browsers” if there are only two or three “browser engines” anyway due to their complexity? Further by pushing the complexity down a layer you inevitably make it slower. Aside from which from a market perspective most small browser projects already are a thin layer on top o…

It would definitely remove complexity from the browser. By that logic should browsers just contain all the common Javascript frameworks? No because that would slow down their rate of change, and sites couldn't control their exact version / configuration. Should be the same for the entire DOM

Re: The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser

#90

Post by hiidrew »

Arc is a refreshing change after using Chrome, Brave, and Firefox.

My favorite feature which any of these browsers could copy though is the command palette and copying the current URL with cmd-shift-c.

I'm excited for the Boosts that they have, and think they could build a library of them that would be interesting to check out. But I'm not an expert with CSS so making my own is a struggle. Could be interesting if they were able to find a way to make the boost creation easier for non-css experts.

I also haven't used their internal notetaking tool as much, but the fact that the browser has it built in is interesting. I just get scared that the company will fold and I'll lose my notes. Would use it if it was like Obsidian and generated .md files based on my notes.

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