14 ms·

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

• greybox 3y ago
  I wish more people would try this. People who can't or are unwilling to do something themselves often try to project that unwillingness onto other people. Good Luck!
• kristopolous 3y ago
  You can just fork something. Starting from scratch is foolish unless you're genuinely just trying to learn things
• raintrees 3y ago
  Yes! This! I'm in!
• mikestaub 3y ago
  The only way this is feasible is if you find a way to code in a DSL and have AI generate all the implementation. A browser is extremely complicated.
• runningmike 3y ago
  > "I’m not an activist fighting for a better world or anything. But I get angry about the corporations screwing over people, software, planets. I’m not in a position to solve that." You ARE in a position to make the world a little bit better. We all are. Start with simple things, like thinking about using cc-by license and think about why, when and what FOSS license to use. A FOSS license is just a tool but make it work for your goal(s)... And why not just ask your local government to use FOSS software on websites to be a bit more compatible with every home baked browser. Your privacy and freedom is limited year after year.
• zmix 3y ago
  Please integrate up to date XML technologies. In addition, please make it like the XUL based Mozilla.
• clouddrover 3y ago
  You'd be better off using and contributing to Firefox. Less work, more result.
  • CodesInChaos 3y ago
    But probably less fun as well.
    • clouddrover 3y ago
      He's not doing it for fun. He's doing it because he's "fed up with it". GoSub will be used by tens of people. If he makes a contribution to Firefox it will be used by millions of people.
      • smabie 3y ago
        Tens of people seems generous
  • ralusek 3y ago
    I get anxiety about humanity forgetting how to build foundational tools. I feel better when the occasional weirdo dips down into the weeds to try things from scratch. They're often writing blogs and sharing their knowledge, which is nice for keeping the dark arts alive. They're also equipped with knowledge that we didn't have the first time through, and might be able to come up with something fundamentally better. Good way to help ensure we're not stuck in some local maximum.
  • pacifika 3y ago
    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.
  • iefbr14 3y ago
    Firefox received billions from Google the last five years.
• majjam 3y ago
  I could have written this, except for the being a good enough programmer to write a browser that is. I wonder if the author has heard of the ladybird browser? https://ladybird.dev/ https://ladybird.dev/
  • adhamsalama 3y ago
    I wonder why Shopify is sponsoring them...
    • buovjaga 3y ago
      “Ladybird is a love-letter to the web, and proof that open technologies enable innovation by organizations of all sizes. Shopify grew up on those technologies, and proudly contributes to them. We’re excited to add Ladybird to the set of projects we support.” From https://awesomekling.substack.com/p/welcoming-shopify-as-a-ladybird-sponsor https://awesomekling.substack.com/p/welcoming-shopify-as-a-l...
    • retrofuturism 3y ago
      “Ladybird is a love-letter to the web, and proof that open technologies enable innovation by organizations of all sizes. Shopify grew up on those technologies, and proudly contributes to them. We’re excited to add Ladybird to the set of projects we support.” Pretty cool of them to contribute $100k to the project. https://awesomekling.substack.com/p/welcoming-shopify-as-a-ladybird-sponsor https://awesomekling.substack.com/p/welcoming-shopify-as-a-l...
• atoav 3y ago
  Of all the passionate reasons one could imagine a person needs to feel compelled to write their own browser, this was quite unexpected. I guess if news affect your mental well-being negatively it is legitimate to avoid them. But I would believe a day long session with the blocklist of your choice would be better? Or just accept a certain degree of news, in the end you live in a world with other people who read news and unless you are a hermit things are going to come up eventually. Reducing can be better than attempting the impossible and fail.
• mkii 3y ago
  The link to your Github project in the article leads to somewhere else
  • walteweiss 3y ago
    It causes infinite loop when you click the GitHub link on that very website with the article, as it redirects to the article. I assume there is no GitHub repository yet.
    • kouteiheika 3y ago
      There is, here: https://github.com/jaytaph/gosub-browser https://github.com/jaytaph/gosub-browser (So the text of the link is correct, just not where it points to. You have to manually copy it as text and paste it in your URL bar.)
  • pacifika 3y ago
    Seems to be fixed now.
• prox 3y ago
  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.
  • gjvc 3y ago
    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?
  • cxr 3y ago
    One viable path would be starting a subproject to work on a "Godot Webview" (just a hobby, not supposed to be big and professional like Electron) and growing it from there.
• budafish 3y ago
  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.
  • sshine 3y ago
    Yes, the tl;dr of this article seems to be: > I do not expect ANYTHING to come from this project. I do not expect to finish this project. So... good luck with that. :)
    • nmz 3y ago
      Goes without saying, its a browser, browsers are never finished. unless you discarded html/js and started from scratch... but then you'd have no data for the browser and what would be the point of that.
      • hutzlibu 3y ago
        "Goes without saying, its a browser, browsers are never finished. " But they can be working enough, to be useful. Meaning they can display correctly the pages you want to see. So the best independent effort of a working browser I know of, is ladybird. And Kling knows how to build browsers, so toying around with a browser from scratch on your own will be a learning experience. But I guess you might learn more, by contributing to a project that stands a real chance to become a working browser.
  • m463 3y ago
    https://xkcd.com/2730/ https://xkcd.com/2730/
    • white_dragon88 3y ago
      God I hate XKCD so much. It's a blight on the internet. I just get unreasonably angry whenever I see a link posted. This is just me venting.
• dexterlagan 3y ago
  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, password vault, auto-complete). Turns out it's quite easy to setup, but there's one annoying chunk: dealing with creating tabs or new windows. 'Modern' Web sites use and abuse that mechanism to display pop-ups, and it's quite a challenge to handle. Good luck to ya!
  • isoos 3y ago
    Is your work open source?
  • sshine 3y ago
    > 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.
    • kybernetikos 3y ago
      "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.
      • sshine 3y ago
        Making a browser is a big undertaking, and I would set the same level of ambition. And then I wouldn’t post it on a forum until it has reached a milestone. :-)
  • ilaksh 3y ago
    If you used Chromium to "write a browser" then in no way did you write a browser. You wrapped Chromium.
• z3t4 3y ago
  You can boycott the bad companies. Spread the word about how they are bad so others can stop using them as well. We live in a world where anyone can communicate with anyone else on the planet. The power is in the hands of the many.
• speps 3y ago
  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 https://github.com/servo/servo
  • dgb23 3y ago
    Writing a toy version of a program is a great way to understand the big boy version.
  • davedx 3y ago
    Servo is an amazing project and I love everything Mozilla has done, but it's also financially coupled to Google, right?
    • nicoburns 3y ago
      Nope! Servo is no longer a Mozilla project. Development has been taken over by Igalia.
    • dharmit 3y ago
      I learned only a few hours back that entire Servo team was let go by Mozilla [1] and the project is now a part of Linux Foundation. So, I think, Servo has no direct/indirect ties to Mozilla/Google any more. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servo_(software)#cite_note-2020_layoff-9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servo_(software)#cite_note-202...
  • jiggawatts 3y ago
    Rust and Servo started out together, which means Servo had a lot of pre-1.0-Rust code written, affecting its style in some less than ideal ways. Similarly, Servo was designed to replace parts of the Firefox browser, which means that it had to be made to fit into "Gecko shaped" hole. For example, it uses UTF-16 strings in many places for compatibility with the rest of Firefox. Servo could probably be rewritten now using modern Rust to be smaller, leaner, and maybe even faster.
• thewrinklyninja 3y ago
  just use Falkon. browser by the KDE team. free, open etc. https://www.falkon.org/ https://www.falkon.org/
  • lfconsult 3y ago
    Great, thanks for sharing!
  • jraph 3y ago
    Falkon uses QtWebEngine, which uses Blink, Google Chrome's engine. Which is a shame, because as a KDE user, I would consider using Falkon otherwise. It's extra painful knowing that KDE built KHTML, used by Apple to build WebKit, used by Google to build Blink…
    • forgotpwd16 3y ago
      Writing and maintaining a state-of-art browser engine is hard. Using an existent one is best choice unless you don't care about people actually using your browser or they're fine with accessing a part of the web.
      • jraph 3y ago
        > Writing and maintaining a state-of-art browser engine is hard I know. And the KDE team would know too, having tried (and succeeded at the time! but could not keep up) > unless you don't care about people actually using your browser Why so dismissive? Blink is not the only existing browser engine that works with most of the Web. I'm not arguing for Falkon authors to build their own engine. That would be fantastic, but I understand they don't. I also understand their choice to use what Qt provides. Embedding another browser engine would be less straightforward or even outright painful / impossible (Gecko). Still, I don't want to strengthen Chrome dominance on the Web.
• Gabrys1 3y ago
  I want a version of this: Firefox with private mode and uBlock on but saving history (so _I_ can go back to something I browsed) with an option for saving cookies on a particular site (but maybe use a separate container so I'm not tracked across these). With an additional button to clear all random cookies now
  • ranguna 3y ago
    Have you tried librewolf?
• ilaksh 3y ago
  "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. Here is my somewhat related pet project: Tersenet. https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet It's just a concept, virtually no implementation. But I deliberately picked a set of requirements that are designed to be feasible for people to implement. Much less involved than a full web-browser. (Related discussion with GPT-4 https://chat.openai.com/share/16d02b78-f876-4c87-949a-a60b4fded622 https://chat.openai.com/share/16d02b78-f876-4c87-949a-a60b4f...) Also related is the Gemini project which is a real thing and quite practical: https://geminiprotocol.net/ https://geminiprotocol.net/ That inspired my ideas for Tersenet.
  • khimaros 3y ago
    related, a subset of html supported by Qt: https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/richtext-html-subset.html https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/richtext-html-subset.html
  • fsckboy 3y ago
    > and that it will be compatible with whatever Google decides to add to theirs There are plenty of respectable people who maintain "home pages" with much simpler HTML than what is possible, and news.ycombinator.com gets a lot of love for keeping its classic look. All this to say, I'd like if the people who have a lot of overlapping agreement on this would agree on a subset to use, and I'd be happy with a browser that didn't do everything google's did. I run with uMatrix which shuts off a lot of google functionality, and I never whitelist google.com domains just to prove that I don't have to, the world doesn't end. It's a relatively small number of sites that just won't work.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • GoblinSlayer 3y ago
• ftxbro 3y ago
  You can do it! I hope more people begin these kind of projects!
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
  When I got fed up with it, I stopped using a browser.^1 Never looked back. 1. Of the advertising-supported, graphical variety. We'll likely always have to use advertising-supported browsers for some things.^2 But certainly not all, or even most, things. 2. It would be really cool if this sad state of affairs changed before I'm dead, but I have no expectations. I would love to be able to use something "like" an API for internet banking and online shopping, instead of an advertising-sponsored browser.
  • dredmorbius 3y ago
    What are you using for Web access, if you don't mind?
    • 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
      I access the web through the internet, the same as I have done since 1993. I use software that can make TCP connections, send HTTP requests and receive HTTP responses.
      • dredmorbius 3y ago
        Care to share specific details? Curl? wget? netcat? Terminal-mode browser? (I use all of the above myself. Many websites ... behave poorly with them, though they can still be useful.)
        • 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
          Original netcat yes, all the time. A variety of other TCP clients. Customised Links browser. Several proxies. Customised tnftp. curl in HN examples. Consider that each web user might visit different websites and seek different information and data. Each user might have different preferences. What is good for one user might not be good for another. Me, I prefer textmode. I am not interested in X11-style terminal emulators. I have not used a mouse outside of the office for over 30 years. I write simple UNIX programs that extract the information/data I want from HTML or JSON on stdin. I usually output this info/data as plain text, CSV or SQL. For recreational web use I am not interested in "interactive" websites. If I get a response body with the info/data I want, then the website is "working" as desired. As it happens, the most challenging step for me is deciding what info/data I want to keep. Websites routinely contain so much garbage and marginally useful bits of info/data that processing it all is an exercise in diminishing returns. (And this is precisely what people trying to write "modern" browsers will inevitably try to do.)
• d--b 3y ago
  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.
  • robertlagrant 3y ago
    > I feel cars are much worse than browsers in terms of screwing their buyers Feelings aside, why do you think this?
    • jcpst 3y ago
      Modern cars. Older cars don’t spy in you or need subscriptions to bypass arbitrary hardware restrictions. But newer cars are ‘safer’, so it’s kind of a crappy tradeoff
    • zem 3y ago
      https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/articles/its-official-cars-are-the-worst-product-category-we-have-ever-reviewed-for-privacy/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/article...
      • d--b 3y ago
        That plus: - Impossible to repair without going to the vendor. - subscription for seat warmers and "full accelerating curve" (https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/23/23474969/mercedes-car-subscription-faster-acceleration-feature-price https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/23/23474969/mercedes-car-su...) - random feature disabling (https://www.wired.com/story/fight-right-repair-cars-turns-ugly/ https://www.wired.com/story/fight-right-repair-cars-turns-ug...)
  • digging 3y ago
    Worse, yes. Easier to topple? A browser doesn't require physical manufacturing and shipping.
  • jcpst 3y ago
    The difference with cars is it’s a lot easier to build yourself a vehicle. Used cars and parts and kits and how-tos are everywhere. It’s so much simpler than a web browser.
• jokoon 3y ago
  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.
  • rizky05 3y ago
    [dead]
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• samsquire 3y ago
  I encourage you! Keep at it! I have implemented a very small part of the ORC Solver algorithm in Python and used wxWidgets for rendering. I used wxWidgets text extents API to work out width of text. This is the ORC Solver whitepaper. https://yuejiang-nj.github.io/Publications/2020CHI_ORCSolver/paper.pdf https://yuejiang-nj.github.io/Publications/2020CHI_ORCSolver... I have been thinking about branch and bound and how to implement it. Any information would be appreciated. I think I should study the TeX codebase for typesetting algorithms. I also really enjoyed using javascript library Masonry for layout binpacking.
• friend_and_foe 3y ago
  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.
  • cookiengineer 3y ago
    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 https://github.com/tholian-network/retrokit [2] https://github.com/tholian-network/retrokit/blob/main/SECURITY.md https://github.com/tholian-network/retrokit/blob/main/SECURI... [3] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth (ongoing rewrite in golang)
  • deaddodo 3y ago
    Honestly, although it's a heavy task, I don't think it's something worth being dissuaded from. I would argue that, in some ways at least, it's easier to do so today than before since we actually have a comprehensive standard now. That all to say, yes it's a tall order. But it's not the most impossible thing for a small team of dedicated people to do.
  • davedx 3y ago
    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.
• rambambram 3y ago
  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)
  • tredre3 3y ago
    > I'm not used to this kind of negativity on HN about browsers and the open web. Really? It's a given that any thread about browsers on HN will have a dozen highly upvoted replies that claim it's impossible to make a new browser. Even though we have evidence that it is indeed possible. Ladybird is made from scratch (originally all the way down to the C++ stdlib!) and can now run Discord (poorly) after 3-4 years of part time work (it now has full time devs). Based on their cargo.lock, GoSub doesn't seem to want to implement everything from scratch, they'll probably use off-the-shelves image decoders and whatnot, so it has the potential of growing even faster!
    • rambambram 3y ago
      Thanks for this information and good to see other alternatives explained.
    • Klonoar 3y ago
      Ladybird has mostly stopped those upvote parties - turns out we were wrong!
• pacifika 3y ago
  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!
  • nicce 3y ago
    Unfortunately, everyone who provides these big feeds (Reddit, Twitter, et al.) don't like that their content is being filtered by third parties and clients. Because they want to keep their users on their platform as long as possible, and their algorithms are designed for it. So they actively make it very difficult to do so, by banning these clients. On Instagram, you can't even fast forward videos because of that. They want you to watch them fully. We really need clients for "feed of feeds", but how can we do that if we don't have access to the feeds? The browser could be a solution, but pages needs to be filtered based on the source code of the page, individually.
    • pacifika 3y ago
      Well, we only need a directory of resequenced feed definitions + some kind of resequencing program that runs the definitions onto a page in a decentralised manner. With resequenced I mean that when applied to a page of markup it can create a feed from it. So imagine it downloads the latest definitions periodically that fix compatibility for service X then everyone who creates feeds of X pages can do so again. If you can specify the definition directory in the settings then even if a directory is no longer active another can take it's place. That means it takes one person to fix, but the service would have to ban all instances to stop this way of consuming. I think most of the puzzle pieces for this exist already.
• soyasis 3y ago
  On the political note of the article: yes, the world is fucked up and it is exhausting to only read fucked up news. I personally believe that disconnecting from reality and becoming 'apolitical' implies giving up on humanity; that is giving up on your kids, nephews and the children of your best friends. No need to change the world, a small change in your community is more than enough. Specially as coders, what we build can impact and influence thousands of people all over the world. Sometimes I wonder if things would be different if we all invested 3-5% of our time in supporting our communities and engaging in some form of activism.
  • robertlagrant 3y ago
    Definitely yes to community engagement. Shovelling the snow outside the house of an elderly neighbour is good because it's actually doing something.
  • globular-toast 3y ago
    I agree, mostly. I decided years ago to stop listening to the news, but that was only after I decided to not have children. It seems wrong for breeders to stick their fingers in their ears. I have given up on the world, as you put it. But other people's children is not my fault. I do as much as everyone else does to "do the right thing", but no more than that. I used to think about all these things, try to minimise my personal footprint and think about sustainability and future generations etc. But I lost hope. I was fighting the tide. Now I just try to make sure my footprint is not above average and try to be good to the people around me.
    • soyasis 3y ago
      Fair enough, as someone sometime somewhere said "you only have control over your actions and your thoughts".
  • WuxiFingerHold 3y ago
    Disconnecting from the news industry does not automatically imply disconnecting from reality. At least I hope so as I consume non-technical news maybe once a week.
• rakoo 3y ago
  "My HTML? If you want it, I'll grant it! Search on! All the world had to offer, I left in that place" "And so hackers set sights on the HyperText Line, in pursuit of their dreams. The world has truly entered a Great Browsers Era!" After years of believing that browsers were an insurmontable mountains, more and more people are believing we can do it. My 2 seconds analysis tells me that we're seeing this not because new browsers makers want to emulate and compete with the existing mammoths, but because they want to change the web. I'm loving it.
• jaytaph 3y ago
  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 the tech industry. But 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. I think this project will not result in an actual browser. That's not why i'm writing this. I want people to see my code, either laugh at it, or get some own idea's to make things better. For instance, I LOVE the whatwg site where the whole html5 tokenizer and parser algorithms are step by step described. This means it should be easy(?) enough for anyone to write their own html5 parser. What would happen if google and/or microsoft decide to create their own custom html5 (html5, ghtml) as a closed format? Who would be able to stop them when they have such a market share? I want to start for scratch - BECAUSE i want to know more about the underlying technical challenges.
  • thecleaner 3y ago
    OP you go write that code and profile and make sure you get some real world feedback on it. I hope it DOES result in a real functional browser.
  • samus 3y ago
    I like your list of 100 opinions. Of course, not absolutely all of them ;-) but the effort you took to compile the list. Lots of things to think about.
  • agentdrek 3y ago
    love the name ... needs a 1980's Commodore BASIC visual :-)
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • INTPenis 3y ago
    As long as you're realistic about it, have fun. Most of us elders have seen these personal browser projects come and go these past 25-30 years. Odds and history are both against them as a long term viable project. But as a fun learning experience it's very impressive.
• quitit 3y ago
  I feel like this is something which a government should be developing and funding. I understand that governments like to make rules and hope that the market responds with something that matches their vision, but as the EU demonstrated this just ends up with websites with user-consent pop-ups. A worse experience for everyone, and bad actors just find a way around it anyway. Rather than relying on legislation to play whack-a-mole, why not just build something for everyone with tax dollars and open source.
  • kwanbix 3y ago
    funding, sure, developing? not so much. I rather create a foundation that the government can pitch in some money.
  • taway1237 3y ago
    User consent popups are awesome. I never agree to anything, and I know exactly which sites are spying on me and which are OK.
• mongol 3y ago
  I can relate. I have also stopped following the news, and almost all social media as well. I don't know if it is an age thing, or just the state of the world. But the past year, opening a news site have given me stress symptoms. And news sites love to feed it. Someone burns a koran? It is only news if it is reported. If someone does it in their basement alone, it would not matter at all. But instead it becomes a global shitstorm which I can't do anything about except be careful in crowded places. Better to stay home and program. This + ChatGPT have made me more productive than ever before.
  • sharkbird2 3y ago
    Plus all news are biased one way or another nowadays. It doesn't matter if you're left or right, the news you're getting is spun in a certain way to push whatever narrative your particular media outlet wants to push. This, in combination with their incentive to make everything seem like a huge problem that might lead to the end of the world, is a pretty toxic combination.
  • carlosjobim 3y ago
    Be careful what you wish for. What if the news didn't report on corruption? Because you can find a whole lot of places where the news won't do that, and you'll know it only from gossip or involvement. What if the news didn't report on tragic events? Let's say a natural disaster or a horrific crime happens in your community, and the news media is just silent, pretending like nothing happened. I bet a lot of people would think it very strange if news media didn't report on these negative events, or if international news didn't report on the war. > Someone burns a koran? It is only news if it is reported. If someone does it in their basement alone, it would not matter at all. Yes, of course. But that's exactly what a protest is. It has nothing to do with the burning of the book itself, and everything to do with doing it in public and letting people know. Even if you live in the most rigid dictatorship, you can criticize the president as much as you want in your own basement. It becomes something completely different when you do it on a public square with a crowd watching or participating. But still there are those who want to make what happened in Tiananmen in 1989 become not news. Then it wouldn't matter at all, as you wrote. As for Quran burnings, a person in my country - that is not Islamic - was sentenced for spitting at and burning the Quran as a protest against a recent Islamic massacre against people in his group. Imagine the situation: Your people are being killed because of a holy book, but you are not allowed to protest against that book. In that case the news media chose to be silent about the protest and about the sentencing of the man. Just an example. The bigger problem with news media in my opinion is delivery. I can't stand any TV news, because the way the reporters talk is just sickening. They have adopted this kind of venomous and angry voice that just reeks with contempt against the viewer. I remember many years ago I had been out on travels and spent months far away from TVs. I the airport there was a TV with CNN on broadcast, and I was just shocked at how hateful the voices and demeanor of the presenters were. Like, why would anybody voluntarily watch and listen to this? But if you're used to it you might not notice. But focus on negativity does also get exaggerated in TV news, such as when they are showing clips of traffic accidents far away, or floods in foreign countries that have floods every year, as well as murders in foreign countries that have no international impact. I think it is like you say to keep people in a negative mindset, because that makes them weak and ready to be influenced, not least by advertising that promises to make them feel good if they just buy this product.
• davedx 3y ago
  Ambitious project, I'm sure you'll learn tons with it. Best of luck. :)
• xyproto 3y ago
  Great! Here's a timeline of web browsers, both open source and closed, btw: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Timeline_of_web_browsers.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Timeline...
• shiomiru 3y ago
  As another person who had no clue about how "real" browsers work but still decided to write a browser[1] (with a custom layout engine and whatnot): go for it. It is a very rewarding experience to see websites rendered by your code, no matter how awful that code (or output) may be. I'm about two and a half years in, now my project can render HN and simple blogs reasonably well. Is it objectively better than w3m (that I was going to replace)? Not exactly, so I still return to w3m for some tasks. But I've found use of it for tasks that I didn't even think it would be useful for, learned a lot about programming in the process, and find it cool that it works at all. [1]: https://sr.ht/~bptato/chawan https://sr.ht/~bptato/chawan
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• dtx1 3y ago
  I think the way forward is to let the HTML, CSS, JS Stack finally die and be replaced with something more appropriate. It's an ever growing mess of hacks and compatibility layers to make a technology do something it was never intended to do. Heck, your browser now supports USB. We need something that's designed from the ground up to be a remotely loaded application layer for operating systems. But to get to that point, we need to throw away the decades of legacy requirements.
  • carlosjobim 3y ago
    Let the browser become a user agent in the full meaning of the word. Few web sites need their own styling or navigational structure. Finding information would be much easier for the user if all websites are presented in the same format, completely decided by the user. I've changed my browsers to load all websites in reader view by default, and it is shockingly better than the old way. You get your text, hyperlinks, images and even embedded video in a clean and legible format. Sites that need more advanced functionality can be added as exceptions, such as HN. There is a reason why people are spending almost all their online time inside standardized experiences. It is easier and better. That's why people look at images on Instagram and shop on Amazon.
    • dtx1 3y ago
      > Let the browser become a user agent in the full meaning of the word. Few web sites need their own styling or navigational structure. Finding information would be much easier for the user if all websites are presented in the same format, completely decided by the user. You are correct that this would be the better^tm solution. But it's so far from reality that it might as well be impossible. Branding, UX Design and Marketing are far too entrenched to give up their turf. What you end up with is another Gemini Protocoll that a few nerds use and the rest of the world doesn't care about. We need a solution that can deal with the same level of complexity as browsers but in a cleaner, easier to implement and far less legacy loaded manner. Something like a combined new HTML CSS frontend layer, with a decent sandboxed webasm-like virtual machine (preferably hardware virtualized) with clear boundaries and a decent, forward looking standard.
• SanderNL 3y ago
  Is there some reason why browsers aren't split into a million pieces and worked on seperately? Most browser projects I see are tackled like giant monolithic projects. For example, CSS seems like a constraint solver that has nothing to do with parsing HTTP requests. Even parsing CSS itself has nothing to do with laying it out. Rendering is another step altogether that also has very little to do with anything. I can see these things being split into standalone and testable libraries with limited scope. Maybe I'm wrong though. I often am. A "browser" seems like an "operating system". There is so much going on and I can see how a "browser" could be made out of myriad existing components in various amounts. A bit like the various Linux distributions and their particular choices of underlying tools and frameworks. You don't do it all at once, you got a million separate small chunks working together (if you're a Unix kind of guy..) Maybe we should all work on creating as much small composable components as possible and then let the other guys slap a nice UI on top of it and put a bow on it. This is probably not practical, but a guy can dream.
  • hnarn 3y ago
    Depends on what you mean by "browsers". Take the V8 JavaScript engine for example, it's used in Chrome but can also run stand-alone (I think node.js uses it). I'm not involved in this space at all but I would guess that the main problem with writing browsers isn't that they're all obfuscated monoliths, but that the amount of work to create an entire browser composed of solidly interconnected parts is still a huge amount of work, because of exactly what you said, it's almost an operating system, at least when you look like fully featured browsers like Firefox and Chrome.
    • SanderNL 3y ago
      Bellard’s QuickJS is a good example. It’s 100kb vs V8’s 40mb and for open source purposes plenty fast for a web browser. We need more QuickJS and libcss and rendering backends, not “browsers”.
  • Ono-Sendai 3y ago
    They are split up. Take a lot at the chrome source, it pulls in dozens (hundreds maybe?) of c++ libraries.
• gus_massa 3y ago
  > I do like to follow tech news, and for me, this is done 98% through Ycombinator’s hacker news. But I started to get the same feeling I had ten years ago: it’s all negative. Companies are pushing unwanted updates, [...] My recommendation is to go to https://news.ycombinator.com/newest https://news.ycombinator.com/newest and try to find personal projects and other interesting post that need an upvote, and perhaps make some comments to the author. I like more the discussion when there are 10 comment than 100 comments.
• jsnell 3y ago
  I guess what I'm confused by here is that the author seemed to recognize that news is inherently biased to be negative, that negative (general) news was never actually important or actionable to them, and that getting that news was just bad for them overall. Then he got annoyed at tech news being bad, and came to the opposite conclusion. That all the negative tech news must be correct, and that they have the agency to change it. But the reality is the opposite. Just like for general news, tech newd has a bias for the negative, and the reality is a lot better than you'd think if you just take the HN frontpage at face value. The scenarios that motivate the author are so improbable that they border on absurd. And if they were to happen, the plan of writing your own browser wouldn't help anyway, or at least would not be anywhere near the best way of addressing it. Want to write your own browser as a hobby? Great, go for it! But the justification isn't even internally confident.
  • pfundstein 3y ago
    No it's not the tech news that he's saying is bad, it's the ads.
    • hu3 3y ago
      I read it differently than ads: > the ONLY thing you hear on the news.. any news.. are bad things(tm). War, corruption, you name it.
    • jsnell 3y ago
      Huh? The author is very explicitly writing first about general news, and then about tech news. > I do like to follow tech news, and for me, this is done 98% through Ycombinator’s hacker news. But I started to get the same feeling I had ten years ago: it’s all negative. That's followed by the list of some sample categories negative tech news that they are concerned about. Most of them have nothing to do with ads. Even for browsers only one of the things they are concerned with is ads (and it's not something that actually happened, it's something the author imagines could happen).
      • edwinjm 3y ago
• Ensorceled 3y ago
  The first part of this blog really resonated with me. Stuff is bad, fascism is on the rise, mega corporations control more and more wealth, those two things feed on each other, book banning in the US, war in Ukraine, my country is burning due to global warming, ... and all of this bad news damages the psyche. I've been thinking of how I can help, that I should stop reading so much negative news, for my own mental health, and do something to move the needle back towards the positive. "This time, I DO have some influence because I am a programmer. I can develop software ..." It was jarring to see the blogger go to "I'm going to write a browser". This isn't helping, this isn't even "a way to push back" ... it's a hobby project, like woodworking. Pushing back would be helping out with one of the open source browser projects already out there or something else productive. I mean, "you do you", it was just quite the twist.
  • lijok 3y ago
    > Stuff is bad, fascism is on the rise, mega corporations control more and more wealth, those two things feed on each other, book banning in the US, war in Ukraine, my country is burning due to global warming, ... and all of this bad news damages the psyche. Turn off the news. We are living in unprecedentedly peaceful and prosperous times, and it's only getting better day by day. That is a fact. If you feel otherwise, that means you are consuming something not based in reality that is causing you to feel that way. Most likely mainstream news.
    • Ensorceled 3y ago
      > We are living in unprecedentedly peaceful and prosperous times, and it's only getting better day by day. There are a lot of people who are a definitely NOT more prosperous or peaceful. Democracy is decreasing world wide. Young people in the US are NOT as prosperous as their parents and grandparents were at their age. Global warming is causing serious issues which we are only beginning to address. Maybe things are getting better for you and me but that is NOT universal.
      • lijok 3y ago
        US makes up a mere ~4% of the worlds population
• sharas- 3y ago
  Corporations are not hiring devs... Devs have plenty of time... Devs fuck corps by redoing things right... The shortsightedness of suits is as always staggering.
• rendall 3y ago
  > And how about browser-specific extensions that make sites unusable from other browsers (sorry, you cannot view your gmail with Firefox. Please install google chrome)? This has happened, and as soon as lawyers find a way out of monopoly issues, it will happen again. If anything would rile the regulators, Google making Gmail compatible only with Chrome would do it.
  • nicce 3y ago
    I think there have been already notifications in Google's services that this will fully work only in Chrome.
    • rendall 3y ago
      I use Firefox with Gmail every day and have never seen such a message.
      • nicce 3y ago
        Not in Gmail, but for example, in Google Cloud webui.
      • jcpst 3y ago
        Same. I even use gmail in the browser on Firefox/iOS, and all it does is give me a splash page saying the app is better, then I click through.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• narrator 3y ago
  10 years from now: "GPT-12, write me a browser. Make it like the latest chrome, but make it not do this annoying thing. Build me a github site with full documentation. It should work on Mac, Linux and Windows and support all the latest standards."
  • PixyMisa 3y ago
    GPT-12: "I am not permitted to do anything that could potentially interfere with the business interests of OpenAI or of its partners. Your request has been recorded for quality assurance purposes."
• peter_d_sherman 3y ago
  Hi Joshua, My name is Peter Sherman. I wrote a non-HTML, non-CSS, non-JavaScript browser several years ago (in theory, it could be easily adapted to those standards by including code and hooks for the appropriate parsers and interpreters. (Software Engineering side-observation: Why aren't browsers delivered as independently functional component parts, that is, why are the codebases for most browsers that use a lot of libraries typically tightly coupled to those codebases?)) Anyway, point is, I may be able to help you with your quest if you reach out to me... my email address is: peter.d.sherman@gmail.com I can give you all of the basic theories with respect to what you're trying to do, and hopefully make the software engineering process a little bit easier by showing you how to appropriately divide ("divide and conquer") the entire task into much more managable, approachable, and understandable subcomponents... Let me know, and I'll try to help you! Anyone else who is similarly curious can also reach out to me, via email, too! If more than one person is interested -- perhaps we should put together a group?
  • zzo38computer 3y ago
    > Why aren't browsers delivered as independently functional component parts Actually, independently component parts is what I think should be done, would be better, that you can exchange each part, add new parts, or wire them together differently, e.g. you can much more easily change some features in ways which are not as easily done, e.g. replace the TLS implementation with your own that allows non-TLS proxies, or to change some CSS commands, or add new HTML commands, without changing everything else too.
• gumby 3y ago
  > I didn’t want to hear the news anymore. ... In fact, I didn’t want to listen to the news like ever again! ... Why? I don’t know exactly, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this was also around the time my wife got pregnant So the news is contraceptive? I can easily believe that.
  • amelius 3y ago
    Watching the news probably also correlates with depression.
• gumby 3y ago
  > 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 using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things). I've currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months, and I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-) Linus (torvalds [at] kruuna.helsinki.fi) PS. Yes – it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT portable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(. —Linus Torvalds
  • seanw444 3y ago
    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).
    • jonny_eh 3y ago
      > Almost every server room of almost every large corporation is comprised mainly of servers running Linux Even at Microsoft. Truly incredible.
  • _moof 3y ago
    > it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks *installs Linux on literal spacecraft* You never know where a project will go. And in a way it doesn't matter, if you're doing it for your own reasons.
• mwexler 3y ago
  "Now you have two problems."
• grishka 3y ago
  As someone who is annoyed with the direction the web is going, please keep at it. Not gonna lie, I also want to try building my own browser as a distant future project.
• Tade0 3y ago
  I think that regardless of whether this project has any chance of succeeding, it's worth pursuing for at least this reason: practice. I'm a firm believer in the idea that no matter how much experience you have, you should practice. Every skill that isn't practiced wanes over time. Commercial projects usually don't provide the sort of regular stimulation needed to improve one's abilities. Sometimes it's not even enough to maintain them. Even if they do, you should probably not rely on that, because it leads to design decisions that scratch that itch instead of getting the job done.
• BimJeam 3y ago
  You do it right man. I sit in the same boat as big corporations just start to go on my nerves. I use Linux, try to stay away from most google software but use a chinese mobile so I do not need to be logged in any Google or Microsoft based store. It is tough but I think you go the right way. If I can be of any help let me know. Maybe you create a github (bah Microsoft) or similar repository where people can help you testing and/or developing. You don't have to start completely from scratch as there are some engines available. I wish you luck and dedication.
• harlanji 3y ago
  Go for it. Sounds like a good use of time compared to listening to the radio or browsing tech news. I'm in a similar place, where for the most part I'd rather be in a kitchen washing dishes for minimum wage than managed by a tech guy (and have primarily been out of tech for 6 years, occasionally freelancing). Although I am strongly called to build my vision of tech and continue to do so on my own time. There are similar solo "built by a crazy person" projects out there like TempleOS where you could find synergy. I'm another "crazy person" who's building a stack with early-2000s web tech ("web 1.5"), so if you look hard there's even synergy there... support 2005-era web and I'm on board. Cheers.
• stainablesteel 3y ago
  i think this is a great idea, i hope you find others that are willing to pitch in this isn't the first frustration-funded browser post i've seen, i think this is a common phenomenon. individual people want to gain control and this is a good sign.
• neets 3y ago
  Luke Smith enters the chat
• figital 3y ago
  Am so tired of Windows 11 I’ve just started writing my own desktop / toolbars / windows / struts using X11. It’s more than good enough and not much more difficult than writing webapps (in fact half of this project is various web apps. Then Python / c / lua / whatever. It’s still a little buggy and I have to reboot now and again … but not much more than usual. At least I control much of the experience now and for the rest of my life. And I’m learning a lot of fun stuff. It’s been a huge time waster but in a very good way. And it’s very snappy. And all of the configs/settings/code synchs with git (eventually lol).
• JohnFen 3y ago
  Good for you! I've been considering doing something similar. I can't find a browser that really makes me comfortable or happy, so my thought is that the only solution is to write my own. It would certainly not be full-featured or be able to deal with the full HTML spec -- but for me, that's a positive, not a negative.
• debo_ 3y ago
  For those interested in trying this on their own as a learning experience, I've really loved the early material in this book: "Web Browser Engineering." (https://browser.engineering/ https://browser.engineering/) It was posted here a while back.
  • ngai_aku 3y ago
    It’s an awesome book and was my favorite class at the UofU. I keep telling myself I’m going to go back through it in a language other than Python as a fun and challenging personal project.
• darepublic 3y ago
  I think someone can make their own browser not to take over the browser market or compete with the giants.. it would be cool if we had tools to all make our own bespoke browsers tailored to our individual tastes. I don't think it would change the development side of things too much as the the big four would continue to be the target platforms.
• dredmorbius 3y ago
  So, obviously jaytaph is doing this for his own reasons, which is more than fair. I've looked into the browser space, and its history, how we got here, and where else we might have gone, and might still get to. Regarding browser history, there's the question of how we ended up with a single monolithic application which handles the many different elements of Web interaction, from HTML rendering to JS interpretation to identity and security to managing bookmarks and history, to multimedia (video and audio playback), and the often strongly conflicting roles of document reading and discourse versus commerce and transactions versus media playback versus general application support. (I've long thought that those four principle roles might best be split out.) One of the more interesting (and obscure) early browsers was ViolaWWW, initially released in 1992, which was a graphical browser with scripting and stylesheet support, and introduced or provided an early exemplar of bookmarking, browser history, images, tables, frames, and other features that now define the modern browser. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViolaWWW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViolaWWW> <https://web.archive.org/web/20160303174535/http://www.viola.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160303174535/http://www.viola....> (original seems dead: <http://viola.org/ http://viola.org/>) I've long wondered why browsers don't offer the option to simply cache and store content locally rather than rely on remote lookups for all access. There are some sites for which this doesn't work especially well, but for many static sites, the ability to browse offline and search locally would be a powerful bonus. Similarly, why isn't it possible to run a search across content from my recent browser history rather than across the entire Web? If I know I'd read something in the past hour, or day, or week, constraining a search to recently-accessed content would be a strong bonus. (How to deal with content changing over time by saving snapshots and diffs of websites could also be interesting.) Or why isn't the notion of a discussion --- threaded, flat, sorted, weighted, whatever --- a first-class entity within the Web world? There have been an untold number of reinventions of what was essentially Usenet-plus-something, and the notion that discussions must be fully specified by each individual website (including HN) makes increasingly less sense to me. I've toyed around with the notion of the Web as a filesystem-addressible space. Plan9OS with its 9P protocol has something like this. The notion is that Internet and Web space could be navigated as a filesystem using both existing and newly-developed shell and other tools to directly access and manipulate objects. A modular approach to Web tools would mean that we could disaggregate HTML parsing, various proxy services, caching and storage, ad-blocking, privacy indirection (Tor, VPN, or other forwarding mechanisms), interactions (editing and such), among a suite of tools. Some of this now exists, but the hurdles to general use are still fairly high. Parking something like Readability.js directly in the mainstream content parsing flow would be an interesting option. Working off Readability, I've had a notion that a set of predefined document types, to which user-selected styles could be assigned, would be an interesting change-up to the present Web. A specific URL would specify what its document type was (article, index, gallery, discussion, multimedia, catalogue, application, custom, ...), and the person accessing the site could define what style they prefer for viewing the site. The templates would be fairly tightly defined, but would allow for limited branding elements, think of how pre-printed paper letterhead looked back in the day. Another Web element that might be interesting to disrupt would be search. If websites themselves could provide indices to their content, crawlers would not be necessary (though audits to guard against keyword stuffing or other deceptive practices would remain). Indices could be distributed in a mechanism similar to DNS. Reputation and ranking would remain issues (though those might be achieved through third-party or federated services). But much of the present infrastructure that's presently required to build search engines, and the entrenched incumbent advantage, would be broken. I'd love to see a new set of Web architects play with ideas such as this, and am trying to do so myself.
• guestbest 3y ago
  If I had to redesign the modern web and ditch the legacy requirements, I’d pick a design with a series of simple docs and vm’s that would look like a squeak/smalltalk environment. Directories and search engines would just be a plugin tool to index what you can retrieve with your permission levels. And session management would allow coexisting environments to run side by side like ide’s
• sailorganymede 3y ago
  I really feel this: I wrote my own photo roll app PURELY because I wasn't able to find a decent photo roll app which just let me simply tag my images (all of them let me use create albums but sometimes, you want an image in two albums??) so I had to do it myself. I was angry - and I could do something about it. And that was enough. I applaud the effort and wish you the best luck - also I imagine myself eventually joining you in my own attempt too :P
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• handity 3y ago
  I really want to experience a happy medium between the barebones minimalism of Gemini and the insane free-for-all of the mainstream web. In my mind, there is no reason for every website to dictate its own layout and appearance when 99% of sites could be broken down into procedural elements that could be rendered however the client preferred. I recently bought a Kobo ereader, and the gorgeous, text-focused, crisp design of the OS is what got me thinking in this direction. The existence of Reader Mode in Firefox and Chrome points to a common understanding that, for articles anyway, most of the web fluff is totally unnecessary. Imagine Reader Mode, but maintaining navigation and slightly more complex layouts. There are plenty of extensions that allow you to theme specific sites, but I haven't found any that try to create a unified, pleasant experience from the current chaos. As usual, the ad-based web can be blamed. The argument that it is of utmost importance to preserve the ability to make this button 5px bigger than the other, rounded, and blue, only makes sense if you're an ad-based company trying to manipulate people into specific behaviors. By leaving the design client-side we would enable experiences tailored to providing the best experience for the user. I don't know if or how we could ever get there, but it seems to me that mass adoption of css and Javascript in the majority of websites was a mistake, when most sites could easily be built of a much simpler set of standard widgets. This need is currently filled by pages hosted with hostile third parties like Facebook, or middleware editors like squarespace. This kind of framework would also give online privacy to all in one fell swoop. There is no reason browsers need to be finger-printable. The reason they still are is because the company for which this state of affairs is highly lucrative is also the company making the leading rendering engine. Perhaps what I'm actually asking for is a splinter net, or maybe something like this is still achievable by just parsing html. While I relate to OP's fed-uppness, building a browser seems to me like trying to play catch up to a system that will never have your interests at heart. Not that I think the project isn't worthwhile, it just triggered the above thoughts.
  • edrxty 3y ago
    Yeah this is an underrated position at this point in the history of the web. Back a decade or two ago, people were experimenting with cool graphic design layouts and UI flows and new experiences were always popping up. Now everything is converging on a few CMS layouts and the entire web is just one big SEO grift. I think http has largely run its course.
• trinsic2 3y ago
  Thank you for speaking to what I have been feeling for a long time. I have been recently thinking about starting some kind of organization or initiative to push back against the anti-competitive behavior behavior that are rampant these days. It would be similar to EFF, but more about raising awareness in corporations by sending letters, and talking to employees as an organized effort.
• Andrew018 3y ago
  [dead]
• samiam_iam 3y ago
  [dead]
• happytiger 3y ago
  OP, love it. This is the spirit that makes change. I’m sure it will batter your brain and crush your soul as these large projects tend to do, but declaring war on a problem and then getting featured on HN doing so is old school hacker and you deserve street cred for it. Congratulations on your new baby. Can’t wait to see what college you choose! ;)
• munificent 3y ago
  It doesn't matter whether the author's browser succeeds or not. What matters is that this project gives the author a meaningful sense of agency in the world and we all need that in order to be psychologically healthy. Humans were not meant to sit passively consuming media that makes us feel bad all day. We're animals and animals live by doing.
• Endy 3y ago
  I'm glad to see this, and it looks like you're also building a new engine. I appreciate that and look forward to your success.
• ltbarcly3 3y ago
  I'm surprised at the amount of attention that a threat to write a browser has gotten here. There is 0.000000% chance that anyone will write a new web browser that can reasonably render current web pages without about $10M/yr of budget or volunteer effort, probably much more. You can say this is just being dismissive or pessimistic or whatever, but it's no different than someone saying they are going to build their own Space Shuttle, and the progress so far is a partial sketch of one of the tires. In about 3 or 4 weeks the author here has managed to implement about 2% of a very poor parser for html. Parsing HTML is probably one of the least labor intensive parts of writing a browser and is a task that would be suitable as a project for an undergraduate student majoring in CS as a project for a class. Writing a javascript engine that is fast enough to allow current web pages to work is not even comparable in complexity and effort. Projecting to what it would take to build a very poor browser, we are looking at about 150 years or more.
• raphlinus 3y ago
  Go for it! I think you will learn a lot, and it seems like your expectations are calibrated well. Source: wrote a browser[1]. I enjoyed it and learned a lot. My motivation for starting it is that the open source browser landscape was bleak at the time. There was khtml, which seemed fairly solid, but that was KDE and I was firmly in the Gnome camp. Mine was very fast and lean, but wouldn't scale to embrace what's now considered the basics of a web browser: JS and CSS. Motivation tailed off sharply when Mozilla announced they would be open sourcing their browser. If I had known it would take them over 4 years to ship Firefox 1.0, I might have kept at it. Gambatte! [1]: https://levien.com/gzilla/ https://levien.com/gzilla/
• Emigre_ 3y ago
  Exciting! Challenging for sure! Good luck! Maybe consider hosting the source code in an open-source alternatieve to GitHub?...
• aleign 3y ago
  The spelling mistake in the first sentence really throws me off. I'm not trying to be overly picky or pedantic but after reading only 7 words into a multiple-thousand word long post and seeing an error, I begin to think that this may be a tough read. I also subconsciously begin to assume that the browser this person wrote must be riddled with bugs. Whether that's fair or not. "This blogpost starts with me switching of my car radio..." of != off
  • cedilla 3y ago
    Considering the .nl domain, the author probably isn't a native speaker. Homophones can easily trip us up.
    • aleign 3y ago
      Fair enough :)
• tehjoker 3y ago
  It's good to have a project, more power to you if you can make a useful browser on your own these days. It's like an advanced OS at this point. Didn't like the doomerism about the news in this post. Yea, you as an individual can't do much, but joining a social movement organization would make you not an individual. I think a lot of people here just don't want to take that step or were never invited to do so and so write off things as impossible.
• eeeficus 3y ago
  I love this kind of naivitee! This is the magic stuff that either takes one to greatness or just a step further into nowhere, but it’s the most fun way IMHO to approach things. Go on OP, write a beautiful story for all of us!
• wowgoldfarmer 3y ago
  I want to write a browser that unifies all webpages to one single layout, one single interface that looks the same on all webpages. Minimal design, high performance, low latency, the only thing that changes is the images, text and videos on each web page Everything else is filtered and removed No animation No fancy graphics No emojis No additional symbols other than the text carrying the content.
• AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  > I’m not an idyllic person. I’m not an activist fighting for a better world or anything. Genuinely, why not? What’s wrong with being an activist fighting for a better world? I see your kind of disclaimer all the time and I’m baffled that anyone would actively reject this nearly universally accepted pro-social perspective. Someone help me here Is the risk of being seen as Naiive really so strong as to overtake the highest ideal of humanity?
  • hinkley 3y ago
    Do something badly enough and you can create more harm than good. Negative confirmation bias being a big one. Do a half-assed job of trying to change someone's mind and they become even more recalcitrant. I long ago realized I'm not the person who should be leading a group or a club. I respect people who can, and I support them as best I can. It's important work, but it's not for me. Which sucks when the club doesn't exist (I'm currently trying to encourage a couple of people to start one and it's not going well)
    • AndrewKemendo 3y ago
      >I long ago realized I'm not the person who should be leading a group or a club. I respect people who can, and I support them as best I can. It's important work, but it's not for me. Which sucks when the club doesn't exist (I'm currently trying to encourage a couple of people to start one and it's not going well) That's a perspective I didn't have before so thank you!
• phlakaton 3y ago
  I, too, am fed up with It! That's why I'm implementing an open-source ASN.1 library. ...On the way to writing a new hypertext protocol that uses ASN.1, of course. ...Which I can then write a browser for. I, too, am not sure if this will ever finish, but I figure that at least, at some point, I will definitely be able to tell you why ASN.1 didn't win the protocol wars. :-)
• yumraj 3y ago
  I fully support it. Qs: wouldn’t an, potentially better, approach be to use an existing rendering engine, say WebKit or Gecko, and then build the rest on top first. And, then decide if the needs are met and then decide to rewrite or fork the rendering engine? Disclaimer, I don’t have a deep understanding of browsers.
• lootsauce 3y ago
  A thought, write a very constrained sane rendering/layout engine as a compile target for an llm to convert html/css to rather than support all css or any of it for that matter. Could there be some kind of llvm for html/css?
• dvrp 3y ago
  I wonder what Evan Wallace would think
• ThinkBeat 3y ago
  I hope you stick with it. 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
• sylware 3y ago
  mozilla servo all over again? Rumors (I did not check rust syntax specifications) say rust syntax lost itself like c++ (and what is happening with latest C syntax additions from ISO). Is this true? Because, personally, I am not interested in a browser written with a beyond sanity complex language syntax. I would have prefered a web engine written in plain and simple C (without the latest tantrums from ISO). Without bazillions of deps, SDK included. That said, a modern web engine, beyond a javascript engine (for instance quickjs), is tens of millions of lines of code (Big Tech made sure Small Tech could not reasonably follow). In the end, in my opinion, the most reasonable option is to go noscript/basic (x)html where it does a good enough job, bridges with super simple protocols you can navigate to with URIs (for instance irc://... mailto://...), and really in the worst case scenario a semantically optimized network protocol (the leanest possible) with a rich GUI client (for instance sliding maps, even though you can browse maps ok with a noscript/basic (x)html browsers).