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Nessie – Lightweight Web Browser
- roschdal 6y ago.no is not in the TLD.ini whitelist. Edit TLD.ini - Good times.
- speedgoose 6y agoThat's very unfortunate for the 0.00042 Norwegians who were going to use this web browser.
- sk0g 6y agoNot supporting websites from a fairly big country with a strong economy is a failure on their part, either way. I bet they support TLDs like TV (Tuvalu), or IO (Indian Ocean Territory).
- baal80spam 6y agoNo, they don't. This is the default setting file: .com .net .org .co .io Just add a TLD, restart and voila.
- sk0g 6y agoIs this to help with security? A rather restrictive and somewhat US centric whitelist. And then there's IO.
- Jaruzel 6y agoNo .gov ? Maybe that's a good thing /s
- gvjddbnvdrbv 6y agoNo .co.uk? No .gov.uk? No .ac.uk? No .uk? Wtf?
- scoopertrooper 6y agoI think the joke was that the user base of the browser was small, not that Norway was a small country.
- sk0g 6y agoWhat's the reasoning behind blocking, apparently, all but 5 TLDs? I could see sketchy ones like XYZ being blocked, but the default whitelist is a bit... Bare.
- t0astbread 6y agoWhy even block any TLD entirely and not just malware domains?
- scoopertrooper 6y agoNo idea, but my point (and I think the point of OP) was that people shouldn't treat some rando's side project with the same amount of scrutiny as they might a new release of Firefox.
- kube-system 6y agoI would guess the reason is that it’s a small project that few people use and nobody noticed the problem before this thread.
- int_19h 6y agoI think it's one of the features that were added to differentiate this particular MSHTML-with-address-bar from countless others.
- scoopertrooper 6y agoThis is obviously some person's side project to test a bunch of ideas. One of which was to add in TLD whitelisting, so they came up with a couple of TLDs to whitelist with the intention of expanding it once it went viral on hackernews and they were bought out for a billion dollars by Walmart's venture capital vehicle.
- dependenttypes 6y agoNon-Norwegians do not read the blog of the creator of CSS, right? https://www.wiumlie.no/en https://www.wiumlie.no/en
- izacus 6y agoWait, so this browser blocks everything non-American by default? O.o
- stormdennis 6y agoJust tried it out. Was surprised that youtube and google maps both worked. Only thing I missed was tabs.
- userbinator 6y agoIt's just IE with a different UI, so any site that already works in IE will behave exactly the same in this one.
- mouldysammich 6y agoitd be neat if microsoft opened up their web engines now that they've moved to blink.
- ygra 6y agoThat'd be a lot of work (clean up the code, look through everything to see whether things can actually be released and not covered under licenses disallowing that) for .. what benefit to Microsoft exactly? Trident and EdgeHTML are not really used anywhere anymore, or would that just be out of curiosity how things look inside?
- The_rationalist 6y agoThere are optimizations and features on old edge that would benefit to be backported to chromium. E.g http live streaming
- userbinator 6y agoclean up the code, look through everything to see whether things can actually be released and not covered under licenses disallowing that AFAIK, IE/Edge was developed only by Microsoft, so there wouldn't be much if any thirdparty code?
- ygra 6y agoEspecially if the end result is a closed-source product you still license code you don't want to write yourself. See stories like this one: - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180515-00/?p=98755 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180515-00/?p=98...
- interrupt_ 6y agohttps://github.com/microsoft/ChakraCore https://github.com/microsoft/ChakraCore
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
- benbristow 6y agoSeems to be blocked by Windows Defender as a Potentially Unwanted Application (PUA). I guess it's not wrong. https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/ec9ad4a4d6d1ddcb406d96ff0efb8c212cd91ef9fa821478d12cd06ac293c52a/detection https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/ec9ad4a4d6d1ddcb406d96ff...
- zigh 6y agoI can confirm that: PUA:Win32/Hypnamer.A!ml detected by Windows Security
- Santosh83 6y agoIsn't IE on track to be phased out? I guess that also means the Trident engine component will also likely not be available on future versions of Windows?
- dgellow 6y agoI cannot imagine Windows removing the trident engine, they have a strong focus on backward compatibility and it's guaranteed a lot of businesses depend on trident being available.
- The_rationalist 6y agoBut they could make it available on demand: it would trigger a download if necessary instead of polluting disk space worldwide for niche usages
- vanviegen 6y agoMicrosoft doesn't appear to have much of a problem with that.
- exikyut 6y agoIt's necessary for internal Windows functions to work.
- mumblemumble 6y agoThe recent move to make Edge something you can't uninstall is a likely first step in changing that. You can't remove the old "can't remove" browser engine without first designating a replacement.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agoEh.... it used to be true that Microsoft cared deeply about backwards compatibility, but it seems to me that's becoming less and less the case. I wouldn't be very surprised if Microsoft just ripped it out one day and damn the consequences. I guess it's just another thing that has fallen out of fashion there, like testing, a working control panel, and updates that aren't a trainwreck.
- jart 6y agoHow did you turn Internet Explorer 8 into a 130kb EXE file? Why are you anonymous? Where is the source code?
- cedricd 6y agoI agree with you on the latter two points, but for the first one, it sounds like the application is using IE's rendering engine built into all versions of Windows. So the executable is super small given that all the heavy lifting is in libraries already on your system.
- SyneRyder 6y agoIt's just using the MSHTML.DLL rendering engine built-in to Windows, sadly.
- Jaruzel 6y agoI don't know how the author of Nessie specifically did it, but generally on the .NET platform, you have access to the Trident rendering engine by adding the WebBrowser control to one of the forms of your new application. From there, you gain all the event based functions and callable methods you'd expect a browser to use. I've written several of these type of 'toy' browsers over the years, and they work just like IE does. The only caveat is that you have to patch the registry first to allow the control to report (and render as) a useragent above IE 8. You can set it to report/render as IE 11 as the maximum. Via NuGet, you can download the WebBrowser2 control which is based on the new Edge Chromium based renderer. I haven't seen any new browsers using this properly yet (and I've not played with it either yet) - it will be good when people do, because although the renderer will still be Chromium, the browser UI can then be anything you want. I'm looking forward to people challenging the accepted browser UIs that we currently have. Of course, if you want to avoid the WebBrowser2 control, there's webkit.NET and Embedded Chromium which also can be built to bind with .NET apps.
- SyneRyder 6y agoI thought I recognised your username! In case Jaruzel's too shy to mention it, he wrote a Gopher browser for Windows. If you're reading this thread because you're interested in small web topics (Gopher, Gemini, Tilde.Town, NetSurf, alt browsers) then you might like his browser too. It was my gateway into Gopher. http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/gopher-client-browser-for-windows http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/gopher-client-browser-for-wind...
- throwaway77384 6y agoI would absolutely love to have a new web browser out there. The internet needs this. Is it Windows-only? That seems slightly odd.
- SyneRyder 6y agoIt's Windows-only because it's using the IE rendering engine made by Microsoft that comes built-in to Windows itself. The difference with a new lightweight browser like NetSurf is that they actually have their own rendering engine crammed into their 12MB EXE (and it's cross-platform).
- xenonite 6y agoAnd it perfectly runs on macOS by using Wine.
- chacha2 6y agoSo this is just internet explorer with no back button?
- glaberficken 6y agoAlso without the slowness! [Alt]+ [<-] or [->] works for going Back / Fwd Interestingly Alt + N for new window and then Ctrl+Tab cycles the windows. I like this old school workflow for some browsing tasks rather than tabs (but not all the time obviously)
- hadrien01 6y agoThat means the slowness comes uniquely from IE, not from the engine? I find that surprising, for some reason. I would have imagined the browser UI would be easier to optimize.
- john-aj 6y agoNo, because Internet Explorer is (was) not slow. That's just a meme, and it's incorrect.
- arghwhat 6y agoIE was slow. The meme is from when this was accurate information. IE 10 and 11 made it mostly competitive. The Edge browser was pretty decent, awful tracking aside. Arguably better than Chrome in many aspects.
- est 6y agoThe original Maxthon or TheWorld browsers worked exactly like this.
- The_rationalist 6y agoMaxthon switched dynamically from trident to webkit. The best browser performance wise is the one that switch it's engine on demand depending of a known list of websites being faster on engine X or Y
- frank2 6y agoMy needing to rely on one modern browser engine is already too much software complexity for my tastes. In other words, I would have preferred to be able to live a typical day of my life without relying on any software as complicated (and consequently difficult for me to predict and control) as a modern browser engine. So, arranging for that typical day to be reliant on two browser engines is something I will strenuously try to avoid.
- t0astbread 6y agoHow do you view operating systems and kernels? They're pretty complex as well.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- _emacsomancer_ 6y agoCan we add "for Windows" to the title?
- okamiueru 6y agoIndeed. I didn't stop reading when I hit "Trident layout engine". I stopped reading at "Requirements: Windows 7 or later." Though I should have assumed as much given "trident layout engine", but here I was hoping this had been open sourced or something along those lines. I absolutely do not want to speak ill of anyone's project. But let's judge it for what it is... it's a windows only, MSHTML based, proprietary software. At that point, it honestly doesn't matter what it can do, or how it does it. It's already off to the worst possible start for any hope of adoption. And it will likely never see the light of day on either Linux or MacOS. Porting it would tantamount to writing it again from scratch. That said, if it works for windows users. It's not like it is a bad contribution. So kudos for that. On a less polite opinion: I honestly think a core component such as a web rendering engine that is locked to a OS (pretty much exclusively Trident/EdgeHTML) does the world way more harm than good. Any project with some kind of future prospects of not being windows-only, does themselves disservice for picking Edge. Valve did this with steam. I don't know how painless the transition was when moving to WebKit and then to Chromium, but I'm sure it wasn't free.
- boogies 6y agoSame. If I care about a browser being > ● Privacy-oriented: zero behavior tracking, zero telemetry > ● Lightning-fast startup time > ● Tiny binary size > ● Low RAM usage why would I use an OS that’s the opposite of all of these? In particular, why would I trust a proprietary application to be “privacy-oriented”?
- R0b0t1 6y agoThe prosumer market is huge and mostly Windows. Most dev work is still mostly Windows (I think). HN is an anomaly.
- 6y ago
- userbinator 6y ago277KB is still a bit large for something that just embeds the IE webview... it reminds me of this one (original site is now gone, had to look in the archive) which is only 2.7KB(!): http://web.archive.org/web/20081226192818/http://www.kakeeware.com/i_kb.php http://web.archive.org/web/20081226192818/http://www.kakeewa...
- SinisterAlex 6y agoThis is impressive. It launches and runs in Windows 10 - can not not figure out how to use it thought :O
- forgotpwd16 6y ago>Its codebase is very small (about 2500 LoC currently) and could be open sourced in the next few months if the project gains enough traction and support. Why not open source it from the start?
- 1f60c 6y agoYeah, that seems like a chicken-and-egg problem to me as well.
- R0b0t1 6y agoThis isn't a particularly noteworthy project -- I know a few people who made the same thing to try out the IE webview. I'd be more impressed if the webview was introduced by not using a OS component.
- Chirael 6y agoYeah, at this point I view “install closed source software from a not-well-known source” as a very high risk choice. I was thinking of adding this to my set of tertiary browsers, until I couldn’t find the license/source. I wish them well but closed source is a no-go for me.
- lowwave 6y agoOpen source it, or else it is just a marketing stunt.
- unfunco 6y agoThey're like one of those disgraceful doctors on Facebook that will only rid a child of cancer if they reach 100k likes.
- ryanmccullagh 6y agoThere's a new term for this type of software distribution. Sponsorware. Wherein, the maintainer only open sources the project if they get enough people to pay them a monthly sponsor fee.
- mrtweetyhack 6y agoEven if opensourced, most people will just download the binary which can be fudged
- bonaldi 6y agoUX reminds me of WannaBe for the Mac, which was far ahead of its time on that front.
- otabdeveloper4 6y ago> lightweight skin for the deprecated Internet Explorer Fix't it for ya.
- MayeulC 6y agoI think I would actually take dillo with an updated chrome over this: if I am to use two web browsers, I don't necessarily need javascript on both. dillo lacks a good UI for bookmarks, a browsing history (by choice, but I like those), touch support (for postmarketos/mobile), wayland support, as well as some https quirks. Otherwise, I like it a lot.
- pojntfx 6y agoWindows only!
- rafaelvasco 6y agoEditable start page HTML ? Yes please!