9 ms·

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

115 points by cpeterso 4y ago

flakiness 4y ago
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 that the other one (that backs the JS microtask) had smaller latency...and that was right! My problem was solved, by a VP, in the code! Clearly he was wasting his time as a high-level manager, but I loved that fact. And that's why I cannot help but cheer this move.
- yrgulation 4y ago
  > My problem was solved, by a VP, in the code! Thats proper tech leadership right there. Thanks for sharing, shame this is not the norm.
  - incomplete 4y ago
    /agreemsg. i had the privilege of giving a preso to mark russinovich ~6w ago, and came away from w/the exact reaction: a good tech leader should truly understand the deepest crevasses and be able to spin that back in to context when meeting w/technical people. and yes, shame this isn't the norm.
- taf2 4y ago
  Extremely proud of my big brother - a true super hero.
6c737133 4y ago
am i taking crazy pills? > Arc, which has been in an invite-only beta for more than a year, is trying to rethink the whole browser UI no one is ever going to dethrone chrome unless they start selling hardware filled with their crapware at a loss solely to suck ppl into the ecosystem and/or start giving away laptops as fast as possible for the same reasons & no one is ever going to compete with firefox or brave on UI alone, because the ppl that have the wherewithal to move away from the edge and chrome apps that are thrust upon them with every hardware purchase, care more about if your shit is secure and privacy respecting than if your 'tabs are on the left' :| > he thinks browsers are due for a reinvention — and why he thinks a startup is the best place to do it ah yes, a loss-leading category of software is best done at cash-strapped startups... wonder where the revenue will come from
- paulgb 4y ago
  Nobody thought anybody could dethrone IE when Firefox came around. I don't think the goal of Arc is to be the browser that everybody uses, so much to be a useful browser for a lot of power-users. With the industry standardizing (for better or worse) on a handful of rendering engines, it's not a big stretch to imagine a world where you can choose between different browsers and still experience the same web as everybody else (as opposed to the days past where choosing a niche browser meant accepting a worse web).
  - 6c737133 4y ago
    > to be a useful browser for a lot of power-users fair, but in that case they should be showcasing their security and privacy focused initiatives, and their source of angel funding... otherwise how will it be anything other than spyware crap that funds itself by selling your data?? no group of power users will flock to a new browser without any transparency on the above
    - paulgb 4y ago
      I imagine they'll charge money. Mighty's $30/month is a bit out of my price range, but given that I spend ~70% of the workday in a browser, if one could improve my productivity the amount I'd pay for it isn't nothing.
  - jsemrau 4y ago
    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.
    - paulgb 4y ago
      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, because of the thousand things that nag you on every website to click to close them or otherwise obstruct your reading (cookie banners, too). If a browser can solve that reliably, I'd switch to it.
Dblue 4y ago
Because it outdated
bumblebritches5 4y ago
dontbenebby 4y ago
bfrog 4y ago
The most striking, and maybe obvious statement, the design of chrome the goal being to drive people to search in google. But of course! I suppose an ancillary design and usage goal is usage tracking in some form as well.
_jezell_ 4y ago
Should be titled "Why one web pioneer thinks it's time to bundle more apps with your browser and change the way it does tabs". I like Arc, but they aren't reinventing the browser.
userbinator 4y ago
New rendering engine? Or yet-another-Chrom(e/ium)-clone with a different UI? Honestly, even the latter might be better if it's closer to what older browsers had, with a lot of options to configure and not the dumbed-down useless-UI trend that seems to be gradually infecting everything. That's one of the reasons I use Firefox, although it seems to be slowly going down the same path too.
- Egrodo 4y ago
  Have you checked out Vivaldi? Incredibly customizable UI over Chromium, if you do make the switch from FF.
  - defrost 4y ago
    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 friends and family if the Chrome-o'verse dissolves into a ad strewn zombie landscape post full Mv3 rollout. ( okay, a little over dramatic there )
    - Markoff 4y ago
      both Vivaldi and Brave claim to keep supporting MV2 extensions
      - defrost 4y ago
        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.
- Markoff 4y ago
sirmoveon 4y ago
If we have to rethink the browser is not because of the UI. We have to take the browser to the smartphones ecosystem and dethrone app platforms. Maybe, an app-able solution that mimicks most or all of the stuff one can get from developing for app platforms — because it would provide crossplatform, it would create the necessary incentive to develop for it. Also, user privacy first and open source.
- djbusby 4y ago
  Well, there was the proposal for WebUSB I think. I like it but seem to get shouted down. If the browser was a little tighter to the hardware would be easier to dethrone App - with feature that currently can only be in app.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Yes because cross platform computer frameworks are so great. I’m sure the experience on mobile would be just as good. There is a reason that Facebook moved away from a cross platform web app and even Google is moving away from its own cross platform framework Flutter: https://9to5google.com/2021/10/10/google-ios-apps-native/ https://9to5google.com/2021/10/10/google-ios-apps-native/
est 4y ago
Tried Arc, not my thing. Personally I want browsers to be developer originated, support massive amounts of protocols and playback formats, span over multiple layers of networks, debug tech stack issues as it should be. I don't bother tabs or bookmarks as I always choose to remember URLs with my head. I am not against content creativity, but I really hope someone can re-invent Shockwave Flash, a container for streamable vector animation format. SVG and DOM canvas stuff are traumatic to work with and they always seem to burn my cpu0. Rich media should be so much richer & quicker instead of 20MB main.min.js barely movable <div> renders like shit on a browser. We had better content experience with .swf players on a Pentium-III. Players should entertain us, they should be designed as consumer-oriented software. But browsers are for productivity, they were supposed to browse a broad range of documents hosted on networks of variety, with absolute control and input. Now the world is confusing these two, we are browsing a world of popups, paywalls and infinite scrolls. Arc might never be able to solve the problem here.
moron4hire 4y ago
I've been using "install this webpage as an app" in Edge for about a year now for the vast majority of sites I visit on a regular basis. The site doesn't need to have an app manifest or service worker to use the feature, you can just use it with any site. I also develop a Web-based VR app at work, have been doing WebXR and VR development for a while now. The two experiences together have me about convinced that tabs in the browser were a mistake. The operating system already has a means of managing multiple documents/app views, and that is just windows. It's disturbing that every browser has to implement most of their own media decoders, instead of relying on an OS level API and writing plugins for it. We have file systems for organizing our saved things. Bookmarks should just be links files on disk. You wouldn't need to have in-browser sync of your bookmarks, you'd just point it to your bookmarks directory and let Dropbox or OneDrive or whatever sync the files. If what we think of as the "browser" used more of what is available in the operating system, and operating systems were more closely involved in web standardization (rather than treating it as a completely siloed project) I think we could have better standards for web apps that integrate seamlessly with the user's desktop. We might be able to integrate different apps better, things like standardize an interface for image editors, let developers build to that interface, let users select their preferred editor, and have much more powerful image editing available in every app that wants to work with images. We might be able to have VR home environments where web apps represent objects within the user's environment, rather than exclusive mode, full "experiences". And having this ecosystem on desktop would make users expect to have this functionality everywhere. Smartphone OS vendors might find it a hard time to try to make walled garden, only-place-you-can-do-any-business-so-we-get-our-vig stores. But we don't. And now browsers are seen as "impossibly complex" (except the SerenityOS team seems to be killing it with Ladybird). All because browsers implemented their own multiple document interface and took over control from what should have been OS-level concerns.
- lolinder 4y ago
  > If what we think of as the "browser" used more of what is available in the operating system, and operating systems were more closely involved in web standardization (rather than treating it as a completely siloed project) I think we could have better standards for web apps that integrate seamlessly with the user's desktop. As a web developer, I do not want this. Currently, I can install Chrome and Firefox on my Linux machine and between the two I can test and get the same experience as 95% of my users. Safari is the only browser I can't directly install on my machine, but it's not hard to test that too, at which point 99% of users are covered. If what you propose came about, all of the sudden OS (and OS version!) becomes a major variable that has to be accounted for in testing and troubleshooting, which eliminates one of the biggest advantages Web development has over Native.
Vermeulen 4y ago
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 websites on a range of browsers
- 0xCMP 4y ago
  There was an idea for this in 2011: "Atlantis" https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/atlantis-robust-extensible-execution-environments-for-web-applications/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/atlanti... https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/atlantis.pdf https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/atlantis.pdf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uflg7LDmzI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uflg7LDmzI
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- caslon 4y ago
  That sounds genuinely awful and detestable. "Oh, you're bored of a tenth of a gigabyte of React and TypeScript every time you load a web page? Here, we're going to ship you the entire browser every time you reload!"
  - Vermeulen 4y ago
    Why couldn't it cache?
    - joshuamorton 4y ago
      Same reason cross origin caching is limited today, it's a stuffed channel that can harm privacy and allow tracking.
- phailhaus 4y ago
recursivedoubts 4y ago
I would very much like to see someone move htmx-like hypermedia functionality into a browser. While innovating around the chrome of the browser is certainly nice, it seems to me that hypermedia is just a few small tweaks away from being a viable alternative to the SPA approach for many applications, and it really wouldn't be much code at all to support.
- s7r 4y ago
  Can you elaborate on this? What could a browser look like/do, that has htmx-like hypermedia functionality in it?
  - recursivedoubts 4y ago
    Basically generalize the concept of hypermedia controls (links and forms) in the manner of htmx: - generalize event triggers for hypermedia requests - allow targeted replacement of HTML within a page (rather than requiring a full page refresh) - surface all the HTTP methods (DELETE, PATCH, PUT) in plain HTML All small things on top of normal HTML functionality, but, together, allow much more sophisticated user interfaces to be built: https://htmx.org/examples https://htmx.org/examples
raylad 4y ago
Interesting that their prototype looks a lot like my browser: which is Firefox using: - Tabcenter Redux (last update 2018) https://github.com/eoger/tabcenter-redux-- https://github.com/eoger/tabcenter-redux-- creates a (searchable) left tab column including pinned tabs on top of the column, just like what they are showing. And - Auto Tab Discard -- saves memory (but not perfectly) by writing out tab contents to disk if the tab is inactive for a settable amount of time, then seamlessly reloading the tab when it's clicked.
kuon 4y ago
I have been using tree tab since forever and it's really the best tab UI you can imagine. I wonder why it is not native to more browser. I can manage hundred of tabs with ease.
pcmaffey 4y ago
I’m working on reinventing a browser around reader mode. —Optimized for reading comprehension and the joy of discovery (instead of engagement / ad-metrics). This wouldn’t be the only browser you’d use, but hopefully, it’ll be the best way to read online. ama.
- aliqot 4y ago
  Thanks for the AMA. Is there a link to a git repo of current progress?
  - pcmaffey 4y ago
    Not currently, but will be sharing early experiments here as soon as ready.
    - aliqot 4y ago
      This AMA has concluded.
newaccount2021 4y ago
imoreno 4y ago
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 independent authorship) that follow some common, compatible interface. Advanced users can mix and match these components to assemble their own "browser", or even develop their own components. "Browser distributions" can be created for less technical users that are plug and play. - Ad blocking, request filtering and cosmetic filters as core functionality, rather than some exotic thing for the adventurous that is best left to extension developers. These require low level access to the browser's internal workings, they don't work well as regular extensions because those usually have security restrictions. They also need a solid UX that can provide enough granularity to be useful. Probably a good system for crowdsourcing the filter rules as well. - The browser shouldn't treat the server as incontrovertible gospel. It shouldn't necessarily run every script the server sends over, or provide a full inventory of capabilities (fonts, filetypes, etc.) unless there is a good reason for it. Rather than server as master and browser as worker, the connection should be treated as a contract where the browser is concerned with protecting the user's interest (privacy, usability) rather than slavishly obeying the server's whims.
- rootw0rm 4y ago
  so much this, i can't upvote you enough. i need very little of "core" browser functionality. i would use a browser that is mostly unable to fingerprint me for 90% of my browsing. what's left over I'd use Firefox for.
- origin_path 4y ago
  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?
hughlilly 4y ago
Tried Arc on my 2015 MBP last week and the fan immediately went full-throttle. The app was unusable.
dang 4y ago
Related: Optimizing for Feelings - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31654751 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31654751 - June 2022 (41 comments) Arc Browser Company: Chrome and Safari face a new challenger - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31544988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31544988 - May 2022 (125 comments) One startup's quest to take on Chrome and reinvent the web browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27347388 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27347388 - May 2021 (5 comments) Others?
lob_it 4y ago
As someone who enjoys HTML with java, images and cookies turned off, with several blocklists in the browser on my main reading tablet, a text only protocol would suit me just fine as a modern browsing standard (privacy browser downloaded with aurorastore btw). I still use other browsers on the tablet when needed, but have dropped websites that are incompatible with basic text webpage rendering. I also use an ipad just to watch youtube and listen to podcasts on distrowatch (i always multitask). And use a 5g phone just as a hotspot with an LTE travel router. As an aside, I was visiting Washington state this year just south of Mount St Helens in the spring and with a verizon unlimited MVNO (and only one bar of signal), i was unable to open normal websites to view (and didn't have a VPN configured on my devices), but lo and behold, youtube loaded just fine and played videos the whole time. Its 2022.. I don't think browsers are going to fix the faults/toxicity with tcp/ip A text-only browsing standard (htxtp://justwords.com server and client side) would make < 56kbps useable though :p Build it from scratch, not from bloat and ads. /Just my 2 cents
Existenceblinks 4y ago
Read it through the end, not a single mentioned "javascript" .. and DOM alternatives. I think just don't bother reinventing.
grizzles 4y ago
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 goodwill and it is/was the lifeblood of bricks and mortar companies.
- taf2 4y ago
  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
vanshg 4y ago
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 tabs. cross-window pinned tabs. low power mode which auto suspends tabs. in place editing of websites. profiles are their own application instance. extensions work on iOS. per-page user-agent. built in notes. preventing auto-playing videos. all this while retaining a native macOS UX. https://browser.kagi.com https://browser.kagi.com https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28799049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28799049
- webmobdev 4y ago
  > 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.
- thebitstick 4y ago
  Every Orion update makes the browser even better. With Safari and Firefox updates I'm always worried what they've made worse... Chrome is the absolute worst.
baconmania 4y ago
Is this actually a reinvention of the browser, or just another self-interested organization trying to grab a slice of the pie? I download Arc and am immediately greeted with a mandatory account creation page (which asks for my name, even) with a footnote that says `tl;dr we don't spy on you`. A web browser should be a purely clientside application; no logins required. Building a chromium riff that maintains serverside state about you as a user while saying "trust us :)" is in no way revolutionary, it's just another player in the nightmarish arena that is the modern web.
amadeuspagel 4y ago
> 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 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/OpenSearch
hiidrew 4y ago
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.
JeremyNT 4y ago
So this appears to be mostly an ad for Arc. To save everybody some time: Arc is a reskinned Chromium that's only available behind a signup wall right now.
CleaveIt2Beaver 4y ago
I don't think I'll be trusting the folks at Arc with reinventing the web GUI when the Arc landing page is so pretentiously ugly.
Joel_Mudd 4y ago
[dead]

115 points by cpeterso 4y ago

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 that the other one (that backs the JS microtask) had smaller latency...and that was right! My problem was solved, by a VP, in the code! Clearly he was wasting his time as a high-level manager, but I loved that fact. And that's why I cannot help but cheer this move.

yrgulation 4y ago
> My problem was solved, by a VP, in the code! Thats proper tech leadership right there. Thanks for sharing, shame this is not the norm.
- incomplete 4y ago
  /agreemsg. i had the privilege of giving a preso to mark russinovich ~6w ago, and came away from w/the exact reaction: a good tech leader should truly understand the deepest crevasses and be able to spin that back in to context when meeting w/technical people. and yes, shame this isn't the norm.
taf2 4y ago
Extremely proud of my big brother - a true super hero.

6c737133 4y ago

am i taking crazy pills? > Arc, which has been in an invite-only beta for more than a year, is trying to rethink the whole browser UI no one is ever going to dethrone chrome unless they start selling hardware filled with their crapware at a loss solely to suck ppl into the ecosystem and/or start giving away laptops as fast as possible for the same reasons & no one is ever going to compete with firefox or brave on UI alone, because the ppl that have the wherewithal to move away from the edge and chrome apps that are thrust upon them with every hardware purchase, care more about if your shit is secure and privacy respecting than if your 'tabs are on the left' :| > he thinks browsers are due for a reinvention — and why he thinks a startup is the best place to do it ah yes, a loss-leading category of software is best done at cash-strapped startups... wonder where the revenue will come from

paulgb 4y ago
Nobody thought anybody could dethrone IE when Firefox came around. I don't think the goal of Arc is to be the browser that everybody uses, so much to be a useful browser for a lot of power-users. With the industry standardizing (for better or worse) on a handful of rendering engines, it's not a big stretch to imagine a world where you can choose between different browsers and still experience the same web as everybody else (as opposed to the days past where choosing a niche browser meant accepting a worse web).
- 6c737133 4y ago
  > to be a useful browser for a lot of power-users fair, but in that case they should be showcasing their security and privacy focused initiatives, and their source of angel funding... otherwise how will it be anything other than spyware crap that funds itself by selling your data?? no group of power users will flock to a new browser without any transparency on the above
  - paulgb 4y ago
    I imagine they'll charge money. Mighty's $30/month is a bit out of my price range, but given that I spend ~70% of the workday in a browser, if one could improve my productivity the amount I'd pay for it isn't nothing.
- jsemrau 4y ago
  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.
  - paulgb 4y ago
    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, because of the thousand things that nag you on every website to click to close them or otherwise obstruct your reading (cookie banners, too). If a browser can solve that reliably, I'd switch to it.

Dblue 4y ago

Because it outdated

bumblebritches5 4y ago

dontbenebby 4y ago

bfrog 4y ago

The most striking, and maybe obvious statement, the design of chrome the goal being to drive people to search in google. But of course! I suppose an ancillary design and usage goal is usage tracking in some form as well.

_jezell_ 4y ago

Should be titled "Why one web pioneer thinks it's time to bundle more apps with your browser and change the way it does tabs". I like Arc, but they aren't reinventing the browser.

userbinator 4y ago

New rendering engine? Or yet-another-Chrom(e/ium)-clone with a different UI? Honestly, even the latter might be better if it's closer to what older browsers had, with a lot of options to configure and not the dumbed-down useless-UI trend that seems to be gradually infecting everything. That's one of the reasons I use Firefox, although it seems to be slowly going down the same path too.

Egrodo 4y ago
Have you checked out Vivaldi? Incredibly customizable UI over Chromium, if you do make the switch from FF.
- defrost 4y ago
  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 friends and family if the Chrome-o'verse dissolves into a ad strewn zombie landscape post full Mv3 rollout. ( okay, a little over dramatic there )
  - Markoff 4y ago
    both Vivaldi and Brave claim to keep supporting MV2 extensions
    - defrost 4y ago
      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.
Markoff 4y ago

sirmoveon 4y ago

If we have to rethink the browser is not because of the UI. We have to take the browser to the smartphones ecosystem and dethrone app platforms. Maybe, an app-able solution that mimicks most or all of the stuff one can get from developing for app platforms — because it would provide crossplatform, it would create the necessary incentive to develop for it. Also, user privacy first and open source.

djbusby 4y ago
Well, there was the proposal for WebUSB I think. I like it but seem to get shouted down. If the browser was a little tighter to the hardware would be easier to dethrone App - with feature that currently can only be in app.
scarface74 4y ago
Yes because cross platform computer frameworks are so great. I’m sure the experience on mobile would be just as good. There is a reason that Facebook moved away from a cross platform web app and even Google is moving away from its own cross platform framework Flutter: https://9to5google.com/2021/10/10/google-ios-apps-native/ https://9to5google.com/2021/10/10/google-ios-apps-native/

est 4y ago

Tried Arc, not my thing. Personally I want browsers to be developer originated, support massive amounts of protocols and playback formats, span over multiple layers of networks, debug tech stack issues as it should be. I don't bother tabs or bookmarks as I always choose to remember URLs with my head. I am not against content creativity, but I really hope someone can re-invent Shockwave Flash, a container for streamable vector animation format. SVG and DOM canvas stuff are traumatic to work with and they always seem to burn my cpu0. Rich media should be so much richer & quicker instead of 20MB main.min.js barely movable <div> renders like shit on a browser. We had better content experience with .swf players on a Pentium-III. Players should entertain us, they should be designed as consumer-oriented software. But browsers are for productivity, they were supposed to browse a broad range of documents hosted on networks of variety, with absolute control and input. Now the world is confusing these two, we are browsing a world of popups, paywalls and infinite scrolls. Arc might never be able to solve the problem here.

moron4hire 4y ago

I've been using "install this webpage as an app" in Edge for about a year now for the vast majority of sites I visit on a regular basis. The site doesn't need to have an app manifest or service worker to use the feature, you can just use it with any site. I also develop a Web-based VR app at work, have been doing WebXR and VR development for a while now. The two experiences together have me about convinced that tabs in the browser were a mistake. The operating system already has a means of managing multiple documents/app views, and that is just windows. It's disturbing that every browser has to implement most of their own media decoders, instead of relying on an OS level API and writing plugins for it. We have file systems for organizing our saved things. Bookmarks should just be links files on disk. You wouldn't need to have in-browser sync of your bookmarks, you'd just point it to your bookmarks directory and let Dropbox or OneDrive or whatever sync the files. If what we think of as the "browser" used more of what is available in the operating system, and operating systems were more closely involved in web standardization (rather than treating it as a completely siloed project) I think we could have better standards for web apps that integrate seamlessly with the user's desktop. We might be able to integrate different apps better, things like standardize an interface for image editors, let developers build to that interface, let users select their preferred editor, and have much more powerful image editing available in every app that wants to work with images. We might be able to have VR home environments where web apps represent objects within the user's environment, rather than exclusive mode, full "experiences". And having this ecosystem on desktop would make users expect to have this functionality everywhere. Smartphone OS vendors might find it a hard time to try to make walled garden, only-place-you-can-do-any-business-so-we-get-our-vig stores. But we don't. And now browsers are seen as "impossibly complex" (except the SerenityOS team seems to be killing it with Ladybird). All because browsers implemented their own multiple document interface and took over control from what should have been OS-level concerns.

lolinder 4y ago
> If what we think of as the "browser" used more of what is available in the operating system, and operating systems were more closely involved in web standardization (rather than treating it as a completely siloed project) I think we could have better standards for web apps that integrate seamlessly with the user's desktop. As a web developer, I do not want this. Currently, I can install Chrome and Firefox on my Linux machine and between the two I can test and get the same experience as 95% of my users. Safari is the only browser I can't directly install on my machine, but it's not hard to test that too, at which point 99% of users are covered. If what you propose came about, all of the sudden OS (and OS version!) becomes a major variable that has to be accounted for in testing and troubleshooting, which eliminates one of the biggest advantages Web development has over Native.

Vermeulen 4y ago

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 websites on a range of browsers

0xCMP 4y ago
There was an idea for this in 2011: "Atlantis" https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/atlantis-robust-extensible-execution-environments-for-web-applications/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/atlanti... https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/atlantis.pdf https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/atlantis.pdf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uflg7LDmzI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uflg7LDmzI
deleted 4y ago
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caslon 4y ago
That sounds genuinely awful and detestable. "Oh, you're bored of a tenth of a gigabyte of React and TypeScript every time you load a web page? Here, we're going to ship you the entire browser every time you reload!"
- Vermeulen 4y ago
  Why couldn't it cache?
  - joshuamorton 4y ago
    Same reason cross origin caching is limited today, it's a stuffed channel that can harm privacy and allow tracking.
phailhaus 4y ago

recursivedoubts 4y ago

I would very much like to see someone move htmx-like hypermedia functionality into a browser. While innovating around the chrome of the browser is certainly nice, it seems to me that hypermedia is just a few small tweaks away from being a viable alternative to the SPA approach for many applications, and it really wouldn't be much code at all to support.

s7r 4y ago
Can you elaborate on this? What could a browser look like/do, that has htmx-like hypermedia functionality in it?
- recursivedoubts 4y ago
  Basically generalize the concept of hypermedia controls (links and forms) in the manner of htmx: - generalize event triggers for hypermedia requests - allow targeted replacement of HTML within a page (rather than requiring a full page refresh) - surface all the HTTP methods (DELETE, PATCH, PUT) in plain HTML All small things on top of normal HTML functionality, but, together, allow much more sophisticated user interfaces to be built: https://htmx.org/examples https://htmx.org/examples

raylad 4y ago

Interesting that their prototype looks a lot like my browser: which is Firefox using: - Tabcenter Redux (last update 2018) https://github.com/eoger/tabcenter-redux-- https://github.com/eoger/tabcenter-redux-- creates a (searchable) left tab column including pinned tabs on top of the column, just like what they are showing. And - Auto Tab Discard -- saves memory (but not perfectly) by writing out tab contents to disk if the tab is inactive for a settable amount of time, then seamlessly reloading the tab when it's clicked.

kuon 4y ago

I have been using tree tab since forever and it's really the best tab UI you can imagine. I wonder why it is not native to more browser. I can manage hundred of tabs with ease.

pcmaffey 4y ago

I’m working on reinventing a browser around reader mode. —Optimized for reading comprehension and the joy of discovery (instead of engagement / ad-metrics). This wouldn’t be the only browser you’d use, but hopefully, it’ll be the best way to read online. ama.

aliqot 4y ago
Thanks for the AMA. Is there a link to a git repo of current progress?
- pcmaffey 4y ago
  Not currently, but will be sharing early experiments here as soon as ready.
  - aliqot 4y ago
    This AMA has concluded.

newaccount2021 4y ago

imoreno 4y ago

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 independent authorship) that follow some common, compatible interface. Advanced users can mix and match these components to assemble their own "browser", or even develop their own components. "Browser distributions" can be created for less technical users that are plug and play. - Ad blocking, request filtering and cosmetic filters as core functionality, rather than some exotic thing for the adventurous that is best left to extension developers. These require low level access to the browser's internal workings, they don't work well as regular extensions because those usually have security restrictions. They also need a solid UX that can provide enough granularity to be useful. Probably a good system for crowdsourcing the filter rules as well. - The browser shouldn't treat the server as incontrovertible gospel. It shouldn't necessarily run every script the server sends over, or provide a full inventory of capabilities (fonts, filetypes, etc.) unless there is a good reason for it. Rather than server as master and browser as worker, the connection should be treated as a contract where the browser is concerned with protecting the user's interest (privacy, usability) rather than slavishly obeying the server's whims.

rootw0rm 4y ago
so much this, i can't upvote you enough. i need very little of "core" browser functionality. i would use a browser that is mostly unable to fingerprint me for 90% of my browsing. what's left over I'd use Firefox for.
origin_path 4y ago
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?

hughlilly 4y ago

Tried Arc on my 2015 MBP last week and the fan immediately went full-throttle. The app was unusable.

dang 4y ago

Related: Optimizing for Feelings - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31654751 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31654751 - June 2022 (41 comments) Arc Browser Company: Chrome and Safari face a new challenger - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31544988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31544988 - May 2022 (125 comments) One startup's quest to take on Chrome and reinvent the web browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27347388 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27347388 - May 2021 (5 comments) Others?

lob_it 4y ago

As someone who enjoys HTML with java, images and cookies turned off, with several blocklists in the browser on my main reading tablet, a text only protocol would suit me just fine as a modern browsing standard (privacy browser downloaded with aurorastore btw). I still use other browsers on the tablet when needed, but have dropped websites that are incompatible with basic text webpage rendering. I also use an ipad just to watch youtube and listen to podcasts on distrowatch (i always multitask). And use a 5g phone just as a hotspot with an LTE travel router. As an aside, I was visiting Washington state this year just south of Mount St Helens in the spring and with a verizon unlimited MVNO (and only one bar of signal), i was unable to open normal websites to view (and didn't have a VPN configured on my devices), but lo and behold, youtube loaded just fine and played videos the whole time. Its 2022.. I don't think browsers are going to fix the faults/toxicity with tcp/ip A text-only browsing standard (htxtp://justwords.com server and client side) would make < 56kbps useable though :p Build it from scratch, not from bloat and ads. /Just my 2 cents

Existenceblinks 4y ago

Read it through the end, not a single mentioned "javascript" .. and DOM alternatives. I think just don't bother reinventing.

grizzles 4y ago

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 goodwill and it is/was the lifeblood of bricks and mortar companies.

taf2 4y ago
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

vanshg 4y ago

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 tabs. cross-window pinned tabs. low power mode which auto suspends tabs. in place editing of websites. profiles are their own application instance. extensions work on iOS. per-page user-agent. built in notes. preventing auto-playing videos. all this while retaining a native macOS UX. https://browser.kagi.com https://browser.kagi.com https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28799049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28799049

webmobdev 4y ago
> 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.
thebitstick 4y ago
Every Orion update makes the browser even better. With Safari and Firefox updates I'm always worried what they've made worse... Chrome is the absolute worst.

baconmania 4y ago

Is this actually a reinvention of the browser, or just another self-interested organization trying to grab a slice of the pie? I download Arc and am immediately greeted with a mandatory account creation page (which asks for my name, even) with a footnote that says `tl;dr we don't spy on you`. A web browser should be a purely clientside application; no logins required. Building a chromium riff that maintains serverside state about you as a user while saying "trust us :)" is in no way revolutionary, it's just another player in the nightmarish arena that is the modern web.

amadeuspagel 4y ago

> 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 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/OpenSearch

hiidrew 4y ago

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.

JeremyNT 4y ago

So this appears to be mostly an ad for Arc. To save everybody some time: Arc is a reskinned Chromium that's only available behind a signup wall right now.

CleaveIt2Beaver 4y ago

I don't think I'll be trusting the folks at Arc with reinventing the web GUI when the Arc landing page is so pretentiously ugly.

Joel_Mudd 4y ago

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