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I hate to be egotistical, I’m sure like many people before me, I had the idea of a reader only browser. Of course I never came through with the idea because we

I hate to be egotistical, I’m sure like many people before me, I had the idea of a reader only browser. Of course I never came through with the idea because well…look how much unpaid work goes into it. As others have said, I don’t think Electron is well suited for anything to be resource friendly. I think it’s well suited for apps on machines that can afford to run Electron, not something as general purpose as a browser. Writing a browser is very hard, but something done in reader mode is clearly more feasible. I wanted to marry FreeText with Gumbo, OpenGL and C++. Maybe even throw in a built in RSS reader that displays the stripped pages. but I have no idea how to get FreeText working with OpenGL. I think if I could achieve this, I could get something that’s truly lightweight.

travisgriggs 4y ago
> Writing a browser is very hard And this pretty much sums up why I hate todays internet. Writing a telnet client was super easy. FTP, a little harder, but doable. Writing an SVG renderer using any canvas like tech (Cairo, canvas, CoreGraphics) is moderate, but again pretty doable. The fact that the w3c has churned out spec after spec that layers more and more complexity on something that was supposed to be a document viewer with links and such that we find ourselves in a position where advancing the state of the art requires a small nations state worth of resources, just to come current, is profoundly depressing.
- pipeline_peak 4y ago
  My biggest concern attempting to scrape out just the text and images. If this browser is anything like Safari Reader mode, it’s gonna fail to read all those modern pages that are entangled in template engine boilerplate snot. The web is far too bloated, but it’s been consumer centric for a long time, this was only expected. It’s not just an HTTP document viewer, it’s a pop up tabloid viewer…

travisgriggs 4y ago

> Writing a browser is very hard And this pretty much sums up why I hate todays internet. Writing a telnet client was super easy. FTP, a little harder, but doable. Writing an SVG renderer using any canvas like tech (Cairo, canvas, CoreGraphics) is moderate, but again pretty doable. The fact that the w3c has churned out spec after spec that layers more and more complexity on something that was supposed to be a document viewer with links and such that we find ourselves in a position where advancing the state of the art requires a small nations state worth of resources, just to come current, is profoundly depressing.

pipeline_peak 4y ago
My biggest concern attempting to scrape out just the text and images. If this browser is anything like Safari Reader mode, it’s gonna fail to read all those modern pages that are entangled in template engine boilerplate snot. The web is far too bloated, but it’s been consumer centric for a long time, this was only expected. It’s not just an HTTP document viewer, it’s a pop up tabloid viewer…