15 ms·

WASM or graphical websites

309 points by tsujp 4y ago

willt1979 4y ago
Did someone forget to fill out the "why" section?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ImHereToVote 4y ago
  when the "why" section is missing. The anser is "because".
webmobdev 4y ago
A browser^, at a minimum, should support HTML + CSS (+1 if it supports the latest specification). Edit: ^A modern browser
- jamil7 4y ago
  That seems like an overly narrow definition of what a browser "should" be. I think there's enough choice that niche projects like this can exist.
- Etheryte 4y ago
  By that definition, many screen reader browsers would not be considered browsers yet they enable the user to surf the web none the less.
  - robin_reala 4y ago
    That’s not how a screen reader works. It interfaces with a “normal” browser’s exposed accessibility tree, and generates speech / Braille from that.
  - zinekeller 4y ago
    As stated by robin_reala, that is not how screen readers work. At minimum they still definitely parse CSS as many accessibility enhancements were only introduced by CSS with no equivalent (or even a workaround) using pure HTML, and in practice will also require to have JavaScript support because when a website decides to be an obnoxious GPU-hungry Flutter application even CSS wouldn't cut it.
    - Etheryte 4y ago
      This is not really correct, many screen readers only support a very small subset of CSS which doesn't really match the parent's comment, that browsers must support HTML and CSS.
      - zinekeller 4y ago
        > This is not really correct, many screen readers only support a very small subset of CSS which doesn't really match the parent's comment, that browsers must support HTML and CSS. This doesn't match with current versions of accessibility software which either connects to a browser or simply bundles an embedded version of Chromium. The ship has sailed on no-JS websites sadly, and not supporting (substantially) all of CSS modules would simply render 90% of websites inaccessible.
- trumbitta2 4y ago
  Agree. This cool project should be called "a user agent", not a browser.
- __void 4y ago
  ...a browser for what ? Kristall is (near) perfect, for its work
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dusted 4y ago
  It should not support CSS, just HTML, HTTP and HTTPS. The browser should render the document based on its semantics and the users preference.
- zokier 4y ago
  If modern browser should be that then Kristall is a post-modern browser
__void 4y ago
kristall is along with geminaut and lagrange, the perfect triptych for wandering the small web! until recently they were the only ones to pass (almost) torture tests [1]! highly recommended [1] gemini://gemini.conman.org/test/torture/
- tommica 4y ago
  For those who were wondering: Triptych definition: a set of three associated artistic, literary, or musical works intended to be appreciated together. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triptych https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triptych
- O1111OOO 4y ago
  Completely agree - they are the top three GUI browsers running in GeminiSpace. Since I am seeing lots of confused comments - both Kristall and Lagrange are x-platform and portable. Very easy to take out for a spin:-) There's also JGemini (https://github.com/kevinboone/jgemini https://github.com/kevinboone/jgemini), a cute little 107kb jar file that's also a full GUI browser. Yes! 107kb:-) Also x-platform and portable (java -jar ./jgemini-1.0.jar). Not many features (no tabs, just multiple windows) but it's a good example of how quickly browsing solutions can be built when markup is reduced. That is... you don't need billions of dollars and a decade to present a viable solution in this space. GeminiSpace actually reminds me much of the early days of the web. People will complain about the limited markup. For some users, the additional security/privacy of the protocol and the reduced 'noise' makes this appealing. ----------------------------- Gemini (protocol), Gemtext format: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
- Psychoshy_bc1q 4y ago
  amfora passes all torture tests.
edf13 4y ago
Like Lynx then?
meerita 4y ago
Like Lynx then?
- progre 4y ago
  Can Lynx render Gemini markup?
  - qbasic_forever 4y ago
    Even better, Lynx can speak gopher.
  - seanhunter 4y ago
    Is there anything on gemini other than people talking about gemini? Not trying to be facetious but last time I looked I couldn't find anything. I'm sort of directionally sympathetic to their goals so I want it to be a case where there is great stuff there that I just didn't know how to find.
    - MatthiasPortzel 4y ago
      Just glancing at the Antenna feed, there are about 10 posts a day, and one a day about Gemini. Most content is just blog-post updates on computers and people’s lives. Antenna is an aggregator feed for Geminispace. You can subscribe to it with a Gemini client that supports Atom feeds. => gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/ Antenna on Geminispace
ivanhoe 4y ago
Does it know any new tricks that lynx can't do?
- starwatch 4y ago
  From what I can see it supports point and click via the mouse? I don't think lynx does. At least the few times I've used it I ended up using tab/cursor keys which gets a bit tedious.
  - bombolo 4y ago
    links and links2 support the mouse
- MatthiasPortzel 4y ago
  Since it’s not constrained to the terminal, it can display headers in a large bold font, and body text in a non-monospace font.
Zurrrrr 4y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
reneberlin 4y ago
It will need an adblocker.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- silon42 4y ago
  Personally I don't have problem with some ads, just popups and JS spyware/bloatware. If there is content/ads ratio problem, you just leave the site.
bawolff 4y ago
> TLS with TOFU... So also known as TLS with support for evesdropping. I doubt even an expert would be able to browse the web securely in that model.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- __void 4y ago
  > able to browse the web Yeah but this is not a browser for the web.
  - snvzz 4y ago
    There's more than one web out there. Gopher and HTTP used to be about as popular. Now we have other protocols like Spartan[0]. 0. https://gemini.yesterweb.org/proxy/spartan.mozz.us/ https://gemini.yesterweb.org/proxy/spartan.mozz.us/
    - __void 4y ago
      I am absolutely in love with how spartan solved the input problem (prompt line), I wish gemini would also adopt the same function/tag
      - snvzz 4y ago
        I avoided direct mention of Gemini for a reason: I am not a fan. Got nothing against the idea. It is about the implementation. I care about retro hardware and minimizing requirements; they don't. Spartan is cool.
        cpsns 4y ago
        This has always been my real issue with Gemini. Gopher is useful on all computers I own and actually makes retro computers more useful with the services available on it. Gemini’s TLS requirement prevents access by a of machines that could benefit from it.
napolux 4y ago
HN is the only place on the Internet where I hear about Gemini. Excluding Gemini itself. I'm all in for a simpler Internet, but on HTTP(S), with images and other media if needed
- majkinetor 4y ago
  Yeah, gemini is way to simple, its unpractical.
  - selfhoster11 4y ago
    Being unpractical is the point. It's unpractical to implement tracking, anything beyond simple ads, websites with flashy or distracting designs, picture-in-picture video autoplay like news websites often do, popups, moving banners, and RAM/CPU heavy client-side scripting (or any client-side scripting, for that matter). So your website will have to do without that. And that is by design. Gemini is designed to exclude those features, because the target audience of this protocol wants to browse a web where those features are impossible to include.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- smartmic 4y ago
  Fully agree. I am also wondering why simplicity needs its own protocol here. Striving for simplicity is more a philosophical than a technical task. Edit: The creation of new protocols and technical solutions alone increases cognitive complexity. From this point of view, it is even counterproductive if existing solutions can enable the same.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Dunno, the gemini protocol and gemtext format is like the internet equivalent of a 6502. It's extremely approachable to anyone with a basic understanding of programming. Like you could slap together a working client or a server in an afternoon, most likely. Its built-in limitations also inspires quite a lot of creativity.
ianpurton 4y ago
What's the problem that this fixes?
- rollcat 4y ago
  Distraction-free access to information. Like reading a book.
  - kevinyew 4y ago
    There is nothing about HTML/CSS/JS that prevents simplicity. It is purely how it has been used and abused. You can also disable JS and use user agent stylesheets in any modern web browser.
    - _def 4y ago
      While it doesn't prevent simplicity, it allows and enables distracting complexity. Also a lot of sites just break if you disable js.
    - rollcat 4y ago
      You can read a book on your tablet / laptop, or even watch a movie adaptation; or you can read a book on dead trees. Some people would like to recreate certain aspects of the "dead tree" experience without actually killing trees.
      - Psychoshy_bc1q 4y ago
        use a dedicated ebook reader.
        rollcat 4y ago
        So isn't this kind of project very similar in scope to an ebook reader app? It just focuses on browsing hypertext media, rather than a pdf/epub. I still don't understand why it's utility is being questioned, when the entire category clearly has a user base.
dusted 4y ago
What's this for only gemini? It seems to not support http, https or gopher even though it kinda mention them ? Also seems to just segfault when loading a gemini site..
- cpsns 4y ago
  You have to enable gopher in its preferences, I assume the same is true for http.
bambax 4y ago
Hacker News on Kristall: https://imgur.com/a/lhq8iCw https://imgur.com/a/lhq8iCw http, https are disabled by default, they need to be enabled in File/Settings/Generic. I was hoping it would be a single executable but (on Windows) it's 56 files: 1 exe, 33 dedicated dlls, 22 translation files. Google Search does not work, it's impossible to get past the cookie consent page: https://imgur.com/a/daGMASS https://imgur.com/a/daGMASS (Same thing happens if one tries to put the search words in the url.) DuckDuckGo doesn't display a search box either, just links about itself: https://imgur.com/a/UMLKiOv https://imgur.com/a/UMLKiOv No search box on Bing either; it's possible to access a page like https://www.bing.com/search?q=hacker+news https://www.bing.com/search?q=hacker+news for example, but the SERP is wrong and says "no results" whatever the words searched : https://imgur.com/a/J2Y4CU6 https://imgur.com/a/J2Y4CU6 The modern web is hard to use with simple tools.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  I think (extremely) rudementary CSS support would fix many of these cases. You don't need to support more than the basic layout constraints, but you need something so sites like DDG's search page without Javascript can work. I believe Google will still work on very old browsers through something like user agent sniffing, maybe setting the UA to IE5 will trick it into rendering HTML that might actually work (though the search results will probably still be useless)
  - culi 4y ago
    Or even just supporting user stylesheets like the original browsers intended Nowadays you have to install an extension just to get this promised feature
- danuker 4y ago
  Does https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/ work?
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    I actually used to serve marginalia search it over gemini, although that feature has fallen into disrepair. But it's designed to work without CSS and scripts, I test it with w3m and lynx, so I hope kristall can deal with it too.
ho_schi 4y ago
Like Links[1] then? Really. I want Epiphany and Firefox to allow me turn off JavaScript like I can allow/disallow {Audio, Video, Webcam, Location, Notifications...}. The single wrong decision was following Google into that JS-Show. JS has it rationals, I'm using it as programmer sometimes. But JS was consider harmful for the reasons! Google intention was using JS for it's so called web-application/single-page-application to lure users into the cloud. And they opened the opportunity for a bloated web with user tracking via JS, bitcoin miners via JS, animating all kind of elements with JS and so on. Result? Fan spins up, laptop battery discharged. [1] http://links.twibright.com/ http://links.twibright.com/ PS: I bet Steve Jobs would have banned entire Electron from MacOS. For same reasons Flash was banned.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  > I want Epiphany and Firefox to allow me turn off JavaScript like I can allow/disallow {Audio, Video, Webcam, Location, Notifications...}. uBlock Origin can do this, I believe. NoScript is a more involved solution, but it also still works. I don't know about Epiphany, though.
- Jakob 4y ago
  I use uBlock origin with JavaScript disabled by default. You can set a shortcut to enable JavaScript (“Relax blocking mode”, cmd-J for me. I don’t remember whether that was the default.) You can persist enabled JavaScript for the current domain for the future. I find that with JavaScript enabled on some 20 websites, the rest of the web works pretty well with the occasional cmd-J in case it doesn’t. On mobile I haven’t found a good way to do it. Brave browser makes it easiest to enable/disable JS on the current page, among the ones I tested.
  - toastal 4y ago
    There are annoyances. 1) many sites can't even be bothered with a basic noscript or it was the default message from some “starter” app rather than something meaningful/descriptive 2) basic sites like blogs are putting their image loading behind JavaScript for no reason (unless they or WordPress plugin developers aren't aware of <img loading="lazy">) 3) too many folks are relying on third-party CDNs and client-side parsing for something that should obviously had been done at build time like code syntax highlighting and rendering LaTeX (almost every ‘modern’ docs project fails this so our tech industry fails here).
danShumway 4y ago
I have nitpicks and criticisms about Gemini, and it's not a protocol that I use very often (if at all), but I also don't see the harm in it. It seems to have a pretty strong grasp of what its goals are and (minor criticisms aside) it does a decent job of accomplishing those goals. Nowadays I tend to compare Gemini more to things like Pico-8 or Markdown rather than think of it as a web competitor -- and as a result I've started to develop a lot more respect for the project. It's not designed to replace the web or revolutionize how people share content, it's designed to be a useful medium for the community that uses it. All that to say, I'm not sure I understand the criticism I'm seeing here. A Lynx-like browser with proper graphical mouse support and a couple of extras built in is a fine project. And support for Gemini/Markdown gives the browser a clear use-case beyond HTML that means it'll be practically useful for some people; it's not just an experiment in failing to render most websites because it doesn't support CSS, there's a category of content that you know will work, and a community of people making that content. That's assuming it works well, but if it does -- I don't know, seems like a cool project? It's good to have more Gemini clients.
- canadianfella 4y ago
  [dead]
- leidenfrost 4y ago
  I think of Gemini less like a competitor to the web but more as ham radio. Radio amateurs can communicate through the internet with their phones and it would be faster, simpler and easier. But radio gives them both the nostalgia feeling and a niche community to belong. Gemini is kinda like that.
  - danShumway 4y ago
    I don't use Pico-8, and I find its limitations frustrating; I am never going to make a game in Pico-8. But I do use stuff like Jummbox when I compose music, for basically the same exact reasons other devs use Pico-8 for games, and I love Jummbox's limitations for music composition. Limitations are a way of fostering community (ham radio enthusiasts all kind of get to know local operators, Jummbox makes sharing song sources in a digestible way super-easy). Limitations also allow you to not care about complications that would be barriers to building things -- I don't want to set up a VST before I start writing music. So my feeling on Gemini has shifted from being a curmudgeon about honestly kind of really nitpicky, shallow stuff like the ability to mark-up inline language transitions -- into realizing that when you step away from thinking of the project as some kind of attack on the web then yeah, it actually makes a ton of sense to build a small community around a very limited format that forces everyone in that community to be standardized in how they share with each other, keeps the community a little bit niche so that the people in it are a bit more friendly and personable, and forces its participants to focus pretty much only on what they're writing and nothing else.
867-5309 4y ago
>Crossplatform all the way excluding mobile platforms
genjii931 4y ago
So, basically Gopher.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  It's essentially gopher with TLS.
  - anthk 4y ago
    Gopher with TLS exists, it's promoted by gopher://bitreich.org and sacc. Gemini it's something else. It supports non 80x24 displays with automatic resizing and fixed-width text, among the images category.
noduerme 4y ago
You know when sometimes it's just the humility vs hubris with the way something is presented, that inclines you toward liking or hating it?
hooby 4y ago
As someone who has come to prefer viewing web-pages in reader-mode rather than their default-layouts, I really love the idea of having a leaner, more minimalist web. Just pure content without all the bloat... How have I never heard about this before?
- galangalalgol 4y ago
  I feel the same. I've often wondered how much is missing from servo if we just wanted a noscript browser. It would be nice if redox os had a rust only browser.
- hestefisk 4y ago
  I feel the same. This is insanely cool if it does what it says on the tin. I am going to try it out.
abhijeetpbodas 4y ago
Interesting that their website itself uses CSS: view-source:https://kristall.random-projects.net/style.css https://kristall.random-projects.net/style.css
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- spookie 4y ago
  Looks like that through gemini via their browser.
dig1 4y ago
lynx, links, eww (from Emacs) and edbrowse [1] entered the chat ;) Especially edbrowse, which I find weirdly powerful. [1] https://edbrowse.org/ https://edbrowse.org/
- toastal 4y ago
  No elinks or w3m?
- anthk 4y ago
  Edbrowse does HTML+JS, Email, IRC, File Managing and it's an SQL client too. And a text editor.
sylware 4y ago
[flagged]
- BirAdam 4y ago
  If you’re aiming for regulation to fix the internet, you’ll never have a fixed internet.
  - sylware 4y ago
    Corruption?
pepa65 4y ago
Instant fail: does not zoom. Unusable except if the font scaling is just right for you. Lagrange (cross-platform) looks much better, and does zoom. In the terminal is nice too, I like Amfora (Golang single binary).
- zamadatix 4y ago
  Being it's version 0.4 I'm willing to look past a lot of things being fully implemented yet. Especially in this case since Settings -> Style lets you configure the sizing of every component to your liking so we know text scaling isn't just forgotten about or restricted. Another example is text selection, looks like it's marked as experimental.
- tucosan 4y ago
  Useless negative comments like yours make me wish I could downvote comments on HN.
kgbcia 4y ago
I'm a fan of Lynx. React and angular have destroyed the semantic web.
- pipo234 4y ago
  Love Lynx and not particularly fond about JS or responsive frameworks. But I do not understand what React or Angular could have contributed that would be incompatible counter to or otherwise could have hampered the semantic web — so far as that would have ever been a viable thing is the first place. Can you elaborate on how react and angular have destroyed the semantic web?
  - mprime1 4y ago
    Not GP but heres what I think they meant. In the old days you could look at at raw non-rendered HTML and it would be so simple that you can render it in your head. With the advent of more sophisticated web frameworks like the one mentioned, that’s no longer the case. The site consists of MBs of scripts and templates that take a gigawatt to render.
    - pipo234 4y ago
      +1 on the bloat, though i would primarily blame sloppy code and cheap fast pipes. On complicated scripts taking a gigawatt to render, I would like to point out that in the good old days that was all happening too — just not in your browser. Inefficient PHP and CGI scripts, massive Java frameworks. Today, still the majority of complexity and heavy lifting is kept away from our browsers. It's sobering to think that most of the gigawatts we burn on our phones, do not show up on our power bills...
      - johnfernow 4y ago
        I think that for most businesses, their sites could be statically generated, with iframes and embed tags for interactive parts like forms, and the web would become much faster, more pleasant to use, and have a notably lower carbon footprint. Making images smaller by default would help too. For interactive sites, if videos were limited to 480p on mobile and 720p on desktop unless manually changed, I imagine the carbon impact of data centers would drop considerably. For content viewed on TVs (where you usually sit quite a bit farther back than a monitor), such as Netflix or Hulu, I think they could set it to 480p by default and a lot of people would never bother to change it. Unfortunately actually calculating the carbon footprint of a bloated web (compared to a lite version) would be very difficult. As you mention, a lot of that bloat is on the backend. New Reddit may transfer 6x more resources over the network than Old Reddit, but both of them have to process on the back-end what links should even be shown for a given user, so I doubt switching to Old Reddit would result in 6x fewer emissions. But even if it only resulted in 2x fewer emissions, that'd still be a considerable improvement. Part of the investigation would require seeing how much energy is used by the data centers processing what to send, versus how much energy is used by ISPs transferring that data across networks to the end-users. In any case, if sites were more like Hacker News, Craigslist, and Wikipedia, versus New Reddit, Amazon, and most news sites, I feel confident that the carbon footprint of the Internet would go down notably. HN and Craigslist's designs are going to be hard sell for most businesses, but something like Wikipedia proves you can have an attractive design with low page sizes. And in the case for newspapers, it'd be nice if their web versions were more similar to their paper versions. That is tough with a free + ads model, but honestly I'm more likely to see an ad if the whole site is just text and there's a text ad in the middle of it (hopefully properly identified as such, though.)
blackhaz 4y ago
The scrolling direction for some reason is inverted. If I grab the scrollbar and drag it down with a mouse, it drags up. Is this made for an iPad?
BizarreByte 4y ago
I don’t think I’ve ever seen HN react so negatively to a project, but I think that has to do with the image people have of what a “browser” is. Kristall isn’t very useful for HTTP even though it supports the protocol. That said its goal is the “small internet” and very basic sites on HTTP will work, which is is inline with that goal. Some have complained even Google search doesn’t work, but Google search doesn’t fall under the umbrella of “small internet”. When it comes to Gopher and Gemini it’s far more useful, but only a small community of people use either in 2023 so that’s not going to appeal to most people here, even though that’s the primary use case of the project.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  I mean, that's the source of the complaint though. It's 2023. If it doesn't work on google.com, it's not a browser that works on "The Internet" (due to conflation of terms over the years, people assume that "The Internet" means "The Web," especially when the term "browser" is mixed in there). To be clear though, a much better user interface for retrieving and displaying small documents through gopher, gemini, and finger in addition to HTTP is pretty cool.
  - nix23 4y ago
    What a sad mindset to believe google = internet ...that's just sad, especially for HN
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      "Opening a browser and going immediately to a search engine" is how most users use the Internet (proxy statistic; google.com is the most visited web page by a country mile, followed immediately by YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter). A browser that doesn't work with the most popular web pages is not a "browser" for practical purposes of most people. ... which is fine, but I suspect the headline is throwing readers here off because they're equating "browser" to "web browser" and then the actual tool flips their bozo bit when it can't even properly render popular sites in a degraded mode. Perhaps the tool can use better branding: "A general-protocol Internet document browser that can also do some HTML," for example?
warinukraine 4y ago
I remember there was an ascii-only browser called Lynx (I think?). What happened to that?
rossdavidh 4y ago
This is interesting, but what is really missing from the non-graphical (and non CSS/JS/WASM) web is a good search engine. Or, if there is one that returns only these kinds of results, I don't know it.
- nightpool 4y ago
  Well, search.marginalia.nu exists, but it would be kind of hard to use it with this browser, since along with CSS and JS they apparently also don't believe in input elements.
- phoebos 4y ago
  https://wiby.me https://wiby.me
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
est 4y ago
I am ok with no CSS/JS/WASM, but no graphics? This is wrong on metaphysics level. Like Socrates believed, writing was not an effective means of communicating knowledge
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  It says that one of the features is "In-browser rendering of text, images and video". That seems to be at odds with the statement that it doesn't support "graphical websites". All I can think is that it doesn't support canvas - which would have surprised me anyway.
  - throw10920 4y ago
    The "Hacker News on Kristal" screenshot from a sibling comment[1] shows HN rendered without the logo in the corner - I believe the browser won't render inline media (which is how many other Gemini viewers work), in which case the parent's complaint applies. I think that it's kind of an anti-tool-for-thought - meant to be an art piece or a political statement, and not a tool for getting work done. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34351337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34351337
moron4hire 4y ago
I'm quite pleased with how my personal site renders in it. Other than my navigation menu not showing up in quite the right place (which is definitely on me), everything else flows very nicely.
Julesman 4y ago
Because reasons. lol
Shared404 4y ago
If the dev is reading these, just know that a lot of us here _do_ quite like this. I'm in the "market" for a small internet browser these days, and this is one I very well may get good use out of.
tete 4y ago
Not a fan of Gemini for various reason, but this browser seems like a really cool project. And browsing the other projects, like LoLa. They seem really cool too. And I really love the style of the whole website. Nicely done!
jug 4y ago
I think it would be more flexible to instead of Geminispace and developing a browser without JS support to enforce “smolnet” would simply be to define a HTMLite standard with a subset where e.g. the entire script tag or img tag is not part of it. Then you have HTMLite verifiers (probably the simplest thing to verify!) to ensure a site is compliant and voila you need no Gemini protocol, only simple HTTP/1 and you can also render it in anything from Firefox 1.0 to Kristall to Lynx to Chrome 100+. As a bonus now you would also have very mature accessibility support thanks to modern browsers. We already have the tools for smolnet. We don’t need to enforce it by removing features. We just need to define what little it should be. Having said that, all the power to people who love tinkering this way instead. I just think it will be a hindrance to broader adoption and wasting a bit of flexibility and reach (in terms of both software and people).
- LesZedCB 4y ago
  from the Gemini FAQ[1], 2.5: > The problem is that deciding upon a strictly limited subset of HTTP and HTML, slapping a label on it and calling it a day would do almost nothing to create a clearly demarcated space where people can go to consume only that kind of content in only that kind of way. It's impossible to know in advance whether what's on the other side of a https:// https:// URL will be within the subset or outside it. It's very tedious to verify that a website claiming to use only the subset actually does, as many of the features we want to avoid are invisible (but not harmless!) to the user. It's difficult or even impossible to deactivate support for all the unwanted features in mainstream browsers, so if somebody breaks the rules you'll pay the consequences. Writing a dumbed down web browser which gracefully ignores all the unwanted features is much harder than writing a Gemini client from scratch. Even if you did it, you'd have a very difficult time discovering the minuscule fraction of websites it could render. > Alternative, simple-by-design protocols like Gopher and Gemini create alternative, simple-by-design spaces with obvious boundaries and hard restrictions. You know for sure when you enter Geminispace, and you can know for sure and in advance when following a certain link will cause you leave it. While you're there, you know for sure and in advance that everybody else there is playing by the same rules. You can relax and get on with your browsing, and follow links to sites you've never heard of before, which just popped up yesterday, and be confident that they won't try to track you or serve you garbage because they can't. You can do all this with a client you wrote yourself, so you know you can trust it. It's a very different, much more liberating and much more empowering experience than trying to carve out a tiny, invisible sub-sub-sub-sub-space of the web. [1] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
opan 4y ago
Appears to be packaged in both guix and nix, which is surprisingly not mentioned on the website.
nickdothutton 4y ago
My kingdom for a non corporate browser.
guilhas 4y ago
For me this is the future of the productive web, documents sharing. Forget the smart apps The only thing missing to make it perfect is XUL addons
robinsonb5 4y ago
I've thought for a while that the world needs a new simplified web, based on something like markdown but properly standardised. I'm stoked to discover that something similar actually exists!

309 points by tsujp 4y ago

willt1979 4y ago

Did someone forget to fill out the "why" section?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ImHereToVote 4y ago
when the "why" section is missing. The anser is "because".

webmobdev 4y ago

A browser^, at a minimum, should support HTML + CSS (+1 if it supports the latest specification). Edit: ^A modern browser

jamil7 4y ago
That seems like an overly narrow definition of what a browser "should" be. I think there's enough choice that niche projects like this can exist.
Etheryte 4y ago
By that definition, many screen reader browsers would not be considered browsers yet they enable the user to surf the web none the less.
- robin_reala 4y ago
  That’s not how a screen reader works. It interfaces with a “normal” browser’s exposed accessibility tree, and generates speech / Braille from that.
- zinekeller 4y ago
  As stated by robin_reala, that is not how screen readers work. At minimum they still definitely parse CSS as many accessibility enhancements were only introduced by CSS with no equivalent (or even a workaround) using pure HTML, and in practice will also require to have JavaScript support because when a website decides to be an obnoxious GPU-hungry Flutter application even CSS wouldn't cut it.
  - Etheryte 4y ago
    This is not really correct, many screen readers only support a very small subset of CSS which doesn't really match the parent's comment, that browsers must support HTML and CSS.
    - zinekeller 4y ago
      > This is not really correct, many screen readers only support a very small subset of CSS which doesn't really match the parent's comment, that browsers must support HTML and CSS. This doesn't match with current versions of accessibility software which either connects to a browser or simply bundles an embedded version of Chromium. The ship has sailed on no-JS websites sadly, and not supporting (substantially) all of CSS modules would simply render 90% of websites inaccessible.
trumbitta2 4y ago
Agree. This cool project should be called "a user agent", not a browser.
__void 4y ago
...a browser for what ? Kristall is (near) perfect, for its work
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dusted 4y ago
It should not support CSS, just HTML, HTTP and HTTPS. The browser should render the document based on its semantics and the users preference.
zokier 4y ago
If modern browser should be that then Kristall is a post-modern browser

__void 4y ago

kristall is along with geminaut and lagrange, the perfect triptych for wandering the small web! until recently they were the only ones to pass (almost) torture tests [1]! highly recommended [1] gemini://gemini.conman.org/test/torture/

tommica 4y ago
For those who were wondering: Triptych definition: a set of three associated artistic, literary, or musical works intended to be appreciated together. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triptych https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triptych
O1111OOO 4y ago
Completely agree - they are the top three GUI browsers running in GeminiSpace. Since I am seeing lots of confused comments - both Kristall and Lagrange are x-platform and portable. Very easy to take out for a spin:-) There's also JGemini (https://github.com/kevinboone/jgemini https://github.com/kevinboone/jgemini), a cute little 107kb jar file that's also a full GUI browser. Yes! 107kb:-) Also x-platform and portable (java -jar ./jgemini-1.0.jar). Not many features (no tabs, just multiple windows) but it's a good example of how quickly browsing solutions can be built when markup is reduced. That is... you don't need billions of dollars and a decade to present a viable solution in this space. GeminiSpace actually reminds me much of the early days of the web. People will complain about the limited markup. For some users, the additional security/privacy of the protocol and the reduced 'noise' makes this appealing. ----------------------------- Gemini (protocol), Gemtext format: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
Psychoshy_bc1q 4y ago
amfora passes all torture tests.

edf13 4y ago

Like Lynx then?

meerita 4y ago

Like Lynx then?

progre 4y ago
Can Lynx render Gemini markup?
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  Even better, Lynx can speak gopher.
- seanhunter 4y ago
  Is there anything on gemini other than people talking about gemini? Not trying to be facetious but last time I looked I couldn't find anything. I'm sort of directionally sympathetic to their goals so I want it to be a case where there is great stuff there that I just didn't know how to find.
  - MatthiasPortzel 4y ago
    Just glancing at the Antenna feed, there are about 10 posts a day, and one a day about Gemini. Most content is just blog-post updates on computers and people’s lives. Antenna is an aggregator feed for Geminispace. You can subscribe to it with a Gemini client that supports Atom feeds. => gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/ Antenna on Geminispace

ivanhoe 4y ago

Does it know any new tricks that lynx can't do?

starwatch 4y ago
From what I can see it supports point and click via the mouse? I don't think lynx does. At least the few times I've used it I ended up using tab/cursor keys which gets a bit tedious.
- bombolo 4y ago
  links and links2 support the mouse
MatthiasPortzel 4y ago
Since it’s not constrained to the terminal, it can display headers in a large bold font, and body text in a non-monospace font.

Zurrrrr 4y ago

[flagged]

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reneberlin 4y ago

It will need an adblocker.

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silon42 4y ago
Personally I don't have problem with some ads, just popups and JS spyware/bloatware. If there is content/ads ratio problem, you just leave the site.

bawolff 4y ago

> TLS with TOFU... So also known as TLS with support for evesdropping. I doubt even an expert would be able to browse the web securely in that model.

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__void 4y ago
> able to browse the web Yeah but this is not a browser for the web.
- snvzz 4y ago
  There's more than one web out there. Gopher and HTTP used to be about as popular. Now we have other protocols like Spartan[0]. 0. https://gemini.yesterweb.org/proxy/spartan.mozz.us/ https://gemini.yesterweb.org/proxy/spartan.mozz.us/
  - __void 4y ago
    I am absolutely in love with how spartan solved the input problem (prompt line), I wish gemini would also adopt the same function/tag
    - snvzz 4y ago
      I avoided direct mention of Gemini for a reason: I am not a fan. Got nothing against the idea. It is about the implementation. I care about retro hardware and minimizing requirements; they don't. Spartan is cool.
      - cpsns 4y ago
        This has always been my real issue with Gemini. Gopher is useful on all computers I own and actually makes retro computers more useful with the services available on it. Gemini’s TLS requirement prevents access by a of machines that could benefit from it.

napolux 4y ago

HN is the only place on the Internet where I hear about Gemini. Excluding Gemini itself. I'm all in for a simpler Internet, but on HTTP(S), with images and other media if needed

majkinetor 4y ago
Yeah, gemini is way to simple, its unpractical.
- selfhoster11 4y ago
  Being unpractical is the point. It's unpractical to implement tracking, anything beyond simple ads, websites with flashy or distracting designs, picture-in-picture video autoplay like news websites often do, popups, moving banners, and RAM/CPU heavy client-side scripting (or any client-side scripting, for that matter). So your website will have to do without that. And that is by design. Gemini is designed to exclude those features, because the target audience of this protocol wants to browse a web where those features are impossible to include.
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smartmic 4y ago
Fully agree. I am also wondering why simplicity needs its own protocol here. Striving for simplicity is more a philosophical than a technical task. Edit: The creation of new protocols and technical solutions alone increases cognitive complexity. From this point of view, it is even counterproductive if existing solutions can enable the same.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  Dunno, the gemini protocol and gemtext format is like the internet equivalent of a 6502. It's extremely approachable to anyone with a basic understanding of programming. Like you could slap together a working client or a server in an afternoon, most likely. Its built-in limitations also inspires quite a lot of creativity.

ianpurton 4y ago

What's the problem that this fixes?

rollcat 4y ago
Distraction-free access to information. Like reading a book.
- kevinyew 4y ago
  There is nothing about HTML/CSS/JS that prevents simplicity. It is purely how it has been used and abused. You can also disable JS and use user agent stylesheets in any modern web browser.
  - _def 4y ago
    While it doesn't prevent simplicity, it allows and enables distracting complexity. Also a lot of sites just break if you disable js.
  - rollcat 4y ago
    You can read a book on your tablet / laptop, or even watch a movie adaptation; or you can read a book on dead trees. Some people would like to recreate certain aspects of the "dead tree" experience without actually killing trees.
    - Psychoshy_bc1q 4y ago
      use a dedicated ebook reader.
      - rollcat 4y ago
        So isn't this kind of project very similar in scope to an ebook reader app? It just focuses on browsing hypertext media, rather than a pdf/epub. I still don't understand why it's utility is being questioned, when the entire category clearly has a user base.

dusted 4y ago

What's this for only gemini? It seems to not support http, https or gopher even though it kinda mention them ? Also seems to just segfault when loading a gemini site..

cpsns 4y ago
You have to enable gopher in its preferences, I assume the same is true for http.

bambax 4y ago

Hacker News on Kristall: https://imgur.com/a/lhq8iCw https://imgur.com/a/lhq8iCw http, https are disabled by default, they need to be enabled in File/Settings/Generic. I was hoping it would be a single executable but (on Windows) it's 56 files: 1 exe, 33 dedicated dlls, 22 translation files. Google Search does not work, it's impossible to get past the cookie consent page: https://imgur.com/a/daGMASS https://imgur.com/a/daGMASS (Same thing happens if one tries to put the search words in the url.) DuckDuckGo doesn't display a search box either, just links about itself: https://imgur.com/a/UMLKiOv https://imgur.com/a/UMLKiOv No search box on Bing either; it's possible to access a page like https://www.bing.com/search?q=hacker+news https://www.bing.com/search?q=hacker+news for example, but the SERP is wrong and says "no results" whatever the words searched : https://imgur.com/a/J2Y4CU6 https://imgur.com/a/J2Y4CU6 The modern web is hard to use with simple tools.

jeroenhd 4y ago
I think (extremely) rudementary CSS support would fix many of these cases. You don't need to support more than the basic layout constraints, but you need something so sites like DDG's search page without Javascript can work. I believe Google will still work on very old browsers through something like user agent sniffing, maybe setting the UA to IE5 will trick it into rendering HTML that might actually work (though the search results will probably still be useless)
- culi 4y ago
  Or even just supporting user stylesheets like the original browsers intended Nowadays you have to install an extension just to get this promised feature
danuker 4y ago
Does https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/ work?
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  I actually used to serve marginalia search it over gemini, although that feature has fallen into disrepair. But it's designed to work without CSS and scripts, I test it with w3m and lynx, so I hope kristall can deal with it too.

ho_schi 4y ago

Like Links[1] then? Really. I want Epiphany and Firefox to allow me turn off JavaScript like I can allow/disallow {Audio, Video, Webcam, Location, Notifications...}. The single wrong decision was following Google into that JS-Show. JS has it rationals, I'm using it as programmer sometimes. But JS was consider harmful for the reasons! Google intention was using JS for it's so called web-application/single-page-application to lure users into the cloud. And they opened the opportunity for a bloated web with user tracking via JS, bitcoin miners via JS, animating all kind of elements with JS and so on. Result? Fan spins up, laptop battery discharged. [1] http://links.twibright.com/ http://links.twibright.com/ PS: I bet Steve Jobs would have banned entire Electron from MacOS. For same reasons Flash was banned.

jeroenhd 4y ago
> I want Epiphany and Firefox to allow me turn off JavaScript like I can allow/disallow {Audio, Video, Webcam, Location, Notifications...}. uBlock Origin can do this, I believe. NoScript is a more involved solution, but it also still works. I don't know about Epiphany, though.
Jakob 4y ago
I use uBlock origin with JavaScript disabled by default. You can set a shortcut to enable JavaScript (“Relax blocking mode”, cmd-J for me. I don’t remember whether that was the default.) You can persist enabled JavaScript for the current domain for the future. I find that with JavaScript enabled on some 20 websites, the rest of the web works pretty well with the occasional cmd-J in case it doesn’t. On mobile I haven’t found a good way to do it. Brave browser makes it easiest to enable/disable JS on the current page, among the ones I tested.
- toastal 4y ago
  There are annoyances. 1) many sites can't even be bothered with a basic noscript or it was the default message from some “starter” app rather than something meaningful/descriptive 2) basic sites like blogs are putting their image loading behind JavaScript for no reason (unless they or WordPress plugin developers aren't aware of <img loading="lazy">) 3) too many folks are relying on third-party CDNs and client-side parsing for something that should obviously had been done at build time like code syntax highlighting and rendering LaTeX (almost every ‘modern’ docs project fails this so our tech industry fails here).

danShumway 4y ago

I have nitpicks and criticisms about Gemini, and it's not a protocol that I use very often (if at all), but I also don't see the harm in it. It seems to have a pretty strong grasp of what its goals are and (minor criticisms aside) it does a decent job of accomplishing those goals. Nowadays I tend to compare Gemini more to things like Pico-8 or Markdown rather than think of it as a web competitor -- and as a result I've started to develop a lot more respect for the project. It's not designed to replace the web or revolutionize how people share content, it's designed to be a useful medium for the community that uses it. All that to say, I'm not sure I understand the criticism I'm seeing here. A Lynx-like browser with proper graphical mouse support and a couple of extras built in is a fine project. And support for Gemini/Markdown gives the browser a clear use-case beyond HTML that means it'll be practically useful for some people; it's not just an experiment in failing to render most websites because it doesn't support CSS, there's a category of content that you know will work, and a community of people making that content. That's assuming it works well, but if it does -- I don't know, seems like a cool project? It's good to have more Gemini clients.

canadianfella 4y ago
[dead]
leidenfrost 4y ago
I think of Gemini less like a competitor to the web but more as ham radio. Radio amateurs can communicate through the internet with their phones and it would be faster, simpler and easier. But radio gives them both the nostalgia feeling and a niche community to belong. Gemini is kinda like that.
- danShumway 4y ago
  I don't use Pico-8, and I find its limitations frustrating; I am never going to make a game in Pico-8. But I do use stuff like Jummbox when I compose music, for basically the same exact reasons other devs use Pico-8 for games, and I love Jummbox's limitations for music composition. Limitations are a way of fostering community (ham radio enthusiasts all kind of get to know local operators, Jummbox makes sharing song sources in a digestible way super-easy). Limitations also allow you to not care about complications that would be barriers to building things -- I don't want to set up a VST before I start writing music. So my feeling on Gemini has shifted from being a curmudgeon about honestly kind of really nitpicky, shallow stuff like the ability to mark-up inline language transitions -- into realizing that when you step away from thinking of the project as some kind of attack on the web then yeah, it actually makes a ton of sense to build a small community around a very limited format that forces everyone in that community to be standardized in how they share with each other, keeps the community a little bit niche so that the people in it are a bit more friendly and personable, and forces its participants to focus pretty much only on what they're writing and nothing else.

867-5309 4y ago

>Crossplatform all the way excluding mobile platforms

genjii931 4y ago

So, basically Gopher.

marginalia_nu 4y ago
It's essentially gopher with TLS.
- anthk 4y ago
  Gopher with TLS exists, it's promoted by gopher://bitreich.org and sacc. Gemini it's something else. It supports non 80x24 displays with automatic resizing and fixed-width text, among the images category.

noduerme 4y ago

You know when sometimes it's just the humility vs hubris with the way something is presented, that inclines you toward liking or hating it?

hooby 4y ago

As someone who has come to prefer viewing web-pages in reader-mode rather than their default-layouts, I really love the idea of having a leaner, more minimalist web. Just pure content without all the bloat... How have I never heard about this before?

galangalalgol 4y ago
I feel the same. I've often wondered how much is missing from servo if we just wanted a noscript browser. It would be nice if redox os had a rust only browser.
hestefisk 4y ago
I feel the same. This is insanely cool if it does what it says on the tin. I am going to try it out.

abhijeetpbodas 4y ago

Interesting that their website itself uses CSS: view-source:https://kristall.random-projects.net/style.css https://kristall.random-projects.net/style.css

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spookie 4y ago
Looks like that through gemini via their browser.

dig1 4y ago

lynx, links, eww (from Emacs) and edbrowse [1] entered the chat ;) Especially edbrowse, which I find weirdly powerful. [1] https://edbrowse.org/ https://edbrowse.org/

toastal 4y ago
No elinks or w3m?
anthk 4y ago
Edbrowse does HTML+JS, Email, IRC, File Managing and it's an SQL client too. And a text editor.

sylware 4y ago

[flagged]

BirAdam 4y ago
If you’re aiming for regulation to fix the internet, you’ll never have a fixed internet.
- sylware 4y ago
  Corruption?

pepa65 4y ago

Instant fail: does not zoom. Unusable except if the font scaling is just right for you. Lagrange (cross-platform) looks much better, and does zoom. In the terminal is nice too, I like Amfora (Golang single binary).

zamadatix 4y ago
Being it's version 0.4 I'm willing to look past a lot of things being fully implemented yet. Especially in this case since Settings -> Style lets you configure the sizing of every component to your liking so we know text scaling isn't just forgotten about or restricted. Another example is text selection, looks like it's marked as experimental.
tucosan 4y ago
Useless negative comments like yours make me wish I could downvote comments on HN.

kgbcia 4y ago

I'm a fan of Lynx. React and angular have destroyed the semantic web.

pipo234 4y ago
Love Lynx and not particularly fond about JS or responsive frameworks. But I do not understand what React or Angular could have contributed that would be incompatible counter to or otherwise could have hampered the semantic web — so far as that would have ever been a viable thing is the first place. Can you elaborate on how react and angular have destroyed the semantic web?
- mprime1 4y ago
  Not GP but heres what I think they meant. In the old days you could look at at raw non-rendered HTML and it would be so simple that you can render it in your head. With the advent of more sophisticated web frameworks like the one mentioned, that’s no longer the case. The site consists of MBs of scripts and templates that take a gigawatt to render.
  - pipo234 4y ago
    +1 on the bloat, though i would primarily blame sloppy code and cheap fast pipes. On complicated scripts taking a gigawatt to render, I would like to point out that in the good old days that was all happening too — just not in your browser. Inefficient PHP and CGI scripts, massive Java frameworks. Today, still the majority of complexity and heavy lifting is kept away from our browsers. It's sobering to think that most of the gigawatts we burn on our phones, do not show up on our power bills...
    - johnfernow 4y ago
      I think that for most businesses, their sites could be statically generated, with iframes and embed tags for interactive parts like forms, and the web would become much faster, more pleasant to use, and have a notably lower carbon footprint. Making images smaller by default would help too. For interactive sites, if videos were limited to 480p on mobile and 720p on desktop unless manually changed, I imagine the carbon impact of data centers would drop considerably. For content viewed on TVs (where you usually sit quite a bit farther back than a monitor), such as Netflix or Hulu, I think they could set it to 480p by default and a lot of people would never bother to change it. Unfortunately actually calculating the carbon footprint of a bloated web (compared to a lite version) would be very difficult. As you mention, a lot of that bloat is on the backend. New Reddit may transfer 6x more resources over the network than Old Reddit, but both of them have to process on the back-end what links should even be shown for a given user, so I doubt switching to Old Reddit would result in 6x fewer emissions. But even if it only resulted in 2x fewer emissions, that'd still be a considerable improvement. Part of the investigation would require seeing how much energy is used by the data centers processing what to send, versus how much energy is used by ISPs transferring that data across networks to the end-users. In any case, if sites were more like Hacker News, Craigslist, and Wikipedia, versus New Reddit, Amazon, and most news sites, I feel confident that the carbon footprint of the Internet would go down notably. HN and Craigslist's designs are going to be hard sell for most businesses, but something like Wikipedia proves you can have an attractive design with low page sizes. And in the case for newspapers, it'd be nice if their web versions were more similar to their paper versions. That is tough with a free + ads model, but honestly I'm more likely to see an ad if the whole site is just text and there's a text ad in the middle of it (hopefully properly identified as such, though.)

blackhaz 4y ago

The scrolling direction for some reason is inverted. If I grab the scrollbar and drag it down with a mouse, it drags up. Is this made for an iPad?

BizarreByte 4y ago

I don’t think I’ve ever seen HN react so negatively to a project, but I think that has to do with the image people have of what a “browser” is. Kristall isn’t very useful for HTTP even though it supports the protocol. That said its goal is the “small internet” and very basic sites on HTTP will work, which is is inline with that goal. Some have complained even Google search doesn’t work, but Google search doesn’t fall under the umbrella of “small internet”. When it comes to Gopher and Gemini it’s far more useful, but only a small community of people use either in 2023 so that’s not going to appeal to most people here, even though that’s the primary use case of the project.

shadowgovt 4y ago
I mean, that's the source of the complaint though. It's 2023. If it doesn't work on google.com, it's not a browser that works on "The Internet" (due to conflation of terms over the years, people assume that "The Internet" means "The Web," especially when the term "browser" is mixed in there). To be clear though, a much better user interface for retrieving and displaying small documents through gopher, gemini, and finger in addition to HTTP is pretty cool.
- nix23 4y ago
  What a sad mindset to believe google = internet ...that's just sad, especially for HN
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    "Opening a browser and going immediately to a search engine" is how most users use the Internet (proxy statistic; google.com is the most visited web page by a country mile, followed immediately by YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter). A browser that doesn't work with the most popular web pages is not a "browser" for practical purposes of most people. ... which is fine, but I suspect the headline is throwing readers here off because they're equating "browser" to "web browser" and then the actual tool flips their bozo bit when it can't even properly render popular sites in a degraded mode. Perhaps the tool can use better branding: "A general-protocol Internet document browser that can also do some HTML," for example?

warinukraine 4y ago

I remember there was an ascii-only browser called Lynx (I think?). What happened to that?

rossdavidh 4y ago

This is interesting, but what is really missing from the non-graphical (and non CSS/JS/WASM) web is a good search engine. Or, if there is one that returns only these kinds of results, I don't know it.

nightpool 4y ago
Well, search.marginalia.nu exists, but it would be kind of hard to use it with this browser, since along with CSS and JS they apparently also don't believe in input elements.
phoebos 4y ago
https://wiby.me https://wiby.me

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

est 4y ago

I am ok with no CSS/JS/WASM, but no graphics? This is wrong on metaphysics level. Like Socrates believed, writing was not an effective means of communicating knowledge

denton-scratch 4y ago
It says that one of the features is "In-browser rendering of text, images and video". That seems to be at odds with the statement that it doesn't support "graphical websites". All I can think is that it doesn't support canvas - which would have surprised me anyway.
- throw10920 4y ago
  The "Hacker News on Kristal" screenshot from a sibling comment[1] shows HN rendered without the logo in the corner - I believe the browser won't render inline media (which is how many other Gemini viewers work), in which case the parent's complaint applies. I think that it's kind of an anti-tool-for-thought - meant to be an art piece or a political statement, and not a tool for getting work done. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34351337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34351337

moron4hire 4y ago

I'm quite pleased with how my personal site renders in it. Other than my navigation menu not showing up in quite the right place (which is definitely on me), everything else flows very nicely.

Julesman 4y ago

Because reasons. lol

Shared404 4y ago

If the dev is reading these, just know that a lot of us here _do_ quite like this. I'm in the "market" for a small internet browser these days, and this is one I very well may get good use out of.

tete 4y ago

Not a fan of Gemini for various reason, but this browser seems like a really cool project. And browsing the other projects, like LoLa. They seem really cool too. And I really love the style of the whole website. Nicely done!

jug 4y ago

I think it would be more flexible to instead of Geminispace and developing a browser without JS support to enforce “smolnet” would simply be to define a HTMLite standard with a subset where e.g. the entire script tag or img tag is not part of it. Then you have HTMLite verifiers (probably the simplest thing to verify!) to ensure a site is compliant and voila you need no Gemini protocol, only simple HTTP/1 and you can also render it in anything from Firefox 1.0 to Kristall to Lynx to Chrome 100+. As a bonus now you would also have very mature accessibility support thanks to modern browsers. We already have the tools for smolnet. We don’t need to enforce it by removing features. We just need to define what little it should be. Having said that, all the power to people who love tinkering this way instead. I just think it will be a hindrance to broader adoption and wasting a bit of flexibility and reach (in terms of both software and people).

LesZedCB 4y ago
from the Gemini FAQ[1], 2.5: > The problem is that deciding upon a strictly limited subset of HTTP and HTML, slapping a label on it and calling it a day would do almost nothing to create a clearly demarcated space where people can go to consume only that kind of content in only that kind of way. It's impossible to know in advance whether what's on the other side of a https:// https:// URL will be within the subset or outside it. It's very tedious to verify that a website claiming to use only the subset actually does, as many of the features we want to avoid are invisible (but not harmless!) to the user. It's difficult or even impossible to deactivate support for all the unwanted features in mainstream browsers, so if somebody breaks the rules you'll pay the consequences. Writing a dumbed down web browser which gracefully ignores all the unwanted features is much harder than writing a Gemini client from scratch. Even if you did it, you'd have a very difficult time discovering the minuscule fraction of websites it could render. > Alternative, simple-by-design protocols like Gopher and Gemini create alternative, simple-by-design spaces with obvious boundaries and hard restrictions. You know for sure when you enter Geminispace, and you can know for sure and in advance when following a certain link will cause you leave it. While you're there, you know for sure and in advance that everybody else there is playing by the same rules. You can relax and get on with your browsing, and follow links to sites you've never heard of before, which just popped up yesterday, and be confident that they won't try to track you or serve you garbage because they can't. You can do all this with a client you wrote yourself, so you know you can trust it. It's a very different, much more liberating and much more empowering experience than trying to carve out a tiny, invisible sub-sub-sub-sub-space of the web. [1] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

opan 4y ago

Appears to be packaged in both guix and nix, which is surprisingly not mentioned on the website.

nickdothutton 4y ago

My kingdom for a non corporate browser.

guilhas 4y ago

For me this is the future of the productive web, documents sharing. Forget the smart apps The only thing missing to make it perfect is XUL addons

robinsonb5 4y ago

I've thought for a while that the world needs a new simplified web, based on something like markdown but properly standardised. I'm stoked to discover that something similar actually exists!