10 ms·

It's pretty sad that the only way to ship a usable browser these days is by fork...

by pipeline_peak 3y ago

rizky05 3y ago
What do you think should be done ?
- pipeline_peak 3y ago
  I'm stuck wondering what can be done. We've all seen FAANG companies go to court for breaches of users privacy. A browser engine monopoly doesn't seem to be something people care about. They don't know what an engine is, and can't see how one owner would be a problem. The problem is Google, being such a large company is far to powerful to compete with. Not to mention they own a lot of the products on the web that other engines need to be compatible with to be usable. What should be done is Google should be broken up so it's no longer one company leading this thing but I can't see that.
  - soundnote 3y ago
    A lot of people don't know what a browser is, or what the Internet is, per se. To them the Internet is the Google search bar on their phone.
    - pipeline_peak 3y ago
      > To them the Internet is the Google search bar on their phone That's just moving around terms. I think it's widely known that almost everyone knows all their devices are in some magical way connected to each other.
omeid2 3y ago
There is always an exception, Ladybird is one. https://lunduke.substack.com/p/ladybird-a-truly-new-web-browser https://lunduke.substack.com/p/ladybird-a-truly-new-web-brow...
- pipeline_peak 3y ago
  "usable browser"
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    I think he will succeed. So far the progress trajectory has been great and he's getting funding to hire more developers to assist.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Alifatisk 3y ago
There are only a handful of browser engines available, implementing one from scratch is a hard task.
andsoitis 3y ago
There hasn't been a new browser rendering engine from scratch in something like 20 years. It is just too complex and resource intensive to create from nothing. Even Blink, the rendering engine of Chromium, is a fork of the WebCore component of WebKit, which was originally a fork of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE. EDIT: TIL about Ladybird, not sure how accurate its rendering is.
- pipeline_peak 3y ago
  This is what they can "achieve" when they apply a significant amount of their man power to getting Reddit running lol... https://awesomekling.github.io/assets/ladybird-proggit.png https://awesomekling.github.io/assets/ladybird-proggit.png It's impressive, but it also shows how hard and everchanging this sort of task is. I don't see Youtube or Google Docs as always being reliable.
  - tredre3 3y ago
    > This is what they can "achieve" when they apply a significant amount of their man power to getting Reddit running lol... LibWeb/Ladybird was made by a handful of people working part time on it over a couple of years. During that time, they managed to implement absolutely everything from image decoding to font rendering to javascript parsing and execution, all FROM SCRATCH. Stop trying to twist it as if they applied tons of resources and came up short. Before last month they had nobody working on it full time.
    - pipeline_peak 3y ago
      Ladybird isn’t going to be anything more than a decrepit toy project and we both know it. They don’t have anywhere near the corporate support real browsers do, it’s just chasing cars. They don’t have the HR to scale, some day they’ll get Google Docs to work “hurray we did it, looks like it is possible” then they’ll try to get Spotify working. Next thing you know Google Docs will break again. It’s gonna be that times 100+ other apps that people use. You can call me pessimistic, hell even antagonist, I don’t care. I’m being honest in order to outline how unrealistic it’s become to write a browser from scratch for the modern web. Andreas or whatever his name will get the apps he wants working and maybe some more, but it will NEVER be something people can just jump on and expect to use as a functional browser. It’ll be some Reddit Discord HTML4.5 viewer. I’d say if they wanted to make something usable, they’d fork WebKit and bolt on SpiderMonkey, QuickJS, JerryScript or whatever and build up from there. But they care too much about their stupid pride “look what we did”. And that “roll your own” nonsense isn’t attractive to corporate adoption unless they’re some project like OpenBSD that does it with a real purpose, not HN front page gratitude. SerenityOS is advertised, not as a microkernel, not architecture portability , but as a “90s operating system”. That is some hipster bs that only depicts the Amish rate of development Ladybird will take unless they really think about the goal they want to achieve. Because right now, they want a usable browser and they want it from scratch and I can only see one of those happening. Linux might’ve initially been “Just for fun” but now they clearly mean business
berkes 3y ago
People keep saying this, but it lacks a crucial detail. A usable general browser is near impossible to build from scratch. A specialized one? Not so. You don't need to fork chromium to render some HTML on the screen of a specialised hardware. Nor do you need to fork chromium for rendering the "about.html/css" in your mobile app. And so on. For some reason people do this anyway: good chance your smart fridge is running full chromium to show its temp and some images. But it could use a simple rendering engine optimized for embedded hardware just fine.
- seabass-labrax 3y ago
  > A usable general browser is near impossible to build from scratch. Modern browsers support a lot of most definitely not modern features. I believe it would be feasible to create an entirely new browser from scratch if those older features were ignored. Take for instance Mozilla's experimental Servo rendering engine and Deno for ECMAScript - these were created in mere years with (relatively) small teams. I would be quite comfortable using a web browser that supported, say, CSS Flexbox and Grid quite well but didn't implement every historical way of centering text on a page.
  - userbinator 3y ago
    Better to ignore the new features since that's where all the complexity and churn is, and most sites are fine as plain HTML <5 anyway.
    - seabass-labrax 3y ago
      The thing is, HTML5 introduced the 'semantic' elements (<nav>, <video> etc.) which let the browser know what it is that it's supposed to be displaying. That means that an HTML5 page without any CSS or JavaScript could be understood by the browser and displayed exactly like a native application would be on the platform: the same visual style, the same accessibility features, the same behaviour for keyboard shortcuts or touch gestures. With HTML <5 (and excluding XHTML from the discussion) the browser has no clue what all those <div> and <table> elements are supposed to be, so CSS and JS are necessary to reproduce basic things like screenreader flow for all but the most basic page layouts. Ironically, the opportunity for users' browser to apply stylesheets on generic, semantically meaningful sites was one of the original concepts behind CSS (hence 'cascading' in the acronym - the browser takes precedence), which is now usually employed to overwrite the browsers' defaults!
charcircuit 3y ago
Browsers engines themselves use and fork underlying libraries. There is a lot of complexity that exists.

It's pretty sad that the only way to ship a usable browser these days is by fork...

rizky05 3y ago

What do you think should be done ?

pipeline_peak 3y ago
I'm stuck wondering what can be done. We've all seen FAANG companies go to court for breaches of users privacy. A browser engine monopoly doesn't seem to be something people care about. They don't know what an engine is, and can't see how one owner would be a problem. The problem is Google, being such a large company is far to powerful to compete with. Not to mention they own a lot of the products on the web that other engines need to be compatible with to be usable. What should be done is Google should be broken up so it's no longer one company leading this thing but I can't see that.
- soundnote 3y ago
  A lot of people don't know what a browser is, or what the Internet is, per se. To them the Internet is the Google search bar on their phone.
  - pipeline_peak 3y ago
    > To them the Internet is the Google search bar on their phone That's just moving around terms. I think it's widely known that almost everyone knows all their devices are in some magical way connected to each other.

omeid2 3y ago

There is always an exception, Ladybird is one. https://lunduke.substack.com/p/ladybird-a-truly-new-web-browser https://lunduke.substack.com/p/ladybird-a-truly-new-web-brow...

pipeline_peak 3y ago
"usable browser"
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  I think he will succeed. So far the progress trajectory has been great and he's getting funding to hire more developers to assist.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

Alifatisk 3y ago

There are only a handful of browser engines available, implementing one from scratch is a hard task.

andsoitis 3y ago

There hasn't been a new browser rendering engine from scratch in something like 20 years. It is just too complex and resource intensive to create from nothing. Even Blink, the rendering engine of Chromium, is a fork of the WebCore component of WebKit, which was originally a fork of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE. EDIT: TIL about Ladybird, not sure how accurate its rendering is.

pipeline_peak 3y ago
This is what they can "achieve" when they apply a significant amount of their man power to getting Reddit running lol... https://awesomekling.github.io/assets/ladybird-proggit.png https://awesomekling.github.io/assets/ladybird-proggit.png It's impressive, but it also shows how hard and everchanging this sort of task is. I don't see Youtube or Google Docs as always being reliable.
- tredre3 3y ago
  > This is what they can "achieve" when they apply a significant amount of their man power to getting Reddit running lol... LibWeb/Ladybird was made by a handful of people working part time on it over a couple of years. During that time, they managed to implement absolutely everything from image decoding to font rendering to javascript parsing and execution, all FROM SCRATCH. Stop trying to twist it as if they applied tons of resources and came up short. Before last month they had nobody working on it full time.
  - pipeline_peak 3y ago
    Ladybird isn’t going to be anything more than a decrepit toy project and we both know it. They don’t have anywhere near the corporate support real browsers do, it’s just chasing cars. They don’t have the HR to scale, some day they’ll get Google Docs to work “hurray we did it, looks like it is possible” then they’ll try to get Spotify working. Next thing you know Google Docs will break again. It’s gonna be that times 100+ other apps that people use. You can call me pessimistic, hell even antagonist, I don’t care. I’m being honest in order to outline how unrealistic it’s become to write a browser from scratch for the modern web. Andreas or whatever his name will get the apps he wants working and maybe some more, but it will NEVER be something people can just jump on and expect to use as a functional browser. It’ll be some Reddit Discord HTML4.5 viewer. I’d say if they wanted to make something usable, they’d fork WebKit and bolt on SpiderMonkey, QuickJS, JerryScript or whatever and build up from there. But they care too much about their stupid pride “look what we did”. And that “roll your own” nonsense isn’t attractive to corporate adoption unless they’re some project like OpenBSD that does it with a real purpose, not HN front page gratitude. SerenityOS is advertised, not as a microkernel, not architecture portability , but as a “90s operating system”. That is some hipster bs that only depicts the Amish rate of development Ladybird will take unless they really think about the goal they want to achieve. Because right now, they want a usable browser and they want it from scratch and I can only see one of those happening. Linux might’ve initially been “Just for fun” but now they clearly mean business

berkes 3y ago

People keep saying this, but it lacks a crucial detail. A usable general browser is near impossible to build from scratch. A specialized one? Not so. You don't need to fork chromium to render some HTML on the screen of a specialised hardware. Nor do you need to fork chromium for rendering the "about.html/css" in your mobile app. And so on. For some reason people do this anyway: good chance your smart fridge is running full chromium to show its temp and some images. But it could use a simple rendering engine optimized for embedded hardware just fine.

seabass-labrax 3y ago
> A usable general browser is near impossible to build from scratch. Modern browsers support a lot of most definitely not modern features. I believe it would be feasible to create an entirely new browser from scratch if those older features were ignored. Take for instance Mozilla's experimental Servo rendering engine and Deno for ECMAScript - these were created in mere years with (relatively) small teams. I would be quite comfortable using a web browser that supported, say, CSS Flexbox and Grid quite well but didn't implement every historical way of centering text on a page.
- userbinator 3y ago
  Better to ignore the new features since that's where all the complexity and churn is, and most sites are fine as plain HTML <5 anyway.
  - seabass-labrax 3y ago
    The thing is, HTML5 introduced the 'semantic' elements (<nav>, <video> etc.) which let the browser know what it is that it's supposed to be displaying. That means that an HTML5 page without any CSS or JavaScript could be understood by the browser and displayed exactly like a native application would be on the platform: the same visual style, the same accessibility features, the same behaviour for keyboard shortcuts or touch gestures. With HTML <5 (and excluding XHTML from the discussion) the browser has no clue what all those <div> and <table> elements are supposed to be, so CSS and JS are necessary to reproduce basic things like screenreader flow for all but the most basic page layouts. Ironically, the opportunity for users' browser to apply stylesheets on generic, semantically meaningful sites was one of the original concepts behind CSS (hence 'cascading' in the acronym - the browser takes precedence), which is now usually employed to overwrite the browsers' defaults!

charcircuit 3y ago

Browsers engines themselves use and fork underlying libraries. There is a lot of complexity that exists.