20 ms·

OP here. Thanks for the pos/neg/neutral comments everybody. Some remarks: Yes, there are a lot of browsers out there where I can contribute to which would be m

OP here. Thanks for the pos/neg/neutral comments everybody. Some remarks: Yes, there are a lot of browsers out there where I can contribute to which would be more efficient. But that would result in just a few browsers instead of a lot of browsers. I'm all for the last one, as this would give people options. This IS a pet project. I never told anyone otherwise. I would start writing it even when I wasn't fed up with the tech industry. But I get angry about not being able to do anything about anything. And this is my way of trying to do something about it. It's the best I can do. I think this project will not result in an actual browser. That's not why i'm writing this. I want people to see my code, either laugh at it, or get some own idea's to make things better. For instance, I LOVE the whatwg site where the whole html5 tokenizer and parser algorithms are step by step described. This means it should be easy(?) enough for anyone to write their own html5 parser. What would happen if google and/or microsoft decide to create their own custom html5 (html5, ghtml) as a closed format? Who would be able to stop them when they have such a market share? I want to start for scratch - BECAUSE i want to know more about the underlying technical challenges.

samus 3y ago
I like your list of 100 opinions. Of course, not absolutely all of them ;-) but the effort you took to compile the list. Lots of things to think about.
agentdrek 3y ago
love the name ... needs a 1980's Commodore BASIC visual :-)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
INTPenis 3y ago
As long as you're realistic about it, have fun. Most of us elders have seen these personal browser projects come and go these past 25-30 years. Odds and history are both against them as a long term viable project. But as a fun learning experience it's very impressive.
- jaytaph 3y ago
  i'm 45 :) I consider myself elder as well.. and yes.. i've seen many come and go as well.. I just don't think that should be a reason to not do it.
huijzer 3y ago
Nice! Just go for it, man! History often needs only one person. Who would have known that Guido van Rossum would write the language in which most of modern AI would be written while the servers run on some operating systems created by Linus Torvalds. Both just had a crazy idea and started working on it.
nonrandomstring 3y ago
> I get angry about not being able to do anything about anything. And this is my way of trying to do something about it. It's the best I can do. This attitude is gold, and it's what changes the whole world. What you said about the misery of "news" resonates with me. In psyops we call it "sapping". Propaganda designed to demoralise, dispirit and corrode resistance used to come from our enemies. The classic example was Lord Haw-Haw [0]. Today our own mainstream news channels and technology giants seem determined to keep the population in perpetual hopeless anxiety. As you do, I find the discourse around tech to be a pit of dismissiveness, avoidance, denial, resignation, and learned-helplessness. I've been doing a lot of interviewing people lately, and careful sentiment analysis. The results are horrifying. The very word "tech" is becoming synonymous with "Resistance is futile". To stand up and do something, anything, not because you hope for success, but as an example, and for your own sanity, is the most positive and human of responses. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Haw-Haw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Haw-Haw
- Eggsellence 3y ago
  [flagged]
- phkahler 3y ago
  >> As you do, I find the discourse around tech to be a pit of dismissiveness, avoidance, denial, resignation, and learned-helplessness. Do you think this is why people are abandoning the GPL license in favor of MIT/BSD? Something about the fight the GPL aims to win being a hopeless fantasy? In the face of the sentiment you and OP express, I'd think GPL usage would be widespread.
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    I think opinions around software licenses are limited to us hackers, and the actively code-publishing subset of us, moreover. From my POV the GPL certainly seems alive and well, and the ideology of the Free Software movement remains sound and strong. What I'm alluding to is the wider public. In <podcast-i-dare-not-mention> we literally walked around town interviewing young and old. Soon as I can, I'll share the results in a HN submission.
vidarh 3y ago
> This IS a pet project I think that is a great attitude to start with. When you build something with the attitude that it's for you and not "meant to be big and professional like GNU" to paraphrase Linus Torvalds, you can often achieve a lot with far less effort. It allows you to be pragmatic and accept things that you otherwise might not, and you can get to something useful to you whether as a learning experience or to actually use with a tiny fraction of the effort you'd want to invest if you intended to build a "product". A lot of my personal projects have involved stumbling over a project like yours and repurposing parts, and often veering off in entirely different directions, because it's often so much easier to pick up someones small pet project that is "close enough" than trying to pare down or adapt a huge, feature-complete beast. With a browser, a huge part of the complexity comes from needing to support every site out there, and every usage scenario, but when you build for you, already just being able to focus on making sites you care about work well enough pares the problem back enormously... And this is a long way of saying I think more people should take on "impossible" projects. Maybe the full thing won't be useful for other people anytime soon, but maybe parts of it will be, and sometimes something bigger comes out of what starts as a small pet project (like Linux did...)
samsquire 3y ago
Jaytaph, I really hope you can keep going and do something interesting with the work you learn from. Reading someone else's codebase is very difficult because there's so much context and knowledge behind a web browser. I have a very simple layout algorithm based on ORC Solver algorithm. If you want to get to something that is useful you could implement rendering for simple HTML documents with <p>, <h1> <table> tags.
atlasduo 3y ago
I wish more people gave a shot at browser implementations. You see a lot of comments that this in a herculean task, and maybe it is, but it's not _that_ bad. You don't have to implement all of the functionality of modern web browsers. You don't need battery APIs, game controller APIs, USB, etc. Focus on what is important - HTML, CSS, JS. Worst case scenario - you will learn something new. Best of luck on this project!
- nicoburns 3y ago
  I think it probably is that bad if you the approach it as this person is currently doing: not using any libraries at all. If you use existing libraries for HTML parsing, CSS parsing, layout algorithms, graphics rendering, etc, then I think I think it's doable.
  - kelnos 3y ago
    Writing parsers honestly isn't that hard, especially when you have more or less step-by-step instructions for some of the formats, and test suites that independent 3rd parties have written that you can use to help verify your implementation. Regardless, so what if it's "bad"? OP is using this as a learning experience too. If he wants to write parsers, and thinks that experience will be good for him, then he should write parsers. I do agree that writing your own parsers isn't strictly necessary if you want to write an independent web renderer/browser. If I were tackling this project, I'd be more interested in and curious about how to write a renderer, and if there's a HTML or CSS parsing crate already written and available on crates.io, I'd probably use it. Then again, writing a parser would also make me intimately familiar with HTML and CSS in ways that I'm probably not currently, and that might help inform how I build the renderer.
- justapassenger 3y ago
  I wrote my own engine 15 years ago, when web was much much much simple. It’s a Herculean task. What’s important - HTML, CSS, JS are highly complicated, even if you exclude other APIs. It’s really cool pet project. But don’t expect anything usable as a result.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
matwood 3y ago
You shouldn't have to write this response on 'hacker' news, but good for you. Work on what you want. Some people do wood working, fix cars, or play video games. Others like coding. I have tons of partial projects I've started for various reasons, and enjoyed them all. Good luck and have fun. And, maybe your project does turn into something bigger.
- fm2606 3y ago
  Well said. I couldn't agree more! Good luck to the OP!
- otp209 3y ago
  Right? Whether or not it's practical, it's the way we learn. I used to see that sort of haughty "well why do you want to do X" response all the time on stackoverflow/its ilk (I've basically deprioritized results from that entire network of sites now), which isn't even a good tack as there are plenty of others who might want to do X for other, valid reasons; "why" shouldn't even be a question as far as learning goes.
- stavros 3y ago
  Agreed. This community has a tacit assumption that everything must make money or some other kind of return, otherwise it's useless, and that's not true. I love hanging out here, but I've posted projects for fun where people couldn't believe I didn't want to make money on them. Money is great, but it's not everything. Good luck, OP!
- Cyphase 3y ago
  "(just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux#The_creation_of_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux#The_creation_...
philbo 3y ago
I think a browser makes a GREAT personal project, because there are high-quality, public specifications for the stuff you need to implement. And these things are maintained in the open, you can even go and find meeting minutes if there are particular decisions you want to investigate further. And it's not just specifications, there's test suites and reference implementations out there too. Of course it's still a huge task, but there should be no blind alleys to wander up.
LaGrange 3y ago
You could do something back then, and it’s the same only thing you can do now: work with others. Drop the egocentrism, because collective action is the only way out, and it is possible.
slashdev 3y ago
If you’re doing it as a learning experience, then more power to you. But be honest with yourself about your motivations. As someone who usually takes on too much, and makes similar rationalizations, the road can be fun but it’s not going to a destination where you finish something. Don’t repeat my mistakes, examine the whys carefully.
- jackthetab 3y ago
  Why does he have to finish anything? TFA even says "I don't expect to finish." The Mona Lisa is unfinished and Leo spent 16 years on it.
  - slashdev 3y ago
    He doesn’t, if he’s honestly ok with that. But you only have so much time, why not pick a goal that is achievable? Seems like a waste.
    - jackthetab 3y ago
      Why have a goal? Oftentimes it is the journey that is the most important, not the destination.
      - slashdev 3y ago
        Not all journeys are equally valuable. A goal is critical to point yourself in a worthwhile direction.
        jackthetab 3y ago
        "Not all those who wander are lost." -Tolkein You and I obviously have different value systems so this thread will never coalesce. Enjoy your travels towards your goals.
        slashdev 3y ago
jongjong 3y ago
This is great. Would you be interested to add support for a custom blockchain-based DNS instead of the current centralized hierarchical mess? I've been thinking about this a lot and it's clear that a multi-blockchain-based solution would be perfect for this (and far simpler than the current system). Each blockchain could have its own top level domain. People would buy domains using the blockchain's own tokens on the blockchain itself. The browser would just discover its own peers and query any node in the blockchain to convert domain names into IP addresses. The browser could check the results against known public keys on that chain to verify that the record is legitimate. Blockchains are great for this use case as they are infinitely scalable in terms of reads (since you can always add more nodes which are exact cryptographically-verifiable replicas). While blockchains are constrained in terms of writes, this problem is dealt with via a transaction fee which increases with demand so it is naturally DoS-resistant and doesn't require special skills or trusted parties to operate. Anyway, the current centralized DNS system of hierarchical resolvers is also constrained in terms of writes but it feels ad-hoc with many centralized entities which are given a substantial amount of trust.
- opless 3y ago
  Blockchain is a solution looking for a problem. DNS isn't it. Sorry
  - jongjong 3y ago
    Yet Bitcoin's market cap is $500 Billion and has a trading volume is over $10 billion per day and has been outperforming the markets for over a decade. If the financial system is fine, then how is it possible that a 'scam' is worth $500 billion? What kind of financial system allows such scam to exist for over a decade and keeps attracting investors year after year? If the financial system is not fine, then how could you say a blockchain like Bitcoin is a solution looking for a problem? That position doesn't make sense from any angle. And anyway, I've explained clearly what is the advantage of blockchain: - It's a system which supports unlimited reads at scale. - Spam-resistant when it comes to writes. - Its data can be verified independently so there is no need to trust service operators. Those are the most important characteristics of a DNS. Sadly the current system is missing the third point and that's why nobody truly owns their domain names. Everyone is merely renting from a TLD provider and hope that the laws of whatever country it's in are going to respect your claims.
koprulusector 3y ago
I just want to thank you for sharing your politics views. These are the same ideas and views, as an American, that I’m struggling with. It helps so much to know other people in other parts of the world are going through the same thing and have the same thoughts and ideas.
jefc1111 3y ago
This is an inspiring attitude. I used to be stuck in a rut of "there's no point starting to build / learn a thing because there will almost certainly never be a result of substance". After a while I realised that every unfinished thing results in learning, which is applied in the future, etc etc. What truly got me out of the rut was the realisation I was not only not finishing anything, I was not _doing_ anything. And one sure fire way to never finish anything is to never start anything. The corporate world is results-orientated, which is fair enough. Doesn't have to be that way all the time though - it's fun to be playful with technology.
- trinsic2 3y ago
  > I used to be stuck in a rut of "there's no point starting to build / learn a thing because there will almost certainly never be a result of substance". In my view, that's what people in power want to encourage, using crowed influencing dynamics [0]. There is an a loosely orchestrated effort to make people feel less powerful because that makes it easier for people in power (people with money or resources) to increase their self-interest endeavors. This is why I don't watch the news, and take peoples opinions about the world with a grain of salt. Ideas are like viruses, the spread rapidly. The people with the most resources gets to set the tone about what the population thinks by using modern media to mold the narrative. If you don't understand your individual value, you will be swept into this mind set, whether you are aware of it or not. [0]: Example https://cxl.com/blog/17-lesser-known-ways-to-persuade-people/ https://cxl.com/blog/17-lesser-known-ways-to-persuade-people...
lr4444lr 3y ago
Ignore the naysayers, and keep posting back when you have major updates. Also keep in mind that it doesn't have to be full featured to be incredibly usable and useful. Would love to have a minimalist browser that can run HTML/CSS/JS, keep cookies/localStorage, and that's about it. Maybe an anonymous browsing mode. I am rooting for you!
taylodl 3y ago
> I think this project will not result in an actual browser. Maybe this project shouldn't result in a graphical browser. I still think there's value in text-based browsing, in the line of Lynx. I would think there's a higher probability of creating something really useful if you were to go that route.
heresie-dabord 3y ago
> i want to know more about the underlying technical challenges. I applaud this fundamental curiosity. We don't want a world where technologies that people use (must use) every day are opaque, proprietary solutions that spy on us. Yet that is exactly what we have in the most popular Web browser. I recommend RSS or just to scrape Web content (Python and Perl do this well) and read the bits that are interesting to you.
zerojames 3y ago
You are going to learn so much from this project! I have had a lot of fun implementing (much smaller) web standards. I started with ones that had step-by-step implementation guides. It was one step in realizing that the web _is ours_! We can build it at every stage, from the web pages to the standards to the browsers. Happy building!
mo_42 3y ago
> This IS a pet project. Contrary to many comments here about not creating another browser, I'd like to encourage you continue! Once, for example Linux was also pet project. In retrospective, it's obvious but we don't know how the world will look like in a couple of years. And who could predict the success of Linux in the early nineties?
lacrimacida 3y ago
Scratch whichever itch you may have, especially the ones you can learn from. Some itches give birth and evolve into bigger things.
failrate 3y ago
I wrote a browser in Ruby yonks ago just to see what the hard parts were. It was great fun, and I learned a lot, so more power to you.
i_am_a_peasant 3y ago
Shut up and hack!
hughw 3y ago
Idea -- pump the whatwg specs through chatgpt to generate the Rust code.
- jabradoodle 3y ago
  If it's that simple, do it yourself?
mietek 3y ago
You may find this website useful: https://browser.engineering https://browser.engineering
BobbyJo 3y ago
-"I'm building a hot rod!" -"Why wouldn't you just go hang out on the factory line at Ford instead?"
- pipeline_peak 3y ago
  More like "I'm building a soap box derby racer!"
  - georgeecollins 3y ago
    yes- which is usually fun and teaches you a lot!
- charcircuit 3y ago
  The difference is instead of buying parts to build the hotrod you instead start by making an iron mine. If you want to make something custom you don't need to start from scratch.
  - BobbyJo 3y ago
    I don't think he plans to build his own processors and write it in machine code.
  - function_seven 3y ago
    In the hierarchy of "from scratch", it goes more like "buy fast car", "build fast car from available parts", "machine own parts from stock", "make own castings from scrap metal", "mine ore and smelt it". Just because my hot rod isn't made from existing parts does it mean I'm mining ore. Many awesome hot rod projects involve machining from stock or even casting from scrap. What OP is doing is on this same level. He's not doing atomic layer deposition or anything. Just writing code on top of an existing OS and using existing programming languages.
marginalia_nu 3y ago
Ignore the noise. So much crab mentality on HN sometimes. If even half the time spent telling people that their project is pointless waste of time was spent doing something constructive instead, the world would have a lot more cool and interesting projects in it. Better to fail at something bold and ambitious than not even try at all.
- jwr 3y ago
  This! Making >> Not Making, always. You make, you learn, perhaps one day you will make something better, perhaps not — but at least you've been building something. Ignore the armchair critics, criticizing is so much easier than building.
  - digging 3y ago
    I'm not upset at the OP, but I wouldn't say this is a golden rule. Some people make some really atrocious shit. People should, in general, be at least a little critical of what they're making.
    - marginalia_nu 3y ago
      It's fine to make atrocious shit though. Making something good takes practice. Often you need to see what sticks. Sometimes the only outcome is a lesson. The master has failed more times than a beginner has even tried.
      - digging 3y ago
        Sorry - I don't mean low-quality, I mean evil.
      - halostatue 3y ago
        I don't think that GP is talking about the quality of production, but the quality of the concept. There are things that people with any sense of shame would not produce.
weinzierl 3y ago
People inevitably will come and say this is futile because writing a browser that supports the "modern web" is just too big an undertaking. I would like to encourage you to ignore them and write a browser that works with a subset you decide to be useful and never feel bad if some pages don't work. I know it is kind of hypocritical for me to say that, because I come from a generation that fought for standardization and against all the "This page works best with IE4", but I've come to the realization that while we certainly have progressed we've not really accomplished what we'd set out to. Nowadays, I certainly would not refuse to use a browser just because it only supports a subset of pages and sites. Heck, a browser without Facebook and Youtube might even be a good thing.
PaulHoule 3y ago
I would say though that you have to pick your battles. On your path you might vanquish shitty web sites but just not being able to read them, but I think a real victory against enshittification involves breaking away from the web user interface which is some of why there has been so much bot blocking lately. It's not that people are going train an LLM on a shitty site but that you're going to get the LLM to read the shitty site for you, that is the real death of shitty sites. (e.g. agent posts your question to Reddit on your behalf, picks out and summarizes the best answer; instead of looking at craigslist every day for farm animals you get notified of the good ones; instead of seeing an ad for a Laurie Anderson concert on the bus when the tickets are all sold out the system tells you the moment the tickets go on sale...) But who knows? An HTML 5 parser is a good place to start towards that end. I had similar motivations for developing my smart RSS reader and intelligent agent YOShInOn which has gotten me to work on filtering and "deshittification" right away as opposed to face a 1500 man x year project before getting to the stuff that matters to me. For me the path not taken was developing a "reader" that works like archive.today, there was a summmer in the pandemic when my son and I were driving back and forth to Buffalo a lot and talking about missile defense systems and I did a "spike" project to develop something that would archive, process and deshittify web pages and I came to the conclusion that it was a long road to make something that was better instead of worse (every archiver I've seen is way slower than just browsing the page and sorry "slow X" advocates, slow = bad) This winter I turned to the problem of end-to-end active learning for selecting articles and had great success as it. Sometime it sends me to archive.today but the goddamn CAPTCHAs never end when I use it from home so the question of the archiver/reader has come back but now that the thing has a workflow engine and could archive articles before I look at them the archiver/reader looks appealing if I can find something open source that is good enough. There's a commercial product https://www.getupnext.com/ https://www.getupnext.com/ which took the opposite approach of developing a reader and now they are working on recommendations. That's a path that makes sense because the reader cleans up the text which in principle is good for NLP but for what I am doing I think the signals in dirty text have enough value that I am doing just fine. They've got the issue that they're very unlikely to really develop content-based recommendation for a multi-user system because collaborative filter is such a good shortcut, also YOShInOn uses a Tik Tok style interface which for some reason has hardly been tried despite being a hit with Stumbleupon, this interface collects good negative samples and gets great results with a simple classifer... if you get a few 1000 judgements.*
radicalbyte 3y ago
Good to see someone do this. Funny I was thinking about this recently - I've been trying to push for action from regulators / government here in NL (especially wrt Google) but there was very little appetite with the people I'd need to convince to stand with me to make something happen. Considered briefly starting a new browser. However I've had experience attempting to design a very simple OS (a long long time ago, I got a mouse/pointer working on the C64 then realised that it wasn't worth it).. and modern OSes and browsers are of a similar level of complexity. So now I'm focused first on family (due to working insane hours the last few years they've been neglected - pretty sure you worked a little bit on the same projects so know where I'm getting at) and a bit later in the year on something where I have a >50% chance of seeing results - fixing healthcare IT here in Europe. If I can say anything it would be to remember that as a parent - especially one who wants to be responsible and present - we don't have a lot of space available for serious side projects.
- radicalbyte 3y ago
  (oh and my side project is a C64 emulator, also in Rust, ground up.. only said being a parent thing means I'm only at the research phase, although to the point where I have all of the resources I need to begin productive work sans the 8-16 hrs of quiet time to start coding + get the write-test-deliver loop up and running)
thecleaner 3y ago
OP you go write that code and profile and make sure you get some real world feedback on it. I hope it DOES result in a real functional browser.
irrational 3y ago
I don't know why Linus is trying to write a new OS, we already have OSes. It's not like this Linux thing is going to go anywhere.
- px43 3y ago
  No one said that. At the time there was a massive gaping hole in the OS market begging to be filled. OS vendors were gouging everyone, and GNU/Hurd kept experiencing delays.
  - irrational 3y ago
    Of course nobody said that. Just like nobody should be saying anything to this guy about writing a browser.
  - strunz 3y ago
    Actually Linus himself proclaimed it as a hobby that would never be big and professional: >I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.
- justapassenger 3y ago
  It’s like saying “Zuckerberg and Gates dropped out of school so why shouldn’t I?”. Chances of replicating Linux success are as big as chances of being next Zuckerberg. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, but align your expectations. And most importantly, as OP said - it’s pet project. Success isn’t a goal.
- prewett 3y ago
  Version 6 Unix was about 9000 lines of code; the first version of Linux was something similar. Firefox has 27 million lines of code. Linux has about that now, too, which is why one reason you don't see grad-school Linus #2 writing an OS and getting traction.
- jonny_eh 3y ago
  Did he write a blog post (or newsgroup post) in advance of writing the first version? I'm all for pet project tinkering, but seems strange to publicly make a pronouncement before starting. There's no "news" here, why is it on the front page?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
awesomekling 3y ago
Go for it OP, the more browsers the merrier! :^)
mannyv 3y ago
go for it! The hardest part of a browser is rendering. The rest of it is easy, relatively speaking The big problem with browsers is state. Specifically, the web page has an internal state that the developer is tracking, and the browser UI has a state that the browser is tracking. How do you keep those two in sync? The current model is based on the sort of hack that Netscape did way back when. There are probably other ways to do it. Specifically, the problem is: how do you give something access to a representation of the visual state (the DOM) while hiding your implementation of it...in a secure manner? And how do you allow that client (the website) write access to that DOM representation securely and safely?
eska 3y ago
This site is called hacker news after all, so this is the attitude I love and welcome on here. Ignore the high-karma-naysayers, they don’t really contribute to anything.
astrobe_ 3y ago
To me the logical conclusion of what you write is not to write yet-another-web-browser, because browsers are rotten to the core by terrible protocol designs, terrible specifications, politics, greed etc. Browsers did not spontaneously start to degrade, it's what the key actors at different times did that made it happen. The only hope, IMO, is to build something much more sane that cannot be abused. Something like Gopher or Gemini. Simple specs that make it possible for a single person or a small team to implement something decently working without them spending their like on it like Middle Age monks spent their life mapping and cataloging stars. I would start with a feature-limited markup language that's good enough to display text - maybe images if you really insist - and leave all media and interactive stuff to external programs; if your browser ends up being a virtual machine and a universal media player, it is doomed to degenerate into a WWW browser if it ever gets popular. But of course if one builds something that cannot be abused or monetized easily, the big content creators won't be interested. It will take a lifetime or two to gather a critical mass of users, and only if the WWW overloads abuse their power so much that the average WWW serf actively starts to look for a better place to be, and only if at this time the alternative has more and bigger advantages than drawbacks.
- unethical_ban 3y ago
  Gemini is an interesting educational project but the lack of ability to serve even static pictures or video is an absolutely crippling mistake.
  - spc476 3y ago
    Gemini can, in fact, serve up images, audio and even video. The specification disallows inline display of such types, but it can serve them fine.
    - unethical_ban 3y ago
      Ah. I misspoke, but my assertion is the same - the lack of inline display is a hamper.
waynesonfire 3y ago
I loved your comparison to how hackernews is turning into TV news. > ... it’s all negative. Companies are pushing unwanted updates, breaking all promises, raising subscriptions, and buying up companies while doing everything in their power to figure out how much more personal data they can take (away) from us. Governments are banning encryption because of child molesters (they also use vans and candy. Let’s also ban them!). People in power with absolutely no idea of how the modern world works and people in power who DO know how it works You nailed it. Thanks for articulating this.
otachack 3y ago
I think it's amazing you're starting a new project. You stated two points in your blog post on this project: 1. To push back on Chrome almost-monopoly and 2. As a self-learn project. You'll have to balance the needs between those two. You aren't hitting 1. until you have users picking up the browser. You'll be hitting 2. as soon as you start the project, potentially. If you contribute to currently existing projects you'll be hitting 1. A lot more but may lack 2. compared to a new project. Good luck! Btw this is reminding me of Serenity OS which includes a from-scratch browser. You should check it for inspiration :D
dogcomplex 3y ago
Great philosophy. What were the pain points so far - where's the real moat? In the not-too-distant future when we sick some AI coder programs on the problem to just mass-implement features in a banal repetitive way, which are the really complex ones they're gonna get stuck on? What are the ridiculous "this feature only exists to keep google in power" features you've found? What made you want to make a browser instead of something much simpler like - an OS?
darkclouds 3y ago
What I've found when you become a nuisance but read that as successful, you'll find all sorts of problems suddenly plague you in your off line world. So I wish you the best of the luck, but keep an eye out, the world but in my experience the US and UK, is nothing like its "public persona".
PumpkinSpice 3y ago
On any tech forum, there's always a lot of "why are you writing your own Hello World program instead of contributing to an existing one?" energy. As you note, the learning process itself is worth it. I'd encourage you to keep a blog / journal for others to follow. Most innovation doesn't involve the most qualified expert in the field taking on a project that is a sure bet. In fact, qualified experts are often too cautious to try something crazy or shake up the status quo. Back in 1991, Linus wasn't the right guy to write an operating system either, and most experts probably felt we didn't need another OS to begin with. He probably should've contributed to GNU Hurd or Minix instead.
askafriend 3y ago
Respect
kelnos 3y ago
I think this project is a fantastic idea! I've toyed with the idea of writing a browser for years, but when I consider the amount of human-years that have gone into Firefox, Chrome, etc., I get scared and back off of it. I wanted to give it a try, but it looks like main isn't building right now, so I'll check back periodically. Hopefully I will even find some time to contribute, as a Rust-based web browser sounds like a project I'd be interested in working on. One thing I'm a little bummed about is the license: I've gone back and forth on this topic a lot in the past couple decades, and more recently I have actually been releasing stuff under more permissive licenses like MIT. But if I were to work on a browser, I'd want to GPL that. For a work of that magnitude, someone forking it and making proprietary changes would be intolerable to me. Regardless, I think there is absolutely room in the world for more than just ~2.5 dominant browser engines (Gecko, and Blink/WebKit, which I guess aren't the same any more, but have the same provenance, hence the extra 0.5). Sure, contributing to something that already exists would be "more efficient", but since when was efficiency a requirement for doing something that you believe matters?
why-el 3y ago
I think there is a useful LLM based solution (chrome extension or something) here where you ask it (with some trial and error), to only list constructive responses, hhh. I am only half kidding, most of internet feedback is useless, even here, but the ones that matter do matter someone somewhat exponentially, so you'd want them. You can even allow it a margin of error.
niutech 3y ago
> Yes, there are a lot of browsers out there where I can contribute to which would be more efficient. But that would result in just a few browsers instead of a lot of browsers. I'm all for the last one, as this would give people options. IMO it's better to have few rock-solid open source systems than multitude of half-baked projects reinventing the wheel. But good luck!
TheHappyOddish 3y ago
Screw everyone else, it looks interesting and fun. I'll be following your RSS updates. Good luck!

samus 3y ago

I like your list of 100 opinions. Of course, not absolutely all of them ;-) but the effort you took to compile the list. Lots of things to think about.

agentdrek 3y ago

love the name ... needs a 1980's Commodore BASIC visual :-)

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

INTPenis 3y ago

As long as you're realistic about it, have fun. Most of us elders have seen these personal browser projects come and go these past 25-30 years. Odds and history are both against them as a long term viable project. But as a fun learning experience it's very impressive.

jaytaph 3y ago
i'm 45 :) I consider myself elder as well.. and yes.. i've seen many come and go as well.. I just don't think that should be a reason to not do it.

huijzer 3y ago

Nice! Just go for it, man! History often needs only one person. Who would have known that Guido van Rossum would write the language in which most of modern AI would be written while the servers run on some operating systems created by Linus Torvalds. Both just had a crazy idea and started working on it.

nonrandomstring 3y ago

> I get angry about not being able to do anything about anything. And this is my way of trying to do something about it. It's the best I can do. This attitude is gold, and it's what changes the whole world. What you said about the misery of "news" resonates with me. In psyops we call it "sapping". Propaganda designed to demoralise, dispirit and corrode resistance used to come from our enemies. The classic example was Lord Haw-Haw [0]. Today our own mainstream news channels and technology giants seem determined to keep the population in perpetual hopeless anxiety. As you do, I find the discourse around tech to be a pit of dismissiveness, avoidance, denial, resignation, and learned-helplessness. I've been doing a lot of interviewing people lately, and careful sentiment analysis. The results are horrifying. The very word "tech" is becoming synonymous with "Resistance is futile". To stand up and do something, anything, not because you hope for success, but as an example, and for your own sanity, is the most positive and human of responses. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Haw-Haw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Haw-Haw

Eggsellence 3y ago
[flagged]
phkahler 3y ago
>> As you do, I find the discourse around tech to be a pit of dismissiveness, avoidance, denial, resignation, and learned-helplessness. Do you think this is why people are abandoning the GPL license in favor of MIT/BSD? Something about the fight the GPL aims to win being a hopeless fantasy? In the face of the sentiment you and OP express, I'd think GPL usage would be widespread.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  I think opinions around software licenses are limited to us hackers, and the actively code-publishing subset of us, moreover. From my POV the GPL certainly seems alive and well, and the ideology of the Free Software movement remains sound and strong. What I'm alluding to is the wider public. In <podcast-i-dare-not-mention> we literally walked around town interviewing young and old. Soon as I can, I'll share the results in a HN submission.

vidarh 3y ago

> This IS a pet project I think that is a great attitude to start with. When you build something with the attitude that it's for you and not "meant to be big and professional like GNU" to paraphrase Linus Torvalds, you can often achieve a lot with far less effort. It allows you to be pragmatic and accept things that you otherwise might not, and you can get to something useful to you whether as a learning experience or to actually use with a tiny fraction of the effort you'd want to invest if you intended to build a "product". A lot of my personal projects have involved stumbling over a project like yours and repurposing parts, and often veering off in entirely different directions, because it's often so much easier to pick up someones small pet project that is "close enough" than trying to pare down or adapt a huge, feature-complete beast. With a browser, a huge part of the complexity comes from needing to support every site out there, and every usage scenario, but when you build for you, already just being able to focus on making sites you care about work well enough pares the problem back enormously... And this is a long way of saying I think more people should take on "impossible" projects. Maybe the full thing won't be useful for other people anytime soon, but maybe parts of it will be, and sometimes something bigger comes out of what starts as a small pet project (like Linux did...)

samsquire 3y ago

Jaytaph, I really hope you can keep going and do something interesting with the work you learn from. Reading someone else's codebase is very difficult because there's so much context and knowledge behind a web browser. I have a very simple layout algorithm based on ORC Solver algorithm. If you want to get to something that is useful you could implement rendering for simple HTML documents with <p>, <h1> <table> tags.

atlasduo 3y ago

I wish more people gave a shot at browser implementations. You see a lot of comments that this in a herculean task, and maybe it is, but it's not _that_ bad. You don't have to implement all of the functionality of modern web browsers. You don't need battery APIs, game controller APIs, USB, etc. Focus on what is important - HTML, CSS, JS. Worst case scenario - you will learn something new. Best of luck on this project!

nicoburns 3y ago
I think it probably is that bad if you the approach it as this person is currently doing: not using any libraries at all. If you use existing libraries for HTML parsing, CSS parsing, layout algorithms, graphics rendering, etc, then I think I think it's doable.
- kelnos 3y ago
  Writing parsers honestly isn't that hard, especially when you have more or less step-by-step instructions for some of the formats, and test suites that independent 3rd parties have written that you can use to help verify your implementation. Regardless, so what if it's "bad"? OP is using this as a learning experience too. If he wants to write parsers, and thinks that experience will be good for him, then he should write parsers. I do agree that writing your own parsers isn't strictly necessary if you want to write an independent web renderer/browser. If I were tackling this project, I'd be more interested in and curious about how to write a renderer, and if there's a HTML or CSS parsing crate already written and available on crates.io, I'd probably use it. Then again, writing a parser would also make me intimately familiar with HTML and CSS in ways that I'm probably not currently, and that might help inform how I build the renderer.
justapassenger 3y ago
I wrote my own engine 15 years ago, when web was much much much simple. It’s a Herculean task. What’s important - HTML, CSS, JS are highly complicated, even if you exclude other APIs. It’s really cool pet project. But don’t expect anything usable as a result.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

matwood 3y ago

You shouldn't have to write this response on 'hacker' news, but good for you. Work on what you want. Some people do wood working, fix cars, or play video games. Others like coding. I have tons of partial projects I've started for various reasons, and enjoyed them all. Good luck and have fun. And, maybe your project does turn into something bigger.

fm2606 3y ago
Well said. I couldn't agree more! Good luck to the OP!
otp209 3y ago
Right? Whether or not it's practical, it's the way we learn. I used to see that sort of haughty "well why do you want to do X" response all the time on stackoverflow/its ilk (I've basically deprioritized results from that entire network of sites now), which isn't even a good tack as there are plenty of others who might want to do X for other, valid reasons; "why" shouldn't even be a question as far as learning goes.
stavros 3y ago
Agreed. This community has a tacit assumption that everything must make money or some other kind of return, otherwise it's useless, and that's not true. I love hanging out here, but I've posted projects for fun where people couldn't believe I didn't want to make money on them. Money is great, but it's not everything. Good luck, OP!
Cyphase 3y ago
"(just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux#The_creation_of_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux#The_creation_...

philbo 3y ago

I think a browser makes a GREAT personal project, because there are high-quality, public specifications for the stuff you need to implement. And these things are maintained in the open, you can even go and find meeting minutes if there are particular decisions you want to investigate further. And it's not just specifications, there's test suites and reference implementations out there too. Of course it's still a huge task, but there should be no blind alleys to wander up.

LaGrange 3y ago

You could do something back then, and it’s the same only thing you can do now: work with others. Drop the egocentrism, because collective action is the only way out, and it is possible.

slashdev 3y ago

If you’re doing it as a learning experience, then more power to you. But be honest with yourself about your motivations. As someone who usually takes on too much, and makes similar rationalizations, the road can be fun but it’s not going to a destination where you finish something. Don’t repeat my mistakes, examine the whys carefully.

jackthetab 3y ago
Why does he have to finish anything? TFA even says "I don't expect to finish." The Mona Lisa is unfinished and Leo spent 16 years on it.
- slashdev 3y ago
  He doesn’t, if he’s honestly ok with that. But you only have so much time, why not pick a goal that is achievable? Seems like a waste.
  - jackthetab 3y ago
    Why have a goal? Oftentimes it is the journey that is the most important, not the destination.
    - slashdev 3y ago
      Not all journeys are equally valuable. A goal is critical to point yourself in a worthwhile direction.
      - jackthetab 3y ago
        "Not all those who wander are lost." -Tolkein You and I obviously have different value systems so this thread will never coalesce. Enjoy your travels towards your goals.
        slashdev 3y ago

jongjong 3y ago

This is great. Would you be interested to add support for a custom blockchain-based DNS instead of the current centralized hierarchical mess? I've been thinking about this a lot and it's clear that a multi-blockchain-based solution would be perfect for this (and far simpler than the current system). Each blockchain could have its own top level domain. People would buy domains using the blockchain's own tokens on the blockchain itself. The browser would just discover its own peers and query any node in the blockchain to convert domain names into IP addresses. The browser could check the results against known public keys on that chain to verify that the record is legitimate. Blockchains are great for this use case as they are infinitely scalable in terms of reads (since you can always add more nodes which are exact cryptographically-verifiable replicas). While blockchains are constrained in terms of writes, this problem is dealt with via a transaction fee which increases with demand so it is naturally DoS-resistant and doesn't require special skills or trusted parties to operate. Anyway, the current centralized DNS system of hierarchical resolvers is also constrained in terms of writes but it feels ad-hoc with many centralized entities which are given a substantial amount of trust.

opless 3y ago
Blockchain is a solution looking for a problem. DNS isn't it. Sorry
- jongjong 3y ago
  Yet Bitcoin's market cap is $500 Billion and has a trading volume is over $10 billion per day and has been outperforming the markets for over a decade. If the financial system is fine, then how is it possible that a 'scam' is worth $500 billion? What kind of financial system allows such scam to exist for over a decade and keeps attracting investors year after year? If the financial system is not fine, then how could you say a blockchain like Bitcoin is a solution looking for a problem? That position doesn't make sense from any angle. And anyway, I've explained clearly what is the advantage of blockchain: - It's a system which supports unlimited reads at scale. - Spam-resistant when it comes to writes. - Its data can be verified independently so there is no need to trust service operators. Those are the most important characteristics of a DNS. Sadly the current system is missing the third point and that's why nobody truly owns their domain names. Everyone is merely renting from a TLD provider and hope that the laws of whatever country it's in are going to respect your claims.

koprulusector 3y ago

I just want to thank you for sharing your politics views. These are the same ideas and views, as an American, that I’m struggling with. It helps so much to know other people in other parts of the world are going through the same thing and have the same thoughts and ideas.

jefc1111 3y ago

This is an inspiring attitude. I used to be stuck in a rut of "there's no point starting to build / learn a thing because there will almost certainly never be a result of substance". After a while I realised that every unfinished thing results in learning, which is applied in the future, etc etc. What truly got me out of the rut was the realisation I was not only not finishing anything, I was not _doing_ anything. And one sure fire way to never finish anything is to never start anything. The corporate world is results-orientated, which is fair enough. Doesn't have to be that way all the time though - it's fun to be playful with technology.

trinsic2 3y ago
> I used to be stuck in a rut of "there's no point starting to build / learn a thing because there will almost certainly never be a result of substance". In my view, that's what people in power want to encourage, using crowed influencing dynamics [0]. There is an a loosely orchestrated effort to make people feel less powerful because that makes it easier for people in power (people with money or resources) to increase their self-interest endeavors. This is why I don't watch the news, and take peoples opinions about the world with a grain of salt. Ideas are like viruses, the spread rapidly. The people with the most resources gets to set the tone about what the population thinks by using modern media to mold the narrative. If you don't understand your individual value, you will be swept into this mind set, whether you are aware of it or not. [0]: Example https://cxl.com/blog/17-lesser-known-ways-to-persuade-people/ https://cxl.com/blog/17-lesser-known-ways-to-persuade-people...

lr4444lr 3y ago

Ignore the naysayers, and keep posting back when you have major updates. Also keep in mind that it doesn't have to be full featured to be incredibly usable and useful. Would love to have a minimalist browser that can run HTML/CSS/JS, keep cookies/localStorage, and that's about it. Maybe an anonymous browsing mode. I am rooting for you!

taylodl 3y ago

> I think this project will not result in an actual browser. Maybe this project shouldn't result in a graphical browser. I still think there's value in text-based browsing, in the line of Lynx. I would think there's a higher probability of creating something really useful if you were to go that route.

heresie-dabord 3y ago

> i want to know more about the underlying technical challenges. I applaud this fundamental curiosity. We don't want a world where technologies that people use (must use) every day are opaque, proprietary solutions that spy on us. Yet that is exactly what we have in the most popular Web browser. I recommend RSS or just to scrape Web content (Python and Perl do this well) and read the bits that are interesting to you.

zerojames 3y ago

You are going to learn so much from this project! I have had a lot of fun implementing (much smaller) web standards. I started with ones that had step-by-step implementation guides. It was one step in realizing that the web _is ours_! We can build it at every stage, from the web pages to the standards to the browsers. Happy building!

mo_42 3y ago

> This IS a pet project. Contrary to many comments here about not creating another browser, I'd like to encourage you continue! Once, for example Linux was also pet project. In retrospective, it's obvious but we don't know how the world will look like in a couple of years. And who could predict the success of Linux in the early nineties?

lacrimacida 3y ago

Scratch whichever itch you may have, especially the ones you can learn from. Some itches give birth and evolve into bigger things.

failrate 3y ago

I wrote a browser in Ruby yonks ago just to see what the hard parts were. It was great fun, and I learned a lot, so more power to you.

i_am_a_peasant 3y ago

Shut up and hack!

hughw 3y ago

Idea -- pump the whatwg specs through chatgpt to generate the Rust code.

jabradoodle 3y ago
If it's that simple, do it yourself?

mietek 3y ago

You may find this website useful: https://browser.engineering https://browser.engineering

BobbyJo 3y ago

-"I'm building a hot rod!" -"Why wouldn't you just go hang out on the factory line at Ford instead?"

pipeline_peak 3y ago
More like "I'm building a soap box derby racer!"
- georgeecollins 3y ago
  yes- which is usually fun and teaches you a lot!
charcircuit 3y ago
The difference is instead of buying parts to build the hotrod you instead start by making an iron mine. If you want to make something custom you don't need to start from scratch.
- BobbyJo 3y ago
  I don't think he plans to build his own processors and write it in machine code.
- function_seven 3y ago
  In the hierarchy of "from scratch", it goes more like "buy fast car", "build fast car from available parts", "machine own parts from stock", "make own castings from scrap metal", "mine ore and smelt it". Just because my hot rod isn't made from existing parts does it mean I'm mining ore. Many awesome hot rod projects involve machining from stock or even casting from scrap. What OP is doing is on this same level. He's not doing atomic layer deposition or anything. Just writing code on top of an existing OS and using existing programming languages.

marginalia_nu 3y ago

Ignore the noise. So much crab mentality on HN sometimes. If even half the time spent telling people that their project is pointless waste of time was spent doing something constructive instead, the world would have a lot more cool and interesting projects in it. Better to fail at something bold and ambitious than not even try at all.

jwr 3y ago
This! Making >> Not Making, always. You make, you learn, perhaps one day you will make something better, perhaps not — but at least you've been building something. Ignore the armchair critics, criticizing is so much easier than building.
- digging 3y ago
  I'm not upset at the OP, but I wouldn't say this is a golden rule. Some people make some really atrocious shit. People should, in general, be at least a little critical of what they're making.
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
    It's fine to make atrocious shit though. Making something good takes practice. Often you need to see what sticks. Sometimes the only outcome is a lesson. The master has failed more times than a beginner has even tried.
    - digging 3y ago
      Sorry - I don't mean low-quality, I mean evil.
    - halostatue 3y ago
      I don't think that GP is talking about the quality of production, but the quality of the concept. There are things that people with any sense of shame would not produce.

weinzierl 3y ago

People inevitably will come and say this is futile because writing a browser that supports the "modern web" is just too big an undertaking. I would like to encourage you to ignore them and write a browser that works with a subset you decide to be useful and never feel bad if some pages don't work. I know it is kind of hypocritical for me to say that, because I come from a generation that fought for standardization and against all the "This page works best with IE4", but I've come to the realization that while we certainly have progressed we've not really accomplished what we'd set out to. Nowadays, I certainly would not refuse to use a browser just because it only supports a subset of pages and sites. Heck, a browser without Facebook and Youtube might even be a good thing.

PaulHoule 3y ago

I would say though that you have to pick your battles. On your path you might vanquish shitty web sites but just not being able to read them, but I think a real victory against enshittification involves breaking away from the web user interface which is some of why there has been so much bot blocking lately. It's not that people are going train an LLM on a shitty site but that you're going to get the LLM to read the shitty site for you, that is the real death of shitty sites. (e.g. agent posts your question to Reddit on your behalf, picks out and summarizes the best answer; instead of looking at craigslist every day for farm animals you get notified of the good ones; instead of seeing an ad for a Laurie Anderson concert on the bus when the tickets are all sold out the system tells you the moment the tickets go on sale...) But who knows? An HTML 5 parser is a good place to start towards that end. I had similar motivations for developing my smart RSS reader and intelligent agent YOShInOn which has gotten me to work on filtering and "deshittification" right away as opposed to face a 1500 man x year project before getting to the stuff that matters to me. For me the path not taken was developing a "reader" that works like archive.today, there was a summmer in the pandemic when my son and I were driving back and forth to Buffalo a lot and talking about missile defense systems and I did a "spike" project to develop something that would archive, process and deshittify web pages and I came to the conclusion that it was a long road to make something that was better instead of worse (every archiver I've seen is way slower than just browsing the page and sorry "slow X" advocates, slow = bad) This winter I turned to the problem of end-to-end active learning for selecting articles and had great success as it. Sometime it sends me to archive.today but the goddamn CAPTCHAs never end when I use it from home so the question of the archiver/reader has come back but now that the thing has a workflow engine and could archive articles before I look at them the archiver/reader looks appealing if I can find something open source that is good enough. There's a commercial product https://www.getupnext.com/ https://www.getupnext.com/ which took the opposite approach of developing a reader and now they are working on recommendations. That's a path that makes sense because the reader cleans up the text which in principle is good for NLP but for what I am doing I think the signals in dirty text have enough value that I am doing just fine. They've got the issue that they're very unlikely to really develop content-based recommendation for a multi-user system because collaborative filter is such a good shortcut, also YOShInOn uses a Tik Tok style interface which for some reason has hardly been tried despite being a hit with Stumbleupon, this interface collects good negative samples and gets great results with a simple classifer... if you get a few 1000 judgements.*

radicalbyte 3y ago

Good to see someone do this. Funny I was thinking about this recently - I've been trying to push for action from regulators / government here in NL (especially wrt Google) but there was very little appetite with the people I'd need to convince to stand with me to make something happen. Considered briefly starting a new browser. However I've had experience attempting to design a very simple OS (a long long time ago, I got a mouse/pointer working on the C64 then realised that it wasn't worth it).. and modern OSes and browsers are of a similar level of complexity. So now I'm focused first on family (due to working insane hours the last few years they've been neglected - pretty sure you worked a little bit on the same projects so know where I'm getting at) and a bit later in the year on something where I have a >50% chance of seeing results - fixing healthcare IT here in Europe. If I can say anything it would be to remember that as a parent - especially one who wants to be responsible and present - we don't have a lot of space available for serious side projects.

radicalbyte 3y ago
(oh and my side project is a C64 emulator, also in Rust, ground up.. only said being a parent thing means I'm only at the research phase, although to the point where I have all of the resources I need to begin productive work sans the 8-16 hrs of quiet time to start coding + get the write-test-deliver loop up and running)

thecleaner 3y ago

OP you go write that code and profile and make sure you get some real world feedback on it. I hope it DOES result in a real functional browser.

irrational 3y ago

I don't know why Linus is trying to write a new OS, we already have OSes. It's not like this Linux thing is going to go anywhere.

px43 3y ago
No one said that. At the time there was a massive gaping hole in the OS market begging to be filled. OS vendors were gouging everyone, and GNU/Hurd kept experiencing delays.
- irrational 3y ago
  Of course nobody said that. Just like nobody should be saying anything to this guy about writing a browser.
- strunz 3y ago
  Actually Linus himself proclaimed it as a hobby that would never be big and professional: >I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.
justapassenger 3y ago
It’s like saying “Zuckerberg and Gates dropped out of school so why shouldn’t I?”. Chances of replicating Linux success are as big as chances of being next Zuckerberg. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, but align your expectations. And most importantly, as OP said - it’s pet project. Success isn’t a goal.
prewett 3y ago
Version 6 Unix was about 9000 lines of code; the first version of Linux was something similar. Firefox has 27 million lines of code. Linux has about that now, too, which is why one reason you don't see grad-school Linus #2 writing an OS and getting traction.
jonny_eh 3y ago
Did he write a blog post (or newsgroup post) in advance of writing the first version? I'm all for pet project tinkering, but seems strange to publicly make a pronouncement before starting. There's no "news" here, why is it on the front page?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

awesomekling 3y ago

Go for it OP, the more browsers the merrier! :^)

mannyv 3y ago

go for it! The hardest part of a browser is rendering. The rest of it is easy, relatively speaking The big problem with browsers is state. Specifically, the web page has an internal state that the developer is tracking, and the browser UI has a state that the browser is tracking. How do you keep those two in sync? The current model is based on the sort of hack that Netscape did way back when. There are probably other ways to do it. Specifically, the problem is: how do you give something access to a representation of the visual state (the DOM) while hiding your implementation of it...in a secure manner? And how do you allow that client (the website) write access to that DOM representation securely and safely?

eska 3y ago

This site is called hacker news after all, so this is the attitude I love and welcome on here. Ignore the high-karma-naysayers, they don’t really contribute to anything.

astrobe_ 3y ago

To me the logical conclusion of what you write is not to write yet-another-web-browser, because browsers are rotten to the core by terrible protocol designs, terrible specifications, politics, greed etc. Browsers did not spontaneously start to degrade, it's what the key actors at different times did that made it happen. The only hope, IMO, is to build something much more sane that cannot be abused. Something like Gopher or Gemini. Simple specs that make it possible for a single person or a small team to implement something decently working without them spending their like on it like Middle Age monks spent their life mapping and cataloging stars. I would start with a feature-limited markup language that's good enough to display text - maybe images if you really insist - and leave all media and interactive stuff to external programs; if your browser ends up being a virtual machine and a universal media player, it is doomed to degenerate into a WWW browser if it ever gets popular. But of course if one builds something that cannot be abused or monetized easily, the big content creators won't be interested. It will take a lifetime or two to gather a critical mass of users, and only if the WWW overloads abuse their power so much that the average WWW serf actively starts to look for a better place to be, and only if at this time the alternative has more and bigger advantages than drawbacks.

unethical_ban 3y ago
Gemini is an interesting educational project but the lack of ability to serve even static pictures or video is an absolutely crippling mistake.
- spc476 3y ago
  Gemini can, in fact, serve up images, audio and even video. The specification disallows inline display of such types, but it can serve them fine.
  - unethical_ban 3y ago
    Ah. I misspoke, but my assertion is the same - the lack of inline display is a hamper.

waynesonfire 3y ago

I loved your comparison to how hackernews is turning into TV news. > ... it’s all negative. Companies are pushing unwanted updates, breaking all promises, raising subscriptions, and buying up companies while doing everything in their power to figure out how much more personal data they can take (away) from us. Governments are banning encryption because of child molesters (they also use vans and candy. Let’s also ban them!). People in power with absolutely no idea of how the modern world works and people in power who DO know how it works You nailed it. Thanks for articulating this.

otachack 3y ago

I think it's amazing you're starting a new project. You stated two points in your blog post on this project: 1. To push back on Chrome almost-monopoly and 2. As a self-learn project. You'll have to balance the needs between those two. You aren't hitting 1. until you have users picking up the browser. You'll be hitting 2. as soon as you start the project, potentially. If you contribute to currently existing projects you'll be hitting 1. A lot more but may lack 2. compared to a new project. Good luck! Btw this is reminding me of Serenity OS which includes a from-scratch browser. You should check it for inspiration :D

dogcomplex 3y ago

Great philosophy. What were the pain points so far - where's the real moat? In the not-too-distant future when we sick some AI coder programs on the problem to just mass-implement features in a banal repetitive way, which are the really complex ones they're gonna get stuck on? What are the ridiculous "this feature only exists to keep google in power" features you've found? What made you want to make a browser instead of something much simpler like - an OS?

darkclouds 3y ago

What I've found when you become a nuisance but read that as successful, you'll find all sorts of problems suddenly plague you in your off line world. So I wish you the best of the luck, but keep an eye out, the world but in my experience the US and UK, is nothing like its "public persona".

PumpkinSpice 3y ago

On any tech forum, there's always a lot of "why are you writing your own Hello World program instead of contributing to an existing one?" energy. As you note, the learning process itself is worth it. I'd encourage you to keep a blog / journal for others to follow. Most innovation doesn't involve the most qualified expert in the field taking on a project that is a sure bet. In fact, qualified experts are often too cautious to try something crazy or shake up the status quo. Back in 1991, Linus wasn't the right guy to write an operating system either, and most experts probably felt we didn't need another OS to begin with. He probably should've contributed to GNU Hurd or Minix instead.

askafriend 3y ago

Respect

kelnos 3y ago

I think this project is a fantastic idea! I've toyed with the idea of writing a browser for years, but when I consider the amount of human-years that have gone into Firefox, Chrome, etc., I get scared and back off of it. I wanted to give it a try, but it looks like main isn't building right now, so I'll check back periodically. Hopefully I will even find some time to contribute, as a Rust-based web browser sounds like a project I'd be interested in working on. One thing I'm a little bummed about is the license: I've gone back and forth on this topic a lot in the past couple decades, and more recently I have actually been releasing stuff under more permissive licenses like MIT. But if I were to work on a browser, I'd want to GPL that. For a work of that magnitude, someone forking it and making proprietary changes would be intolerable to me. Regardless, I think there is absolutely room in the world for more than just ~2.5 dominant browser engines (Gecko, and Blink/WebKit, which I guess aren't the same any more, but have the same provenance, hence the extra 0.5). Sure, contributing to something that already exists would be "more efficient", but since when was efficiency a requirement for doing something that you believe matters?

why-el 3y ago

I think there is a useful LLM based solution (chrome extension or something) here where you ask it (with some trial and error), to only list constructive responses, hhh. I am only half kidding, most of internet feedback is useless, even here, but the ones that matter do matter someone somewhat exponentially, so you'd want them. You can even allow it a margin of error.

niutech 3y ago

> Yes, there are a lot of browsers out there where I can contribute to which would be more efficient. But that would result in just a few browsers instead of a lot of browsers. I'm all for the last one, as this would give people options. IMO it's better to have few rock-solid open source systems than multitude of half-baked projects reinventing the wheel. But good luck!

TheHappyOddish 3y ago

Screw everyone else, it looks interesting and fun. I'll be following your RSS updates. Good luck!