11 ms·

Webkit.js

205 points by ndesaulniers 12y ago

ozten 12y ago
FirefoxOS will host Safari / Chrome apps, before iOS will allow a Firefox. Open FTW.
- atonse 12y ago
  What exactly are iOS users missing in Safari, in your opinion, that they would get from Firefox? I can see that Chrome has some cool sync features if you're into that sort of thing. But it still uses WebKit. And from what I've observed, people seem happy with the "Chrome" app in the app store, even though it uses a handicapped renderer. (Although in iOS 8, it won't be handicapped anymore, and will be as powerful as native Safari) (Also WebGL support is new in iOS). Are people really clamoring for the Firefox engine to be supported in iOS?
  - zachlipton 12y ago
    Because competition in the browser market is vital to keep the web platform progressing and to prevent a single party from controlling web standards. Do you remember the dark ages when IE ruled the web and things like HTML5, canvas, webgl, etc... couldn't happen?
    - anon1385 12y ago
      >competition in the browser market is vital to keep the web platform progressing and to prevent a single party from controlling web standards I don't see much difference between a single party and a cartel of 3-4 parties. They are all mega corporations that don't share my interests and even when there are several parties any one effectively has veto power over any changes to standards. The push for browser-as-OS is only going to make things worse. You don't get any browser choice at all when your hardware is running ChromeOS or FirefoxOS
      - ndesaulniers 12y ago
        > You don't get any browser choice at all when your hardware is running ChromeOS or FirefoxOS Both browser based OS's are still in their early phases. What if the hardware could run both, just as easily as you could put whatever flavor distro of linux on your desktop? There's too much closed source OS specific drivers to really allow you to run whatever OS you want on whatever hardware you want; and everyone is disincentivized unless money is involved. But what if drivers were open source? I'm not sure how to incentivize that (the community fixing shitty GL driver implementations, maybe), but I would bet you it would be a hell of a lot easier to get you favorite software running on your favorite hardware if they were. Right now, closed source drivers are a thorn in the side of users having choice. With the rapid progression of the Mesa project in particular, when hardware manufacturers come around to releasing their drivers, then ChromeOS, Firefox OS, and Tizen will be poised and in a good position.
        anon1385 12y ago
        >Both browser based OS's are still in their early phases. What if the hardware could run both, just as easily as you could put whatever flavor distro of linux on your desktop? This isn't a valid replacement for just being able to run multiple browsers. Switching OS has a large cost. Your FirefoxOS local apps won't run on ChromeOS (and vice versa). You have to work out how to get your files from one to the other and so on. If you want to just try another browser out you have to go through a process that is very intimidating and complicated for most people. The average user is not going to do it (or if they are persuaded to do it many will get angry and complain that all their apps are gone). Making the cost of switching browsers much higher is an attempt to lock people in to a single browser.
        theon144 12y ago
        >This isn't a valid replacement for just being able to run multiple browsers. Switching OS has a large cost. When your OS is no more than a browser, what is the difference?
        12y ago
    - atonse 12y ago
      I agree on principle. Many of us still have emotional baggage from the days of 95% IE market share, where the web really, REALLY sucked. But nowadays, I see it as, multiple companies have a vested financial interest (including MS with their new leadership) to ensure that browsers are very powerful. Even Apple, with iOS 8 has enabled 3rd party devs to have a full speed browser now with a JIT'd JS engine. They are simply not doing this from a position of weakness. There are no market forces. There's nobody out there saying "I won't use iOS because it only has Safari." Yet they still did it. Your mobile platform won't succeed today unless it has a powerful browser built in, apps or not.
      - pornel 12y ago
        > There's nobody out there saying "I won't use iOS because it only has Safari." FWIW, I said it and did it. I didn't like Safari, and I couldn't change the default browser to anything better. Even worse, most 3rd party apps used their own utter-crap in-app browsers instead. So I switched to Android where I have freedom to set my preferred default browser, and 3rd party apps actually respect that. I do agree with the rest of your comment — these days you can't have a platform without a great browser.
        wycats 12y ago
        > FWIW, I said it and did it. Same.
  - ndesaulniers 12y ago
    Most iOS devs aren't clamoring for alternative browser engine implementations because they're happy with the objective C runtime. Web developers shouldn't be happy with only having one browser implementation available because there's no competition on iOS. Safari on iOS can lag in features and not care because there is no competition on iOS. Chrome on iOS offers nothing in the way of additional html5 APIs and is just a new UI on the same old Webkit (to my knowledge). For instance, as of about a week ago Safari on iOS just got WebGL support (as you alluded to). How long would we have had WebGL support on iOS if we could ship an alternative browser engine implementation with competitive JIT'ing JavaScript engine (like Firefox's Gecko & SpiderMonkey engines) on iOS since the beginning? Would alternative browser engines with more APIs drive the Safari for iOS team to ship features faster? Bottom line: competition is healthy; developers and thus users win.
    - anon1385 12y ago
      > if we could ship an alternative browser engine implementation with competitive JIT'ing JavaScript engine Which is not possible on FirefoxOS. So I don't see how 'open' wins here (I'm using 'open' as the GP used it: a marketing buzzword synonymous with Mozilla).
      - ndesaulniers 12y ago
        I agree that "FirefoxOS will host Safari / Chrome apps, before iOS will allow a Firefox." doesn't lead to "Open FTW." I think Open still wins, for other reasons I've been trying to document. [0] Firefox OS is still young, and if it can establish meaningful marketshare, it puts Mozilla in position to change the industry. For example, what if Mozilla had leverage over device manufacturers to say "no locked bootloaders" and device manufacturers complied? I'm not sure Mozilla has that leverage today, but what other ways could Mozilla affect the industry for good once it does? [0] https://github.com/nickdesaulniers/What-Open-Source-Means-To-Me https://github.com/nickdesaulniers/What-Open-Source-Means-To...
    - kolme 12y ago
      > Chrome on iOS offers nothing in the way of additional html5 APIs and is just a new UI on the same old Webkit (to my knowledge). No, they forked Webkit due to all the browser related #ifdef's they had scattered across the source code. They were diverging to much and damaging the quality of the code. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_%28layout_engine%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_%28layout_engine%29 Edit: They're still pretty similar, though.
  - ozten 12y ago
    Firefox for Android is very popular and highly rated in the Google play store. The browsers that are in the Apple App store are handicapped by legal limitations, which are not present on other, more open operating systems.
    - anon1385 12y ago
      >The browsers that are in the Apple App store are handicapped by legal limitations, which are not present on other, more open operating systems. Is FirefoxOS more or less 'open' than iOS? You can't write a competitive javascript runtime for FirefoxOS either.
      - ndesaulniers 12y ago
        You can fork the project on Github and Mercurial and write DOM bindings to whatever JavaScript engine you'd like. [0] https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/B2G https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/B2G [1] http://hg.mozilla.org/ http://hg.mozilla.org/
        anon1385 12y ago
        Having to convince users to install your fork of the OS really isn't the same thing as being able to run a different native browser alongside their existing software. If the only way to use a browser other than Internet Explorer had been to switch OS then Firefox could never have been created in the first place.
        ndesaulniers 12y ago
        How is that any different than with native code? You can't just rip out your OS' implementation of libc and have all of your programs use another (not all implementations of libc are ABI compatible). You can't boot your computer into two operating systems at once (or can you?). This whole post is analogous to running Windows in a VM on Linux.
        12y ago
  - nnnnni 12y ago
    The funny thing is that the "RAWR NO SAFARI, ONLY CHROME!" people don't seem to realize that both are WebKit at the core. Sure, some features are in Chrome first, but that's only because Apple is very cautious when releasing the new features to the general public.
    - agildehaus 12y ago
      Chrome forked Webkit over a year ago, creating Blink. They're two independent layout engines now.
      - thefreeman 12y ago
        I believe he is referring to the fact that iOS Chrome is the only version still using WebKit
        nnnnni 12y ago
        Yes, that's exactly what I meant. I think that a few people may have missed that due to the fact that my comment is currently at -2.
        cwyers 12y ago
        That's because Apple's TOS only allows their system build of WebKit in approved apps, so Google can either use approved WebKit or they can go sit on their thumbs and spin. It's not a voluntary act on Google's part; they would use Blink if Apple allowed it.
      - tlinton 12y ago
        Sort of, they're very similar still. In actually the layout is almost exactly the same, its the rendering and compositing that has significantly changed between the two.
    - thefreeman 12y ago
      I'm pretty sure iOS Chrome is only WebKit at the core because of iOS restrictions. All other version of Chrome on all platforms use Blink.
  - freehunter 12y ago
    The best thing about Android Firefox is the add-ons. Having adblock running on my phone is a pretty nice-to-have feature.
  - greggman 12y ago
    Safari in iOS is missing many newer APIs. For example WebRTC is not in Safari but it is in Chrome/Firefox. No idea if it's been added to iOS8. Even WebGL in iOS8 is currently hobbled. http://codeflow.org/entries/2014/jun/08/some-issues-with-apples-ios-webgl-implementation/#hardcoded-constraints-on-ios http://codeflow.org/entries/2014/jun/08/some-issues-with-app... Also it's not a matter of "clamoring". People have no idea what they're missing. Do you think anyone would have been clamoring for Firefox on Windows in the 90s for they had never seen it and were limited to IE? Maybe I'm showing my bias here but remember the browsers before Chrome and V8 came on the scene and heated up the competition? Well there's no competition on iOS because you can't write your own browser. Heck, I'd certainly like to see ASM.JS on iOS as one example.
PLenz 12y ago
Anyway to get this to run in node with the output going to say Cairo? It'd be a fun little project to see if you could build a simple but working browser in nothing but JS.
- msvan 12y ago
  And then, getting the browser running itself in the in-browser browser.
  - nnnnni 12y ago
    Now THAT would be a sandboxed browser. Also, even though people tend to not like this kind of thing here, it has to be said: Yo dawg...
  - RussianCow 12y ago
    Reminds me of Gary Bernhardt's talk "The Birth and Death of JavaScript": https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
- tlinton 12y ago
  Yes, there's a software rendering version, it actually uses Cairo. Software rendering just bitblts up (out of a webworker or as a SDL_UpdateRect) callback in javascript as a RGBA array.
- Excavator 12y ago
  Would you count links/lynx running under Linux in an OpenRISC emulator with networking provided by a relay server over WebSockets? http://s-macke.github.io/jor1k/ http://s-macke.github.io/jor1k/
LukeB_UK 12y ago
Getting errors on chrome 35.0.1916.153 on Linux Mint. 56 on line 34 in webkit.api.js Uncaught #<error> on line 15633 in webkit.bin.js
- tlinton 12y ago
  If you put in any HTML that requires webkit to go out to hte network it crashes since network requests are disabled in the demo.
  - LukeB_UK 12y ago
    This was using the demo code that was already on the page.
dag11 12y ago
I thought it was a static rendering, but then I put in a marquee tag and it moved flawlessly across the screen. Impressive. I can't say I see the practical implementations of this, but I'm sure there's some. But it's impressive nonetheless.
- pfraze 12y ago
  Rendering HTML to WebGL textures would be big, which I think this could do - though probably not as performantly as the browser could. It's currently not possible, partially due to security concerns if I remember right.
  - ndesaulniers 12y ago
    Awesome idea! I've seen tricks where CSS 3D transforms were used to position the entire DOM within a scene rendered in Canvas, but that approach is extremely limited. [0] Theoretically, now you could render the DOM to a texture instead of to the screen and do some sweet deferred rending. == Edit == Looks like one of Mozilla's Distinguished Engineers blogged about the technique. [1] [2] The creator of emscripten used this technique to render tweets as a texture in the bannabread demo. [3] [0] https://medium.com/@deathcap1/six-months-of-voxel-js-494be64dd1cc https://medium.com/@deathcap1/six-months-of-voxel-js-494be64... [1] http://robert.ocallahan.org/2011/11/drawing-dom-content-to-canvas.html http://robert.ocallahan.org/2011/11/drawing-dom-content-to-c... [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Canvas/Drawing_DOM_objects_into_a_canvas https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Canvas/Dra... [3] http://kripken.github.io/boon/screens/game.html?low,low http://kripken.github.io/boon/screens/game.html?low,low
    - rl3 12y ago
      One of the drawbacks with rendering DOM content to a Canvas/WebGL texture is that interactivity is lost in the process. At the very least an intermediate layer would have to be created that pipes scene input into DOM input. The nice part about CSS 3D transforms is that interactivity is maintained, and it's still hardware-accelerated. A fantastic example of this was made by the creator of Three.js over a year ago: http://mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/threejs/css3d/ http://mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/threejs/css3d/ As you said above, there are severe drawbacks with that approach. It is very limited in terms of what's possible compared to a traditional 3D scene. Moreover, since CSS 3D transforms are essentially DOM content rendered to a texture, rasterization occurs, and as such there isn't clean scaling, even with SVG content.
heydenberk 12y ago
It's a little contrived, but a "practical" use of this might be for an online HTML editor to embed the document (or display a preview) without any interference from the parent document.
- schrodinger 12y ago
  You can do that via iframe as well
  - leorocky 12y ago
    If you allow custom HTML via an iframe and make it shareable you have to host the iframe from a different domain, otherwise it's XSS vulnerability heaven. The trick will be authentication because separate domains don't share sessions (and you wouldn't want a secured domain access to your session anyway) but you can do communication via postMessage.
copremesis 12y ago
straight up broken
elwell 12y ago
Can't wait for JS support so I can: <html> <body> <iframe src="http://trevorlinton.github.io/"></iframe> </body> </html>
- bjeanes 12y ago
  https://help.github.com/articles/setting-up-a-custom-domain-with-github-pages https://help.github.com/articles/setting-up-a-custom-domain-...
  - ricket 12y ago
    Erm, look at the URL of the original page...
jstsch 12y ago
Neat. Getting some good use out of HTML2Canvas as well. But always wondering why there is no way to get a bitmap from screen... something like window.getPixels(x, y, width, height).
- theallan 12y ago
  Yes! This would open a huge number of possibilities. Simple things like a colour picker, to transitions based on the content of the window would be made possible. I would love to see this happen.
- jevinskie 12y ago
  There are privacy and security concerns to address. Similar to this situation: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/03/privacy-related-changes-coming-to-css-vistited/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/03/privacy-related-changes-co...
  - nawitus 12y ago
    One solution is for the browser to provide a "anonymized" bitmap picture, e.g. setting the links to default colors. I don't know how feasible that is. It would require a new rendering of the page, at least.
    - euank 12y ago
      That's not a solution for the general problem of getPixel + iframes though. Here, I'll give a simple example. Let's say there's a site that uses cookies to track logins. For example, hacker news. Now, hacker news does have the X-Frame-Option Deny, but let's assume it doesn't. So to figure out my hacker news username, all you have to do now is create an iframe with hacker news, and then getPixel on the area of the frame that contains usernames, run some trivial OCR, and done. Now, this issue is even more serious in other instances. For example, google talk widgets are embedded by iframes I believe. In both these cases, a fresh rendering would still have the inappropriate material due to cookies. If cookies aren't sent, e.g. you do a fresh render in a private tab, it would still have security concerns for anything that displays different, sometimes private, content based on ip address. For an example of that, you could render "private.internal.company.localsite" in an iframe and if a visitor from that company visited, even a cookie-less load would probably show private data due to the internal site relying on ip/nat controls.
i_am_ralpht 12y ago
In Chrome (for me, on 64bit Linux) it consumes 176MB of RAM -- for all of WebKit + Cairo + FreeType/HarfBuzz/etc -- it's most of an OS right there. GMail, a webapp email reader, is currently taking 368MB of RAM. Insane!
- reubenmorais 12y ago
  "Web browsers have never been more memory efficient, and web pages have never had more memory bloat." - someone on Twitter a couple days ago
notastartup 12y ago
this is pretty cool but network requests and javascript support would make it even more crazier. I viewed the html source for this page and pasted it. I was quite impressed. It looks like this is supposed to be a browser engine written in Javascript? So essentially we would have a sandbox browser within a browser? That would be awesome.
- ndesaulniers 12y ago
  > javascript support would make it even more crazier There's interesting research being done in the area of meta-circular interpreters. There's techniques for speeding them up; they're not as slow as I'd expect. For example, one interpreter can do type analysis and rewrite chunks of code.
  - notastartup 12y ago
    another interesting question would be will webkit.js support single origin policy? basically, what if you could use webkit.js like an iframe but with the ability to execute javascript and manipulate that window.
- userbinator 12y ago
  this is pretty cool but network requests and javascript support would make it even more crazier. The first thought that comes to mind would be to try to nest the things... a browser inside a browser inside a browser.
dingdingdang 12y ago
Why? Not being dry/evil, simply just interesting in whether this project has practical offshoot or is pure fun (..)?
- bluetidepro 12y ago
  I was wondering the same thing. Why would anyone ever need to do something like this? What kind of project would this come useful?
- gol706 12y ago
  Doing this in the browser might be a little silly, or at least I can't immediately think of a good use, but I think using this in a node.js program as an easy way to template something out and render an image/pdf locally could be useful.
  - dingdingdang 12y ago
    Of course, that's cool point!
- _random_ 12y ago
  JavaScript is the mainstream http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck so the reasons all the same.
Yoric 12y ago
Nice one. Next step is porting $YourFavoriteWebkitBrowser to Firefox OS :)
Rinum 12y ago
Very nice and with JS support it would be perfect! I wonder if this is a solution to potential XSS attacks with embeded iframes or embeded user-generated html+css+js.
- m1sta_ 12y ago
  I'm quite interested in seeing this evolve, but for your purposes will postMessage not do?
grimtrigger 12y ago
Pretty cool. There's been a push to make HTML run everywhere, but this proves you can make X run on HTML. Maybe someday we'll code apps in Objective-C/Java that run in the browser, all inside a canvas.
- wtracy 12y ago
  We're closer than you think! https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/gtk-broadway.html https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/gtk-broadway.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr8eo4RlPw4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr8eo4RlPw4
  - spyder 12y ago
    And also emscripten-qt: http://vps2.etotheipiplusone.com:30176/redmine/projects/emscripten-qt/wiki/Demos http://vps2.etotheipiplusone.com:30176/redmine/projects/emsc...
- emilsedgh 12y ago
  That would be a sad day. Layers upon layers of complexity, abstraction, technologies, etc. Please make it easier. More simple.
  - Everlag 12y ago
    I'd like you to consider the fact that your operating system is already a significant abstraction and that a browser is essentially a virtual machine that allows to download and run programs from any source safely. You know all those malware issues regarding unsigned or compromised executables? Not a problem in the wonderful world where programs are incapable of acting overly malicious. There're specs like webgl and webcl that lets you take the scary topic of graphics programming, which is communication to an external piece of hardware, and make that as safe as loading some javascript to sort a table by dollar value. </rant>
  - chuable 12y ago
    Our entire modern day computing experience is built upon 'Layers upon layers of complexity, abstraction, technologies, etc.';Simple and easy doesn't necessarily mean less.
wildpeaks 12y ago
That reminds me of the hilarious talk "The Birth & Death of Javascript" where everything get converted to asm.js, even operating systems. https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
- shayief 12y ago
  Check out this kernel built on V8 engine, designed to run JavaScript code https://github.com/runtimejs/runtime https://github.com/runtimejs/runtime
atomical 12y ago
I've been watching this project hoping that eventually PDFs could be rendered on the client.
- qhoc 12y ago
  You can do that today already using toDataURL() https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLCanvasElement https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLCanvasE... to convert canvas to image and then use jsPdf http://parall.ax/products/jspdf http://parall.ax/products/jspdf to convert that image to pdf
- kevingadd 12y ago
  http://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/ http://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/
- tlinton 12y ago
  Is this a big needed feature? It's actually really easy to pull of, cairo's backend can be switched from using images to svg, to pdf's. It's just switching the backend and once the renderer is done just spit out the results. Add it as a feature request on github and i'll add it to the api.
- atomical 12y ago
  Sorry, I meant rendered from javascript templates in the browser.
mantraxC 12y ago
I remember when for some reason people started writing SVG and HTML engines for Flash. Because, I don't know. They wanted to put a browser in your browser, so you can browse while you browse. The engines worked, but where are they now? Nowhere. Just like Flash. No matter how much effort you put into something, no matter how functional it is, now matter how much geek cred you'll get for it, if it doesn't have some sensible use, at least superficially, it'll linger and die. Wasted effort. Just because you can do something...

Webkit.js

205 points by ndesaulniers 12y ago

ozten 12y ago

FirefoxOS will host Safari / Chrome apps, before iOS will allow a Firefox. Open FTW.

atonse 12y ago
What exactly are iOS users missing in Safari, in your opinion, that they would get from Firefox? I can see that Chrome has some cool sync features if you're into that sort of thing. But it still uses WebKit. And from what I've observed, people seem happy with the "Chrome" app in the app store, even though it uses a handicapped renderer. (Although in iOS 8, it won't be handicapped anymore, and will be as powerful as native Safari) (Also WebGL support is new in iOS). Are people really clamoring for the Firefox engine to be supported in iOS?
- zachlipton 12y ago
  Because competition in the browser market is vital to keep the web platform progressing and to prevent a single party from controlling web standards. Do you remember the dark ages when IE ruled the web and things like HTML5, canvas, webgl, etc... couldn't happen?
  - anon1385 12y ago
    >competition in the browser market is vital to keep the web platform progressing and to prevent a single party from controlling web standards I don't see much difference between a single party and a cartel of 3-4 parties. They are all mega corporations that don't share my interests and even when there are several parties any one effectively has veto power over any changes to standards. The push for browser-as-OS is only going to make things worse. You don't get any browser choice at all when your hardware is running ChromeOS or FirefoxOS
    - ndesaulniers 12y ago
      > You don't get any browser choice at all when your hardware is running ChromeOS or FirefoxOS Both browser based OS's are still in their early phases. What if the hardware could run both, just as easily as you could put whatever flavor distro of linux on your desktop? There's too much closed source OS specific drivers to really allow you to run whatever OS you want on whatever hardware you want; and everyone is disincentivized unless money is involved. But what if drivers were open source? I'm not sure how to incentivize that (the community fixing shitty GL driver implementations, maybe), but I would bet you it would be a hell of a lot easier to get you favorite software running on your favorite hardware if they were. Right now, closed source drivers are a thorn in the side of users having choice. With the rapid progression of the Mesa project in particular, when hardware manufacturers come around to releasing their drivers, then ChromeOS, Firefox OS, and Tizen will be poised and in a good position.
      - anon1385 12y ago
        >Both browser based OS's are still in their early phases. What if the hardware could run both, just as easily as you could put whatever flavor distro of linux on your desktop? This isn't a valid replacement for just being able to run multiple browsers. Switching OS has a large cost. Your FirefoxOS local apps won't run on ChromeOS (and vice versa). You have to work out how to get your files from one to the other and so on. If you want to just try another browser out you have to go through a process that is very intimidating and complicated for most people. The average user is not going to do it (or if they are persuaded to do it many will get angry and complain that all their apps are gone). Making the cost of switching browsers much higher is an attempt to lock people in to a single browser.
        theon144 12y ago
        >This isn't a valid replacement for just being able to run multiple browsers. Switching OS has a large cost. When your OS is no more than a browser, what is the difference?
        12y ago
  - atonse 12y ago
    I agree on principle. Many of us still have emotional baggage from the days of 95% IE market share, where the web really, REALLY sucked. But nowadays, I see it as, multiple companies have a vested financial interest (including MS with their new leadership) to ensure that browsers are very powerful. Even Apple, with iOS 8 has enabled 3rd party devs to have a full speed browser now with a JIT'd JS engine. They are simply not doing this from a position of weakness. There are no market forces. There's nobody out there saying "I won't use iOS because it only has Safari." Yet they still did it. Your mobile platform won't succeed today unless it has a powerful browser built in, apps or not.
    - pornel 12y ago
      > There's nobody out there saying "I won't use iOS because it only has Safari." FWIW, I said it and did it. I didn't like Safari, and I couldn't change the default browser to anything better. Even worse, most 3rd party apps used their own utter-crap in-app browsers instead. So I switched to Android where I have freedom to set my preferred default browser, and 3rd party apps actually respect that. I do agree with the rest of your comment — these days you can't have a platform without a great browser.
      - wycats 12y ago
        > FWIW, I said it and did it. Same.
- ndesaulniers 12y ago
  Most iOS devs aren't clamoring for alternative browser engine implementations because they're happy with the objective C runtime. Web developers shouldn't be happy with only having one browser implementation available because there's no competition on iOS. Safari on iOS can lag in features and not care because there is no competition on iOS. Chrome on iOS offers nothing in the way of additional html5 APIs and is just a new UI on the same old Webkit (to my knowledge). For instance, as of about a week ago Safari on iOS just got WebGL support (as you alluded to). How long would we have had WebGL support on iOS if we could ship an alternative browser engine implementation with competitive JIT'ing JavaScript engine (like Firefox's Gecko & SpiderMonkey engines) on iOS since the beginning? Would alternative browser engines with more APIs drive the Safari for iOS team to ship features faster? Bottom line: competition is healthy; developers and thus users win.
  - anon1385 12y ago
    > if we could ship an alternative browser engine implementation with competitive JIT'ing JavaScript engine Which is not possible on FirefoxOS. So I don't see how 'open' wins here (I'm using 'open' as the GP used it: a marketing buzzword synonymous with Mozilla).
    - ndesaulniers 12y ago
      I agree that "FirefoxOS will host Safari / Chrome apps, before iOS will allow a Firefox." doesn't lead to "Open FTW." I think Open still wins, for other reasons I've been trying to document. [0] Firefox OS is still young, and if it can establish meaningful marketshare, it puts Mozilla in position to change the industry. For example, what if Mozilla had leverage over device manufacturers to say "no locked bootloaders" and device manufacturers complied? I'm not sure Mozilla has that leverage today, but what other ways could Mozilla affect the industry for good once it does? [0] https://github.com/nickdesaulniers/What-Open-Source-Means-To-Me https://github.com/nickdesaulniers/What-Open-Source-Means-To...
  - kolme 12y ago
    > Chrome on iOS offers nothing in the way of additional html5 APIs and is just a new UI on the same old Webkit (to my knowledge). No, they forked Webkit due to all the browser related #ifdef's they had scattered across the source code. They were diverging to much and damaging the quality of the code. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_%28layout_engine%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_%28layout_engine%29 Edit: They're still pretty similar, though.
- ozten 12y ago
  Firefox for Android is very popular and highly rated in the Google play store. The browsers that are in the Apple App store are handicapped by legal limitations, which are not present on other, more open operating systems.
  - anon1385 12y ago
    >The browsers that are in the Apple App store are handicapped by legal limitations, which are not present on other, more open operating systems. Is FirefoxOS more or less 'open' than iOS? You can't write a competitive javascript runtime for FirefoxOS either.
    - ndesaulniers 12y ago
      You can fork the project on Github and Mercurial and write DOM bindings to whatever JavaScript engine you'd like. [0] https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/B2G https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/B2G [1] http://hg.mozilla.org/ http://hg.mozilla.org/
      - anon1385 12y ago
        Having to convince users to install your fork of the OS really isn't the same thing as being able to run a different native browser alongside their existing software. If the only way to use a browser other than Internet Explorer had been to switch OS then Firefox could never have been created in the first place.
        ndesaulniers 12y ago
        How is that any different than with native code? You can't just rip out your OS' implementation of libc and have all of your programs use another (not all implementations of libc are ABI compatible). You can't boot your computer into two operating systems at once (or can you?). This whole post is analogous to running Windows in a VM on Linux.
        12y ago
- nnnnni 12y ago
  The funny thing is that the "RAWR NO SAFARI, ONLY CHROME!" people don't seem to realize that both are WebKit at the core. Sure, some features are in Chrome first, but that's only because Apple is very cautious when releasing the new features to the general public.
  - agildehaus 12y ago
    Chrome forked Webkit over a year ago, creating Blink. They're two independent layout engines now.
    - thefreeman 12y ago
      I believe he is referring to the fact that iOS Chrome is the only version still using WebKit
      - nnnnni 12y ago
        Yes, that's exactly what I meant. I think that a few people may have missed that due to the fact that my comment is currently at -2.
        cwyers 12y ago
        That's because Apple's TOS only allows their system build of WebKit in approved apps, so Google can either use approved WebKit or they can go sit on their thumbs and spin. It's not a voluntary act on Google's part; they would use Blink if Apple allowed it.
    - tlinton 12y ago
      Sort of, they're very similar still. In actually the layout is almost exactly the same, its the rendering and compositing that has significantly changed between the two.
  - thefreeman 12y ago
    I'm pretty sure iOS Chrome is only WebKit at the core because of iOS restrictions. All other version of Chrome on all platforms use Blink.
- freehunter 12y ago
  The best thing about Android Firefox is the add-ons. Having adblock running on my phone is a pretty nice-to-have feature.
- greggman 12y ago
  Safari in iOS is missing many newer APIs. For example WebRTC is not in Safari but it is in Chrome/Firefox. No idea if it's been added to iOS8. Even WebGL in iOS8 is currently hobbled. http://codeflow.org/entries/2014/jun/08/some-issues-with-apples-ios-webgl-implementation/#hardcoded-constraints-on-ios http://codeflow.org/entries/2014/jun/08/some-issues-with-app... Also it's not a matter of "clamoring". People have no idea what they're missing. Do you think anyone would have been clamoring for Firefox on Windows in the 90s for they had never seen it and were limited to IE? Maybe I'm showing my bias here but remember the browsers before Chrome and V8 came on the scene and heated up the competition? Well there's no competition on iOS because you can't write your own browser. Heck, I'd certainly like to see ASM.JS on iOS as one example.

PLenz 12y ago

Anyway to get this to run in node with the output going to say Cairo? It'd be a fun little project to see if you could build a simple but working browser in nothing but JS.

msvan 12y ago
And then, getting the browser running itself in the in-browser browser.
- nnnnni 12y ago
  Now THAT would be a sandboxed browser. Also, even though people tend to not like this kind of thing here, it has to be said: Yo dawg...
- RussianCow 12y ago
  Reminds me of Gary Bernhardt's talk "The Birth and Death of JavaScript": https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
tlinton 12y ago
Yes, there's a software rendering version, it actually uses Cairo. Software rendering just bitblts up (out of a webworker or as a SDL_UpdateRect) callback in javascript as a RGBA array.
Excavator 12y ago
Would you count links/lynx running under Linux in an OpenRISC emulator with networking provided by a relay server over WebSockets? http://s-macke.github.io/jor1k/ http://s-macke.github.io/jor1k/

LukeB_UK 12y ago

Getting errors on chrome 35.0.1916.153 on Linux Mint. 56 on line 34 in webkit.api.js Uncaught #<error> on line 15633 in webkit.bin.js

tlinton 12y ago
If you put in any HTML that requires webkit to go out to hte network it crashes since network requests are disabled in the demo.
- LukeB_UK 12y ago
  This was using the demo code that was already on the page.

dag11 12y ago

I thought it was a static rendering, but then I put in a marquee tag and it moved flawlessly across the screen. Impressive. I can't say I see the practical implementations of this, but I'm sure there's some. But it's impressive nonetheless.

pfraze 12y ago
Rendering HTML to WebGL textures would be big, which I think this could do - though probably not as performantly as the browser could. It's currently not possible, partially due to security concerns if I remember right.
- ndesaulniers 12y ago
  Awesome idea! I've seen tricks where CSS 3D transforms were used to position the entire DOM within a scene rendered in Canvas, but that approach is extremely limited. [0] Theoretically, now you could render the DOM to a texture instead of to the screen and do some sweet deferred rending. == Edit == Looks like one of Mozilla's Distinguished Engineers blogged about the technique. [1] [2] The creator of emscripten used this technique to render tweets as a texture in the bannabread demo. [3] [0] https://medium.com/@deathcap1/six-months-of-voxel-js-494be64dd1cc https://medium.com/@deathcap1/six-months-of-voxel-js-494be64... [1] http://robert.ocallahan.org/2011/11/drawing-dom-content-to-canvas.html http://robert.ocallahan.org/2011/11/drawing-dom-content-to-c... [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Canvas/Drawing_DOM_objects_into_a_canvas https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Canvas/Dra... [3] http://kripken.github.io/boon/screens/game.html?low,low http://kripken.github.io/boon/screens/game.html?low,low
  - rl3 12y ago
    One of the drawbacks with rendering DOM content to a Canvas/WebGL texture is that interactivity is lost in the process. At the very least an intermediate layer would have to be created that pipes scene input into DOM input. The nice part about CSS 3D transforms is that interactivity is maintained, and it's still hardware-accelerated. A fantastic example of this was made by the creator of Three.js over a year ago: http://mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/threejs/css3d/ http://mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/threejs/css3d/ As you said above, there are severe drawbacks with that approach. It is very limited in terms of what's possible compared to a traditional 3D scene. Moreover, since CSS 3D transforms are essentially DOM content rendered to a texture, rasterization occurs, and as such there isn't clean scaling, even with SVG content.

heydenberk 12y ago

It's a little contrived, but a "practical" use of this might be for an online HTML editor to embed the document (or display a preview) without any interference from the parent document.

schrodinger 12y ago
You can do that via iframe as well
- leorocky 12y ago
  If you allow custom HTML via an iframe and make it shareable you have to host the iframe from a different domain, otherwise it's XSS vulnerability heaven. The trick will be authentication because separate domains don't share sessions (and you wouldn't want a secured domain access to your session anyway) but you can do communication via postMessage.

copremesis 12y ago

straight up broken

elwell 12y ago

Can't wait for JS support so I can: <html> <body> <iframe src="http://trevorlinton.github.io/"></iframe> </body> </html>

bjeanes 12y ago
https://help.github.com/articles/setting-up-a-custom-domain-with-github-pages https://help.github.com/articles/setting-up-a-custom-domain-...
- ricket 12y ago
  Erm, look at the URL of the original page...

jstsch 12y ago

Neat. Getting some good use out of HTML2Canvas as well. But always wondering why there is no way to get a bitmap from screen... something like window.getPixels(x, y, width, height).

theallan 12y ago
Yes! This would open a huge number of possibilities. Simple things like a colour picker, to transitions based on the content of the window would be made possible. I would love to see this happen.
jevinskie 12y ago
There are privacy and security concerns to address. Similar to this situation: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/03/privacy-related-changes-coming-to-css-vistited/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/03/privacy-related-changes-co...
- nawitus 12y ago
  One solution is for the browser to provide a "anonymized" bitmap picture, e.g. setting the links to default colors. I don't know how feasible that is. It would require a new rendering of the page, at least.
  - euank 12y ago
    That's not a solution for the general problem of getPixel + iframes though. Here, I'll give a simple example. Let's say there's a site that uses cookies to track logins. For example, hacker news. Now, hacker news does have the X-Frame-Option Deny, but let's assume it doesn't. So to figure out my hacker news username, all you have to do now is create an iframe with hacker news, and then getPixel on the area of the frame that contains usernames, run some trivial OCR, and done. Now, this issue is even more serious in other instances. For example, google talk widgets are embedded by iframes I believe. In both these cases, a fresh rendering would still have the inappropriate material due to cookies. If cookies aren't sent, e.g. you do a fresh render in a private tab, it would still have security concerns for anything that displays different, sometimes private, content based on ip address. For an example of that, you could render "private.internal.company.localsite" in an iframe and if a visitor from that company visited, even a cookie-less load would probably show private data due to the internal site relying on ip/nat controls.

i_am_ralpht 12y ago

In Chrome (for me, on 64bit Linux) it consumes 176MB of RAM -- for all of WebKit + Cairo + FreeType/HarfBuzz/etc -- it's most of an OS right there. GMail, a webapp email reader, is currently taking 368MB of RAM. Insane!

reubenmorais 12y ago
"Web browsers have never been more memory efficient, and web pages have never had more memory bloat." - someone on Twitter a couple days ago

notastartup 12y ago

this is pretty cool but network requests and javascript support would make it even more crazier. I viewed the html source for this page and pasted it. I was quite impressed. It looks like this is supposed to be a browser engine written in Javascript? So essentially we would have a sandbox browser within a browser? That would be awesome.

ndesaulniers 12y ago
> javascript support would make it even more crazier There's interesting research being done in the area of meta-circular interpreters. There's techniques for speeding them up; they're not as slow as I'd expect. For example, one interpreter can do type analysis and rewrite chunks of code.
- notastartup 12y ago
  another interesting question would be will webkit.js support single origin policy? basically, what if you could use webkit.js like an iframe but with the ability to execute javascript and manipulate that window.
userbinator 12y ago
this is pretty cool but network requests and javascript support would make it even more crazier. The first thought that comes to mind would be to try to nest the things... a browser inside a browser inside a browser.

dingdingdang 12y ago

Why? Not being dry/evil, simply just interesting in whether this project has practical offshoot or is pure fun (..)?

bluetidepro 12y ago
I was wondering the same thing. Why would anyone ever need to do something like this? What kind of project would this come useful?
gol706 12y ago
Doing this in the browser might be a little silly, or at least I can't immediately think of a good use, but I think using this in a node.js program as an easy way to template something out and render an image/pdf locally could be useful.
- dingdingdang 12y ago
  Of course, that's cool point!
_random_ 12y ago
JavaScript is the mainstream http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck so the reasons all the same.

Yoric 12y ago

Nice one. Next step is porting $YourFavoriteWebkitBrowser to Firefox OS :)

Rinum 12y ago

Very nice and with JS support it would be perfect! I wonder if this is a solution to potential XSS attacks with embeded iframes or embeded user-generated html+css+js.

m1sta_ 12y ago
I'm quite interested in seeing this evolve, but for your purposes will postMessage not do?

grimtrigger 12y ago

Pretty cool. There's been a push to make HTML run everywhere, but this proves you can make X run on HTML. Maybe someday we'll code apps in Objective-C/Java that run in the browser, all inside a canvas.

wtracy 12y ago
We're closer than you think! https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/gtk-broadway.html https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/gtk-broadway.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr8eo4RlPw4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr8eo4RlPw4
- spyder 12y ago
  And also emscripten-qt: http://vps2.etotheipiplusone.com:30176/redmine/projects/emscripten-qt/wiki/Demos http://vps2.etotheipiplusone.com:30176/redmine/projects/emsc...
emilsedgh 12y ago
That would be a sad day. Layers upon layers of complexity, abstraction, technologies, etc. Please make it easier. More simple.
- Everlag 12y ago
  I'd like you to consider the fact that your operating system is already a significant abstraction and that a browser is essentially a virtual machine that allows to download and run programs from any source safely. You know all those malware issues regarding unsigned or compromised executables? Not a problem in the wonderful world where programs are incapable of acting overly malicious. There're specs like webgl and webcl that lets you take the scary topic of graphics programming, which is communication to an external piece of hardware, and make that as safe as loading some javascript to sort a table by dollar value. </rant>
- chuable 12y ago
  Our entire modern day computing experience is built upon 'Layers upon layers of complexity, abstraction, technologies, etc.';Simple and easy doesn't necessarily mean less.

wildpeaks 12y ago

That reminds me of the hilarious talk "The Birth & Death of Javascript" where everything get converted to asm.js, even operating systems. https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

shayief 12y ago
Check out this kernel built on V8 engine, designed to run JavaScript code https://github.com/runtimejs/runtime https://github.com/runtimejs/runtime

atomical 12y ago

I've been watching this project hoping that eventually PDFs could be rendered on the client.

qhoc 12y ago
You can do that today already using toDataURL() https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLCanvasElement https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLCanvasE... to convert canvas to image and then use jsPdf http://parall.ax/products/jspdf http://parall.ax/products/jspdf to convert that image to pdf
kevingadd 12y ago
http://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/ http://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/
tlinton 12y ago
Is this a big needed feature? It's actually really easy to pull of, cairo's backend can be switched from using images to svg, to pdf's. It's just switching the backend and once the renderer is done just spit out the results. Add it as a feature request on github and i'll add it to the api.
atomical 12y ago
Sorry, I meant rendered from javascript templates in the browser.

mantraxC 12y ago

I remember when for some reason people started writing SVG and HTML engines for Flash. Because, I don't know. They wanted to put a browser in your browser, so you can browse while you browse. The engines worked, but where are they now? Nowhere. Just like Flash. No matter how much effort you put into something, no matter how functional it is, now matter how much geek cred you'll get for it, if it doesn't have some sensible use, at least superficially, it'll linger and die. Wasted effort. Just because you can do something...