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The article mentions that "web browsers have become resource hungry beasts with millions of lines of code," suggesting that much of this cruft has been the resu

The article mentions that "web browsers have become resource hungry beasts with millions of lines of code," suggesting that much of this cruft has been the result of having to support backwards-compatible standards for the web. I'd love to see a project similar in spirit to Servo that instead of aiming to refactor the language browser engines are build with refactors the functionality they provide. Something that identifies the Majority Use Case™ and tries throwing out the rest. I'm not saying that we should push for deprecation of certain functionality, but I think it'd be interesting if people would start using this browser for the promise of faster, snappier surfing.

fridek 11y ago
From what I've heard Microsoft Edge looks like such attempt. When a site requires some kind of compatibility mode, the not-so-good-but-indeed-old IE is spawned to serve it. Great approach and I hope they set the bar high to make the common use case faster. My ideal browser would support only something like "use strong" from [1] and spawn Netscape 4.0 for all pages that abuse JS. [1] https://developers.google.com/v8/experiments https://developers.google.com/v8/experiments
gunn 11y ago
I've been thinking about something like this for a while - a standard for an easily optimised subset of html technologies. To conform to this standard, pages would be restricted in the ways they can manipulate the DOM, have a simpler DOM, use only a small fraction of CSS properties, and not use some JS features e.g. eval, delete. We can use the asm.js model for opting in. Browsers that support it run the pages super fast, other browsers run them just as fast as usual. A browser engine supporting just this standard would be considerably smaller, more embeddable, and a nicer base for current webkit based apps (e.g. spotify, steam, or atom). It might also help apps that want to use something like webviews for embedding content but need to be careful with memory / performance.

fridek 11y ago

From what I've heard Microsoft Edge looks like such attempt. When a site requires some kind of compatibility mode, the not-so-good-but-indeed-old IE is spawned to serve it. Great approach and I hope they set the bar high to make the common use case faster. My ideal browser would support only something like "use strong" from [1] and spawn Netscape 4.0 for all pages that abuse JS. [1] https://developers.google.com/v8/experiments https://developers.google.com/v8/experiments

gunn 11y ago

I've been thinking about something like this for a while - a standard for an easily optimised subset of html technologies. To conform to this standard, pages would be restricted in the ways they can manipulate the DOM, have a simpler DOM, use only a small fraction of CSS properties, and not use some JS features e.g. eval, delete. We can use the asm.js model for opting in. Browsers that support it run the pages super fast, other browsers run them just as fast as usual. A browser engine supporting just this standard would be considerably smaller, more embeddable, and a nicer base for current webkit based apps (e.g. spotify, steam, or atom). It might also help apps that want to use something like webviews for embedding content but need to be careful with memory / performance.