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Comment by nwienert | Hacker News Reader

Safari has proved to me the web has potential to be much, much faster and more memory/battery efficient than most believe who just use Electron/Chrome.

Projects like ultralight[0] also show there's even much higher room for improvement. That, and libraries like React starting to leverage WASM, and SharedArrayBuffers sharing memory and potentially moving all application logic off-thread (worker-dom is a cool project, I was able to get a medium-size React app fully running with it).

Finally, you could fork Safari and remove quite a few features. A lot of legacy things, simplifying the DOM quite a lot, etc.

If someone did that, I think we'd have a really ideal setup for cross platform apps. A much faster, lighter, smaller bundled app that supported 99% of modern web apps out of the box.

[0] https://ultralig.ht

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Existing browser engines (Chromium, WebKit, Gecko) definitely have a lot of cruft in them for compatibility purposes. An engine designed to be much lighter weight and modern would be a great fit for embedding into applications.

As opposed to writing a new engine from scratch (Servo), I wonder how feasible it would be to fork one of these existing engines and modularize its contents? The ability to start from (close to) zero and then pick and choose which features you want in your engine would be pretty attractive to lots of developers. The application that never expects to play any sort of media or access any peripherals could exclude the respective components from the build entirely.

> Safari has proved to me the web has potential to be much, much faster and more memory/battery efficient than most believe who just use Electron/Chrome.

I've been using Safari more recently and it really is a lot better than Chrome, and especially Firefox. I don't know how Apple does it, but they somehow made a Porsche in an SUV world. Thanks for the ultralig.ht pointer, looks quite interesting!

> Finally, you could fork Safari and remove quite a few features.

I'm really curious how you would fork a proprietary project.

> If someone did that, I think we'd have a really ideal setup for cross platform apps.

Buy safari isn't cross-platform.

WebKit isn’t proprietary. Ultralight, the thing I linked to, is a fork of it.

You’d just need to build a UI.

webkit != safari. You might "just" need to build a UI, but if you want it to be cross-platform, that brings you back to the question of what GUI toolkit to use, or you have to handle the mess of different APIs for different platforms yourself.

You’re really confused. We’re not talking about a browser, just an app platform. You can build WebKit on every major platform. If you’re talking about including a UI kit, there’s unlimited of those already written in HTML/CSS/JS. Once WebKit is running there’s no “different APIs”... that’s the whole point.

As I understand it webkit is just the rendering engine. You would still need to build the chrome around it, create and manage windows, etc.

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