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Comment by soulofmischief | Hacker News Reader

I envision a browser inspired by the likes of foobar2k in which core engines are open source and interchangeable, and any browsing experience is achievable through a rich plugin and layout system. The browser itself would be little more than scaffolding and an SDK.

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Isn't this what XUL was? Admitedly I'm aware its arch was too complex to compete with Chromium's speed and security features, but way before Electron, I was using desktop apps built with XUL like Songbird for my music app, as well as a Twitter client whose name I can't recall now (of course, Thunderbird as well). Maybe they threw the baby out with the bath water a little bit by electing to concede to WebExtensions API since now Electron (read: Chromium) is filling exactly the niche that XUL provided.

Yeah, Electron and Chromium fill a close enough niche that I don't think the market is really demanding what I envision.

Try giving foobar2000 a spin or checking out some screenshots to get an idea for what I mean. Unlike Chromium, the browser should be extendable, at runtime, via a component system and editable layout tree. Runtimes, backends, common libs, fonts etc should be managed using a repository system.

Chromium requires recompilation (and know-how) in order to make any big change. Comparatively, a user should be able to completely reskin their browser, switch JavaScript engines, etc. on a per-domain, per-group or per-tab basis in seconds without restarting the browser.

There are two things that become harder with such architecture: integration, and security.

Integration is relatively easy to solve. I did not use foobar2000 for a long time; I can compare instead with Emacs, where various packages are aware of various other packages and will integrate if a counterpart is present, but won't require that.

Security is much harder; the need to isolate pages means relatively smaller customizable API surface, and, most importantly, greater trust to the components. It's much like web extensions now: you have to think well before giving an extension access to your web mail or online banking web pages.

XUL was an attempt to build a very flexible architecture, and it was great, but the (lack of) security killed it.

You can make PWAs of nearly every page. I do this to make 'apps' of Netflix and such. Don't have offline storage though, but at least you don't need the Electron stuff and you decide the extensions it runs (uBlock is a welcome candidate). There's also containers in Firefox.

How do you do this? Do you wrap the website with a PWA-friendly HTML template, then load the desired website in an iframe?

That's more or less what manifest v2 allows for. But, you can use that to block ads. It simply had to go!

I can see Arc somewhat doing this with their "boosts" feature. I imagine they will eventually have something like a marketplace for these, e.g. youtube/twitter without the distracting sidebars.

But to your point the core browsing experience would remain the same. Would be cool if they opened that up to variability though.

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