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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News on Kristall: https://imgur.com/a/lhq8iCw

http, https are disabled by default, they need to be enabled in File/Settings/Generic.

I was hoping it would be a single executable but (on Windows) it's 56 files: 1 exe, 33 dedicated dlls, 22 translation files.

Google Search does not work, it's impossible to get past the cookie consent page: https://imgur.com/a/daGMASS (Same thing happens if one tries to put the search words in the url.)

DuckDuckGo doesn't display a search box either, just links about itself: https://imgur.com/a/UMLKiOv

No search box on Bing either; it's possible to access a page like https://www.bing.com/search?q=hacker+news for example, but the SERP is wrong and says "no results" whatever the words searched : https://imgur.com/a/J2Y4CU6

The modern web is hard to use with simple tools.

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I think (extremely) rudementary CSS support would fix many of these cases. You don't need to support more than the basic layout constraints, but you need something so sites like DDG's search page without Javascript can work.

I believe Google will still work on very old browsers through something like user agent sniffing, maybe setting the UA to IE5 will trick it into rendering HTML that might actually work (though the search results will probably still be useless)

Or even just supporting user stylesheets like the original browsers intended

Nowadays you have to install an extension just to get this promised feature

It seems to work a lot better on Linux. Screenshots of both the front page of HN and of this topic: https://imgur.com/a/Armz49a

You can probably use lite.duckduckgo.com.

How can the search boxes disappear? Aren’t they just plain HTML?

They don't render input elements (at least that is my understanding of the code):

https://github.com/MasterQ32/kristall/blob/6b39f24484bb0796f...

The GitHub notes that they only support a reduced set of HTML, but not which set it is. My guess is they do not support any interactivity related elements.

Ah thanks, that explains it! So it makes for quite a useless browser until and if they do.

Does https://search.marginalia.nu/ work?

I actually used to serve marginalia search it over gemini, although that feature has fallen into disrepair.

But it's designed to work without CSS and scripts, I test it with w3m and lynx, so I hope kristall can deal with it too.

No, but I think I must be doing something wrong, because no form or input field of any kind is ever displayed on any website. I tried the simplest form imaginable on localhost and it didn't work either.

Edit: as ketzu points out (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34351753), Kristall simply doesn't render form elements. Which makes it pretty useless ATM IMHO.

yeah, for me the kristall website also didnt work in kristall.. not sure if i'm doing something wrong

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xtezzcsm2qcat8a/Screenshot%202023-...

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