Dooble Web Browser | Hacker News Reader

Dooble Web Browser

textbrowser.github.io

56 pointssmartmic42 comments

This is just another browser using Qt's WebEngine (uses chromium's blink underneath) lib.

It would be interesting if it was an actual new engine.

Alternative (non khtml or gecko derivative) open-source engines sorted by descending perception of liveliness include: Ladybird[0], NetSurf[1], Links[2] and Dillo[3].

0. https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Ladybird

1. https://www.netsurf-browser.org/

2. http://links.twibright.com/about.php

3. https://www.dillo.org/

Writing a browser engine that supports the modern web and run on personal computers is never going to happen unless there’s some legal intervention. All the examples you’ve given are living proof.

We’re at the mercy of Blink and WebKit. The latter only due to Apples iron grip on iOS browsers.

https://awesomekling.github.io/Ladybird-a-new-cross-platform...

A mammoth task but the Serenity team is making huge progress.

It's not impossible, and the examples listed are living proof that it is possible.

People often cite the failure of Edge/Trident - even with the resources of Microsoft, it's still impossible to compete with Google.

But there's a big difference between "competing with Google and taking significant market share away from Chrome" and just "writing a browser engine that supports the modern web and runs on personal computers". The latter is definitely not impossible.

I also don't think it's impossible, but none of these engines show that it's possible either (same goes for Servo that is being revived by Igalia). None of them is usable for day-to-day browsing yet, and they are likely still in the phase where a lot of impressing progress can be made quickly. I'd be curious to see how they progress on interop tests like https://wpt.fyi/interop-2023

Which one of those examples finished?

I wish them all the best, but you can't hold up some half finished project as proof of feasibility.

On the other hand, is Big Browser "finished" either?

When you realise that change is their weapon, and that they've been successfully convincing web developers with propaganda that the latest is the greatest, the latest features that only work in their browser, while at the same time deprecating features that existed for possibly decades before in all browsers and providing essentially equivalent functionality, you'll see the truth of the situation.

It's not "embrace, extend, extinguish"; it's "embrace, extend, extend, extend, extend..."

The real problem is that "the modern web" has metastasized into a bloated monstrosity of feature creep orders of magnitude larger than it ever should have reached.

The internet worked on my Windows XP computer. There is scarcely little more the internet does for me today than it did then, yet somehow simply opening a modern web browser requires more memory than my entire operating system did at that time.

Ladybird is so crazy. How they are accomplishing that much in this short period of time with their manpower. I mean, it’s no small feat to make a web browser render many of today’s websites.

I wonder if it’s skill or a good underlying rendering architecture that allows rapid evolution like this.

I’ve learnt that reinventing the wheel to “get it right” is usually a fallacy among junior devs, but I wonder how much cruft that hampers productivity accumulates in a highly complex renderer over time.

There's a bunch of factors at play with LadyBird.

First, kling worked on WebKit so he's familiar with browser arch already. Fun fact: the AK library in SerenityOS is basically a reimplementation of the WTF library in WebKit (though it's evolved a lot since then). :)

Second, web standards have come a long way since the early days of browsers. If you read through the LadyBird code lots of it is spec language converted to code. That's a testament to the huge amount of work that's gone into web standards in the past 10 years.

Third, the web is designed around the idea that not every browser supports every API and that things should mostly degrade gracefully. So lots of sites probably fall back to slower paths or feature emulation in LadyBird, or just don't render the advanced effects. That's part of the power of the web.

Fourth, the LadyBird browser doesn't try very hard to be fast. Ex. getElementById is O(n): https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/blob/f532f9d27935f508...

Similarly LibJS doesn't JIT. Lots of effort in modern browsers is about speed.

Fifth, LadyBird doesn't implement a lot of the modern web. There's stubs for a bunch of APIs:

https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/blob/f532f9d27935f508...

None of that is to negate how awesome SerenityOS and LadyBird are though, I'm a huge fan.

Not even Microsoft could make that work.

Incredibly difficult to make a real rendering engine today.

Largely because of the one company whose name starts with a G making it harder for anticompetitive reasons. But there's no reason to drink the Goog-Aid when the pre-churn web standards (actual standards, not the "living" crap we get today) were already plenty sufficient to create useful interactive sites.

Judging by the domain name I was actually expecting a text-based browser, not yet-another-WebKit/Blink-skin.

I kind of wish there was a spec defining a minimum set JS/web APIs, rather than just “whatever X% of visitors’ browsers support”. Like a “web core” that would actually be feasible to implement.

This is not a suggestion, but something like enough to get HTMX or React rendering, plus “fetch”.

What I’m getting at is a middle ground between “no JavaScript, a la Dillo” and “basically an entire OS with a million subtle security concerns”.

You can check out my website, which is almost like an Acid0 test, supporting most 2.0+ browsers including Dillo and Netscape. Try the browser test under Help.

I feel weird replying to myself, but another thought: is there a database of which web features are most used across sites?

Sort of like the inverse of caniuse. More like “should I implement?”

Seems like a cool idea - you’d just have to figure out where to get the stats from.

HTML4 + CSS2 + ES5? I believe that would be roughly equivalent to what mainstream browsers would've had around 10 years ago.

That’s a good thought, although I was more thinking about something up-to-date, just smaller. I think ES5 didn’t even have “let” :)

There have been a lot of improvements, in addition to the obvious bloat/creep.

Yeah back in my day we didn’t even have let or const, we had var and we liked it! We were lucky to have it! You kids nowadays with your const and your fat arrow functions, you don’t know how good you have it.

There are also: Ekioh Flow, Servo.

Page wasn't clear what it is though the GitHub project had this:

> Dooble is a scientific browser. Minimal, cute, unusually stable, and available almost everywhere. Completed.

Guess it's not so completed if they're still updating.

What a terrible post and/or landing page (HN's rules probably hamstrung OP to some degree).

Absolutely lacking in any context. I'm still unclear about the "why should I care?" part.

I found it to be a refreshing contrast to all these websites that try to sell me some software or product. And the sort of things mentioned in the changelog gives a good impression about the state of the codebase.

There are like 100 new things on HN every day. No one is really going to look at your page if you give 0 explanation on what it is or why someone should care. Even a 1 paragraph about summary would have been useful.

Even the title here was completely void of any meaning on what this was.

Its a web browser.

We have those. Why is this one interesting or different?

Heck. What rendering engine is it using?

I found it interesting because it has stability written on their Github page and the Change log reads like a matured project. I might try it as replacement for Firefox. I don't know what you would find interesting.

I didn't make it to the changelog because I had nothing that gave me a sense of whether this was worth digging into.

Why would I replace it with Firefox? What makes it different than Firefox? If I'm already using Firefox, and have it set up the way I'd like, why should I change it?

That's the point I think a lot of commenters here are making. Same here, I saw the landing page and immediately dismissed it. There needs to be information about what you are offering.

I had the same reaction. I came to the comments here hoping someone had already explained "why i should care" or "why i should use this". Alas...

I saw "textbrowser" and I got overly excited. A usable modern terminal browser which generates the modern web sanely would be great.

By "sanely" I mean that across the board. For instance, if you go to youtube, using say, libcaca isn't sane. Just start up a helper app for web video like vlc or mpv. Similarly, you can block out a rectangle of the appropriate size for an image but you'd still start some helper app like imagemagick or whatever if the user wants to see it.

I just want a distraction free engagement with online content.

It doesn't have to be from the ground up. You can use v8 for js - large chunks of existing engines ... just make it a full screen terminal app.

Perhaps Carbonyl may be of interest to you?

https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl

no, this is exactly not what I want. Thanks though.

I'm really confused what the USP is here. The URL says "text browser", but the screenshot looks like "Chrome fork" and there's no description of the goals of the project, just a long, noisy changelog.

Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29736882 (December 30, 2021, 52 comments)

> Dooble is a minimal, scientific, and stable Web browser.

What makes this scientific?

confusing choice for the main image used on the page. my first impression, having never heard of "doodle web browser", was that it was somehow related to that 'astro pi vis' device

I love it mentioned Windows portable and then utterly fails to provide a binary anywhere I can find. I'm sure it's great but I tried and failed.

Did you see the "Download Binaries" button on the top right?

No such thing at least on mobile (Android, Chrome)

I did, yea, but there's no Windows binaries, only 2 source files and a .tar.gz which seems to have a Linux binary.

Oh wait no if I scroll down to a Dec 2022 release there's a Windows binary. I just didn't search hard enough.

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