Hacker News Reader

Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

"Writing a browser" (from scratch) at this point basically means you are implementing a type of portable operating-system-in-a-box (the web platform) and that it will be compatible with whatever Google decides to add to theirs.

The browser is so comprehensive in functionality and APIs, and such a challenge to keep up with Google's constant churn of new features and total dominance, that not even Microsoft could do it.

Here is my somewhat related pet project: Tersenet. https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet It's just a concept, virtually no implementation. But I deliberately picked a set of requirements that are designed to be feasible for people to implement. Much less involved than a full web-browser. (Related discussion with GPT-4 https://chat.openai.com/share/16d02b78-f876-4c87-949a-a60b4f...)

Also related is the Gemini project which is a real thing and quite practical: https://geminiprotocol.net/ That inspired my ideas for Tersenet.

View on HN

> The browser is so comprehensive in functionality and APIs

Not really. If you limit your scope by saying that you're building a hypertext document viewer, it suddenly becomes approachable. A lot of the functionality is all that PWA stuff no one asked for and no one is using for anything good anyway.

WebSQL? IndexedDB? Service workers? WebGL? WebGPU? WebBluetooth? WebRTC? Just act like it all doesn't exist. 99% of actual websites — not web "apps" — would not lose any functionality.

In a world where UNIX-inspired systems run most software, I like to imagine that it’s possible for a UNIX-like browser to become dominant.

Recall that UNIX (and C) were built (and adopted) in response to perceived over-complexities in contemporary systems.

Maybe in 20 years we’ll recall + interact with Chrome like how people in the 80s recall + interacted with Multics or OS/360.

To complete the analogy, I guess you’d expect to see this browser come out of former Safari interns/engineers at Apple.

People interested in building browsers should look into WebKit. You can use that for HTML/CSS/JS rendering and save a lot of time/effort.

But the thing is that if I were to build a browser, I'd start from the requirement that websites should be treated like malware that can't be trusted. Applying my ideas to a preexisting enormous codebase feels troublesome.

> To complete the analogy, I guess you’d expect to see this browser come out of former Safari interns/engineers at Apple.

Sounds like Andreas Kling: https://www.techgamingreport.com/new-ladybird-web-browser-wh...

No true websites use service workers, just like no true Scotsman puts sugar in his porridge.

"PWA stuff no one asked for"

You don't speak for everybody.

I've yet to see someone take a PWA seriously.

I've seen (many) people use and appreciate Google Maps, for one

Aren't you the developer of Smithereen (a fediverse server)? Nearly every other fediverse software has a web interface that can act as a PWA. I launch lemmy.ml and kbin.social as standalone PWAs from my homescreen. My pleroma instance also has some PWA features (though not standalone display mode). I don't use Mastodon, but @nolan@toot.cafe did some amazing work years ago to make it a really fast and responsive PWA (which has since been undone ).

It's ok if you don't like to use PWAs but that doesn't mean nobody does or that they're worthless.

> Aren't you the developer of Smithereen (a fediverse server)?

I am. But I'm biased because I'm primarily an Android developer who turned into a web and backend developer for some projects (I still do Android as well). So naturally, web app (not web site) development feels cumbersome to me. It's like trying to build a proper app UI with a souped up version of Word macros and layout engine. I much prefer native apps. Smithereen will have a client API eventually, when all features I deem necessary for version 1.0 will have been implemented. The large remaining ones are photo albums and discussion boards in groups. The yet-unreleased direct messages need some finishing touches as well.

> It's ok if you don't like to use PWAs but that doesn't mean nobody does or that they're worthless.

Well, that's my point — Chrome and Firefox and Safari, being "mainstream" browsers, try their best to satisfy everyone. They support PWAs, they have extensive accessibility support (that's scarily complex as well!), they implement all those APIs and standards that are complex but mostly unused, etc.

If I were to build my own web browser from scratch, it'd have a warning in the readme along the lines of "if you require accessibility and/or PWA functionality, this is not for you, use one of the more advanced browsers".

I’ve written many business process apps that are PWAs.

Install to homescreen is great for customers that don’t want to go through the app store yet still want their employees to have “an app” (something with an icon on the home screen).

Some are even offline-capable.

You've never met anyone who's used Slack, WhatsApp or Airbnb?

As PWAs?

I asked for it, and a lot of other ppl did too. These are great features and removing them would cause more than 1% of websites to lose some functionality.

But, importantly, they shouldn't lose their core functionality (if they're written well) because that's the "Progressive" part of PWA. If you don't use the feature or your browser doesn't support it, the website should still have basic functionality. One of the big ideas behind PWAs is "progressive enhancement", where you layer on features that may not be supported everywhere but add value when they are supported.

And a progressively built browser that doesn't implement every spec goes hand-in-hand with that. I think having more under-featured browsers like that would push webdevs into caring more about progressive enhancement.

>99% of actual websites — not web "apps" — would not lose any functionality.

What percentage of user driven web traffic is done through 'web "apps"' and what percentage is 'actual websites'

IMO most of what people do on the web is either reading articles (these don't even need JS), watching videos (no advanced browser functionality needed either), or writing comments and messages (some rather simple JS if any).

Yes, if you arbitrarily define “Web site” to exclude most Web resources it is easy to declare victory. Maybe you can even have fun browsing some archived versions of Geocities pages.

"A lot of the functionality is all that PWA stuff no one asked for and no one is using for anything good anyway"

It is really hard to engage with your comment in a constructive way, if you start by insulting everthing on the web, that is not a simple document (with comments).

So I get it, you don't like the web as a plattform for apps. And it surely is not perfect. But do you have a better plattform independent alternative to offer?

I despise cross-platform GUIs as a concept, but if you must make one, there's plenty of options usable from most languages. Java has Swing, C++ has Qt, there's things like Flutter and WxWidgets and a dozen different GUI libraries for Rust. Heck, you can even build GUIs in Python with tkinter. Every single one of these options is much better suited for an app than the web stack.

My main gripe with using the web stack for building apps is that, unlike proper GUI framework, your platform is not made out of the same kind of code that you're writing. For example, there's a number of predefined layout algorithms that you can choose from and then control some of their parameters, but you can't write your own layout algorithm. You can kinda draw your custom controls, but both <canvas> and SVG are not without their own shortcomings compared to real GUI frameworks. A web browser is a glorified scriptable word processor so it's not surprising that it acts like one.

Yes, there are "paint worklets" and "layout worklets" as proposals. That kinda makes it better but still feels like an ugly workaround. The declarativeness of HTML and CSS, extremely awkward for building app-like UIs with, is also never going anywhere.

"but you can't write your own layout algorithm."

Of course you can - in javascript. What is stopping you? (except that you don't like it)

You can also ditch the DOM alltogether and only use the canvas/webgl and maybe your language of choice via emscripten and wasm, if you really cannot stand js/ts.

The web as a plattform is very, very powerful. The app you make, you can ship by simply sending a link. And people can just try it out without installing something and all quite save in a sandbox.

So none of your solutions are better suited than the web stack, if you intend to target the maximum audience with the minimum hazzle. You have to beat that, if you want to overcome the web.

Also, can you give me one example of a nice looking app in swing? Websites are optimized for enabling good UI and UX. Because the moment a user is confused - he is gone very quickly. And people can also customize their experience. I use dark reader and ublock.

HTML and everything around it is often a ugly chaotic mess, but a incredibly powerful one.

Forget all of that. If you can run actual video games in a browser at 120fps, you can definitely achieve pretty much any UI/ux you can dream. Obviously, within resource constraints. But I don't think there's many UIs you can build that are reasonable and slow on the web but fast in Java swing (or whatever other UI framework you're using)

> Of course you can - in javascript. What is stopping you? (except that you don't like it)

If you mean by setting `position: absolute` and then using left/top/right/bottom to position your element, that won't work. You can't plug your code into the browser's layout dispatching mechanism to correctly react to size changes, reflows and all that. You can do that in any native UI framework.

> The app you make, you can ship by simply sending a link.

Depends on what it does. If it needs to store data locally and/or work with files for example, doing that on a website that runs in a browser is a pain in the ass both for the developer and the user. Last time I checked, if you want to generate a file for the user to save, you have to encode it into base64 and "open" it as a data: URI. Isn't that utterly bonkers?

> Also, can you give me one example of a nice looking app in swing?

IntelliJ IDEs.

> Websites are optimized for enabling good UI and UX.

Is that the reason there's so much whitespace everywhere these days? Is that also why all controls are so confusing that you sometimes have to try interacting with them to understand what they do?

> Because the moment a user is confused - he is gone very quickly.

Not everyone's goal is to simply have as many users as possible.

"If you mean by setting `position: absolute` and then using left/top/right/bottom to position your element, that won't work."

Erm, but it does? You can listen to resize events and you can get the exact width and height values of all the elements in the DOM. I am using that technic since I switched to the web (when box layout did not exist yet).

The only problem with this is, that you can create performance bottlenecks easily, as reading clientWidth might trigger a forced reflow. So it might not be easy at first to get everything right, but it is totally possible.

Also you can just use a different GUI framework or build your own.

"Not everyone's goal is to simply have as many users as possible."

Mine neither, but those who do (the majority) made sure, the web is suitable to be used by even the most tech illiterate people. My mother can surf the web to get mostly what she wants - but she cannot use a file browser, nor does she really know what a file is (and she does not want to know).

"> The app you make, you can ship by simply sending a link.

Depends on what it does."

Sure, if you want native file system access, you would be breaking the sandbox. And yes, this is my biggest pain point with the web as well - that it often cannot decide whether it serves untrusted websites or enables app developement where the user trust the app. For example there is no (easy) way to get the pixel data from html elements, because of security. Which makes sense for malicious add filled websites, but not when developing something real, where the user could give permission. Here the focus on the dumbest users who just all allow everything, so the browsers have to protect them and allow no one to use proper permissions is really annoying. Because yes, I also would just like to have file access and other things permissions don't allow.

> no one asked for and no one is using for anything good anyway

Speak for yourself. This is a crappy attitude honestly, you might want to keep an open mind on things you don’t have an interest in

I mean, LadyBird is extremely young and coming along at a pretty decent pace. Though, to be fair, the main author does have some extensive experience in the realm.

I, personally, would love to see some alternative engines to the monoculture of Blink and it's WebKit cousin, other than just Gecko/Quantum. Something to take the place of what KHTML used to have before being gobbled up into WebKit; or just another (ideally, open source) choice to experiment on.

Well, there's Servo [1], which I have high hopes for.

[1] https://servo.org/

I was interested in Servo, but its website is exasperating - any idea where I can find info on what HTML, CSS and JS standards it supports?

Quantum (mentioned by parent post) is what Firefox calls their Servo bindings.

Quick links for the curious:

site: https://www.ladybird.dev

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

Apart from Servo and Ladybird, there are also: NetSurf, Ultralight, Ekioh Flow.

> and that it will be compatible with whatever Google decides to add to theirs

There are plenty of respectable people who maintain "home pages" with much simpler HTML than what is possible, and news.ycombinator.com gets a lot of love for keeping its classic look.

All this to say, I'd like if the people who have a lot of overlapping agreement on this would agree on a subset to use, and I'd be happy with a browser that didn't do everything google's did.

I run with uMatrix which shuts off a lot of google functionality, and I never whitelist google.com domains just to prove that I don't have to, the world doesn't end. It's a relatively small number of sites that just won't work.

I have a similar idea of a minimal html browser, which was dismissed by the gemini authors. Should be reasonably doable if you don't implement all web 2.0. No css - user decides appearance, no javascript - it would require full web 2.0 anyway, and a bit of webcompat, start with <div>, <p>, <a> and there you go.

Isn't it called `netsurf` already?

I would not want a simple browser to replace gemini, but I would be happy to use a simple web browser in addition to gemini. It would be nice to only have to fire up a big bloated real browser for doing banking and such things.

Yes, in addition, maybe even 2in1. As a quick hack gemini can be converted to html on the fly.

> "Writing a browser" (from scratch) at this point basically means you are implementing a type of portable operating-system-in-a-box (the web platform) and that it will be compatible with whatever Google decides to add to theirs.

I'll bite... why? Most websites follow HTML and ECMAScript. Why do you need to do anything Google does? Isn't the whole point of this project to decouple from what big tech companies do?

The vast majority of websites don't want to follow whatever Google-only shit they've come up with most recently, whether it's adtech, AMP, DRM, or whatever.

Study the Microsoft and Firefox projects to see why it turns out that way.

The basic thing I am saying is that if you call it a web browser and use the same core protocols etc., you have a practically infinite (for an individual) set of requirements to implement and will never be truly compatible.

What ideas like Tersenet and systems like Gemini propose is similar to what you say, except even simpler. HTML and ECMAScript are quite complex and have a lot of challenging expectations as far as performance and flexibility.

The idea is to try to break things off in a clean way that is feasible to implement without having to worry about a fuzzy and ever-expanding definition of what you have to support.

> The basic thing I am saying is that if you call it a web browser and use the same core protocols etc., you have a practically infinite (for an individual) set of requirements to implement and will never be truly compatible

But what the parent is saying is you don't have to be compatible with 100% of websites. If you build a browser with good HTML/CSS/Javascript handling, you'll be compatible with the large majority of the web. Yes, there are other specs that are in use by a tiny portion of the web. But your browser can still exist if it doesn't support them. Users of that website will know or find out that they can't use your browser for that, but for every other user that browser could be exactly what they need.

> without having to worry about a fuzzy and ever-expanding definition of what you have to support.

It's only ever-expanding if you're trying to keep up with the Jones's. You can define a subset of the web you want to support and build a clean, small browser that supports that.

> If you build a browser with good HTML/CSS/Javascript handling, you'll be compatible with the large majority of the web.

Will you? I very much doubt this is the case.

> I'll bite... why? Most websites follow HTML and ECMAScript. Why do you need to do anything Google does? Isn't the whole point of this project to decouple from what big tech companies do?

Because Google is following the old Microsoft playbook of "embrace/extend/extinguish". They throw shit at the WWW consortium partially to see what sticks, but also in the hopes that websites will adopt the shit, forcing other browsers to add the shit to be able to display those sites.

Google is incentivized to do this because, since nobody else can keep up with the shit-flinging, users switch to Chrome. Then Google gets everyone's data for free, further strengthening their monopoly.

That said, I fully support people trying to build new browsers.

Am I wrong in thinking the only thing we're missing for a rich ecosystem of browsers is a modular, independent Javascript runtime/interpreter similar to Java? Java has a bunch of JVMs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines

Maybe we need Mozilla (and others) to make an independent Javascript "VM" that everybody can use.

There are many:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ECMAScript_engines

Mozilla's:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpiderMonkey

That's V8.

Mozilla and Google each has one, both open source (iirc). NodeJS uses Chrome's, even.

> The browser is so comprehensive in functionality and APIs, and such a challenge to keep up with Google's constant churn of new features and total dominance, that not even Microsoft could do it.

I always suspect that it's not that they couldn't do what you describe per se, it's that they couldn't do that within other shareholder driver parameters to make them want to do it.

Well, sure, if they were happy to burn money with no tangible result they could probably keep going as long as people are buying other MS products.

They just realized they didn't really needed their own rendering engine. It would have been a nice to have, like in the old days of IE6, where they could decide over the direction of the web.

But more valuable to them is that people are using a browser they control (no matter the tech within) - which is why they try to push you to edge however they can.

related, a subset of html supported by Qt: https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/richtext-html-subset.html

also, a related HN thread about minimal subset of HTTP and HTML: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23731606

You're wrong about a few things. (1) A browser isn't an OS at all, it's a Javascript runtime and a constraint solver (to put all of the boxes in the right places per the CSS inputs). (2) Google doesn't constantly churn the web world anymore, they still do try, but it hasn't been effective for quite some time. (3) Microsoft was keeping up with web standards just fine, but they were falling behind in performance, and that's why they switched to Chromium.

> they were falling behind in performance

They were only falling behind in performance on google’s web pages such as youtube. Read that comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824

If a "hidden empty div" is all it takes to break your browser's performance, I'm sorry, that's just not impressive.

You are picking the least important detail of the story. The deal is, Google found a simple way to kill the performance of a rival browser... so they exploited it and immediately started advertising how slow the rival was. By the time the rival fixed the performance issue, the damage was done. If true, that's pretty dirty, and it directly contributed to the growing browser monoculture.

This is a wild conjecture. Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty? The fact they jumped on it means that someone was paying attention to these metrics, but assuming chrome has any influence on YouTube is laughable.

People are innocent until proven guilty. Corporations are driven by greed and profit until proven otherwise.

That's just a trite saying, that doesn't logically follow. "Driven by" is not the opposite of "innocent". If you want to blindly believe what random people say on the internet, simply because said thing was said about a corporation you dislike, that's fine by me. But don't get frustrated when people prefer to look at the available evidence first, and the available evidence is an (alleged) div breaking Edge around the same time as an (alleged) announcement that Chrome was faster. Also the original poster admits that they aren't 100% sure it was related. But you are, I guess?

> "Driven by" is not the opposite of "innocent"

I agree, that's why I didn't say driven until proven innocent. I'm just pointing out that the concept of innocent until proven guilty does not apply, as we have no moral imperative to treat corporations fairly. We're not claiming that any person at Google did something immoral, but that the structure of the corporation resulted in an immoral act. An 'unjust conviction' (so to speak) would not result in a person being imprisoned without cause, so we are free to make the most reasonable decision without the burden of "beyond a shadow of a doubt".

For the record, I'm still not claiming that it was 100% done intentionally, I'm just explaining why I'm inclined to believe something based on circumstantial evidence. Courtroom procedure is designed to protect people (in a perfect world), so I'll only adhere to it if there's someone to protect. I don't think Google is deserving of my, or anyone's, protection.

Well, you'll find it hard to argue with people if you let your philosophical beliefs get in the way of finding common ground. Many people don't agree that "innocent until proven guilty" does not (philosophically) apply to corporations.

This isn't a court room.

I have no idea if the story is true or not, hence the "if true" clause in my post. I was just pointing out that focusing on the technical aspect is missing the point of the story... the degradation could have been triggered by any number of things, the point of the story was the allegation that Google purposely triggered it and disingenuously used that degradation to claim their browser was faster.

I would be skeptical too if it was just a one time thing, but it wasn't. Around the same time as that HN comment, YouTube rolled out a redesign of their frontend that used the Polymer framework. At the time, Polymer depended on a deprecated web standard that was implemented in Blink and WebKit and used a polyfill elsewhere. This completely killed performance on Firefox and Edge. That isn't unsourced or anonymous information like the invisible div. You can search back and find people complaining on multiple forums that YouTube started running at a crawl out of nowhere and ID'ing Polymer as the culprit [1, 2, 3].

[1] https://hub.packtpub.com/youtubes-polymer-redesign-doesnt-li...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17612139

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/91i0mc/youtube...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com