Shadow: New browser engine made almost entirely in JavaScript
goose.icu
goose.icu
Deliver your site only to the "inner browser" (that the user has no control over because it's heavily obfuscated and tricked-out with anti-debugging code) and you eliminate all ad blockers. Throw some DNS-over-HTTPS w/ certificate pinning in for good measure and you kill DNS-based ad blockers too.
Accessibility will be a challenge but if it sells that'll get "fixed".
(I think this idea is evil, BTW, but somebody is going to do it.)
Edit: As an aside this needs to go here, too. https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
Doesn't matter either way. Can't wait for AI-powered ad blocking. Just imagine it. AI parses content and filters out ads, brands, even subtle PR text from pages automatically. Not just textual content either. It also kills ads in audio, video, images.
If I can imagine it, it must be possible. I'm sure someone much smarter than me will create this at some point. Perhaps this comment will inspire that person.
I'm not against ad-blocking but this seems a bit too Big Brother-ish.
Censorship that many people, myself included, agree with (I don't believe all censorship is harmful) but it is clearly censorship.
But the real problem is assuming everything an AI blocks will be an "ad." Why is this the only instance where the slippery slope doesn't apply? This is different than a normal ad blocker that uses specific heuristics to block specific elements - an AI will be employed to make "intelligent" editorial decisions based on interpreting the intent of the content. What happens when it decides - or is ordered to decide - that political advocacy or the promotion of certain ideas or contrary narratives amounts to "advertising" them?
It's literally just enforcing wrongthink, most likely using closed source centralized services run by corporations who will be harvesting and selling your data to advertisers anyway. But it's cool because ads. It's not cool when it's Nazis or doxxing transgender people or spreading conspiracy theories or plotting sedition, but it's definitely cool if Justin Whang wants to sell me on Nord VPN.
Choosing to block ads is more like choosing to not read a book. Or skipping a boring chapter to get to the action.
It's kind of like someone creating a list of bad books, and you looking avoiding reading any books on that list.
Maybe I'm just fatigued from the constant erosion of user autonomy over information consumption, but as long as a ML ad blocker runs locally by the user's own decision, it doesn't seem that Big Brother-ish (compared to serverside shovel-feeds), and as long as there's a single-click toggle to disable it like in existing ad blockers (or if E.G. the UI exposes a side pane to show the content it's blocked) and it can be configured to be less or more aggressive based on content patterns, it hardly seems like censorship… As far as uses of "AI" go.
Such a person is the very last creature I want parsing every byte of content delivered to me. in order to make this service a reality it must be local.
What we need is data poisoning. Have the AI watch ads, spoof responses, while we watch ad free content. Run it like SETI, during our devices downtime. They'll try to raise fraud concerns. Understandable. Accusations of piracy? Certainly possible. Convictions, though? Probably not.
Absolutely. AI should be local and under our control at all times. Local models that run on our computers is something I want very much.
> What we need is data poisoning.
Agreed. Anything that reduces their profits is valid. Ideally to zero or into the negatives. Their "concerns" are irrelevant.
It would be better to produce a more profitable business model that doesn't incentivize or benefit from being shitty/harmful. "They" can then either adapt and cut it out with their shenanigans, or die out outcompeted by companies that do.
They're virtuous capitalists who got to where they are via pure genius and will to power, right? Adapt or die. And they better not cry about it or beg the government for intervention.
It would seem that it is just as likely that browser producers would add AI "watchers" to the browser to make sure you are not using any ad blocking! AI doesn't see any ads or marketing copy for 30 mins, sorry browser temporarily unusable ... unless you have a business account, then no ads for 8 hours.
I have no doubt that current AI is capable of this (in fact I'm sure it would be trivial for GPT-3.5 and well within reach of even locally-run LLMs), the question is what fraction of users can be bothered -- and I don't see any reason why AI would lead to an increase there.
That is true, but what is also true is that a few products are currently sucking all of the air out of the system, preventing new entrants from encroaching on the incumbents territory.
Maps, Search and Youtube all serve the Google Search business. Any new ad-supported entrant, by necessity, also has to serve the Google Search business.
If the Google Search Business is crippled, there are only good things that can result from that. I don't see a downside to making Google Search unprofitable due to smart ad-blockers. (I welcome hypothetical scenarios in which the Search Business being limited due to ad-blockers has bad unintended consequences).
Unrelated: I don't understand why this comment is modded so low that I can barely see it? It is not in any way controversial and can be (and is, above) rationally debated.
A big increase in the use of ad blockers (AI-enhanced or not) would not only cripple Google, but also hurt the multitudes of small business and hobbyist sites that scrape by on what Google pays them to host ads. If users could somehow culturally readjust en masse to the idea of actually paying for online stuff, this would not be a problem -- but I think that's unlikely to happen immediately, and even in the long term, unlikely to happen to the same extent. So there would be a net loss of free (i.e., paid-for-by-Google-ad-money) content and services available to people. Also, it's not like a new wave of smaller, more democratised ad-sellers would arise in Google's wake, since ad-blocking works on them too.
>It is not in any way controversial and can be (and is, above) rationally debated.
Thanks, I appreciate that. Every society has things that are true but which you aren't supposed to say, and it's amusing to me that "Google provides some high quality free services" seems to be one of ours.
You're correct, but I don't know how bad a thing that is.
To my mind (i.e. my opinion), there's no such thing as a power vacuum that remains a power vacuum.
Something is going to arise that replaces (for example) youtube. It is inconceivable that those content producers on youtube are simply going to give up the ghost and die.
It has to be a self-sustaining something(s) that isn't driven by ads (I agree with you on the point that a replacement can't be ad-supported), and I am arguing that whatever it(them) is will be better than the current ad-driven youtube.
The whole TLDR of my argument is that, even if the ad-driven sites go away, the content-producers and the content-consumers aren't going away!
Right now, the arbitrage is performed by ad-driven middlemen, so the motivation for abuse, control and censorship is incredibly high. I think that whatever arbitrage process or middlemen arise is going to be a lot better for society as a whole than the obnoxious ads with which I am bombarded with whenever I turn off the ad-blocker.
Maybe I'm wrong, but this is one of those things we'll only see when we see it.
I forget how bad Google Search is until I get a new computer/phone without ad blocking enabled
Have also woken up to an ad that was hours long.
Not quite sure what the incentive is but maybe it works for some cases, sometimes I wonder if they're scam setups - sitting through a super long ad is a pre filter. Weirder things have been known for Internet scale.
I use Apple Maps and not Google maps
Ads are irritating, and Google is not supplying these services out of the goodness of their heart, but I think there's no question that the world is a better place with these ad-supported services in it.
I would rather have all google products be paid, and lessen the incentive for business to spend a large share of their revenue on advertisement.
I don't follow, sorry. By "you", do you mean the end-user, sitting in front of their browser? I'd agree that that person is paying Google with their attention (hopefully in exchange for other valuable content nearby in time or space). But it's the companies trying to advertise stuff that pay Google cash (in exchange for that attention). Google then pays a cut to the site hosting the ad.
>I would rather have all google products be paid, and lessen the incentive for business to spend a large share of their revenue on advertisement.
I don't think Google would have ever gotten off the ground if you had to pay cash to search for stuff -- do you?
How many people do you know who watch YouTube?
How many of them have YouTube Premium?
> I don't think Google would have ever gotten off the ground if you had to pay cash to search for stuff -- do you?
If online advertisement became illegal, Google or somebody else would have gotten off by selling search as a service.
I am not saying that this move would have made Google more successful, they are already successful. But I do not believe that this success is reaching us, consumers.
You talk as though this has already happened, but that's not the case. Companies pay Google with money they hope to recoup from you via your purchases, but whether or not you choose to buy the thing advertised is completely up to you. Advertising is an investment with uncertain returns, like any other.
>If online advertisement became illegal, Google or somebody else would have gotten off by selling search as a service.
It's possible, but I just don't think there's enough of an appetite to pay small amounts of cash for this. It will be interesting to see what happens with Kagi (though I acknowledge that if it fails, that would not be definitive, since it has to compete with ad-supported services, and massive, entrenched ones at that).
It has already happened. Things you buy have an online/google advertisement markup whether you use youtube premium or not. You pay for the ads no matter if you watch them or not.
Free services aren't actually free, on a large scale they affect how much everything should cost.
> It's possible, but I just don't think there's enough of an appetite to pay small amounts of cash for this. It will be interesting to see what happens with Kagi (though I acknowledge that if it fails, that would not be definitive, since it has to compete with ad-supported services, and massive, entrenched ones at that).
This is because free services are a trap. People do not want to pay for search BECAUSE there are """free""" alternatives. If every services become paid people wouldn't be as reluctant.
Free services also create wrong expectations and change the way we should use the service. Take youtube, it is free so everybody expect everyone to be able to access the platform, and so people tend to only upload to youtube because "why would you be anywhere else". And now, when youtube obviously change its term you have a wave an angry people seeing youtube as a platform that must remain convenient or their world will collapse.
If video platforms were all paid, people wouldn't have the same expectations. Uploaded videos could only target users who also paid for the platform, and would instinctively understand that this is a temporary platform.
So be it. If those services can't survive without ads and surveillance capitalism, they don't deserve to exist.
If for example youtube with all of its information or even Google search required a subscription, suddenly a lot of people who make significantly less than the average for the developed world would no longer be able to access those resources.
I still hate the ad surveillance everywhere, but it was a point I hadn't considered before.
You know who has seeded that argument into the public domain? PR agencies working for the advertising industry. It doesn't have any merit whatsoever. People in developing countries don't like ads any more than anyone else.
Almost no one likes ads. What many people do like is the trade-off of some ads for access to high quality services that would otherwise cost them money.
This argument definitely gets pushed now and then, but seeing you write it out actually made me realize it seems like a red herring.
Ads are priced, bid, bought, and sold based on their expected return on investment.
If lower-income countries would be unable to sustain a public website because of being unable to pay for subscriptions, wouldn't they also be unable to sustain that website because ads sold there should have lower prices?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
There are plenty of online resources which don't require ads. Sibling comment mentions Wikipedia, Open Street Map also comes to mind. We need more of these in this world. Not this ad-supported nonsense.
I wonder how many millions of people have missed their train/bus connection because they couldn't find a departure board among the billboards.
>There are plenty of online resources which don't require ads
So you claim, but one of the two links you provided contains an ad. Which did not bother me at all, of course -- I'm happy to provide a couple of seconds of my attention in return for the interesting and useful information someone spent time preparing.
If everyone blocks that ad, though, the site will make less money, unless they start charging a fee to view some or all of it. I'm interested enough to read for "free" (paying with a couple of seconds of my attention), but not interested enough to pay cash -- and the world is full of people like me. What do you think will happen to sites like this if everyone blocks ads? Is that what you want?
Yes, there is Wikipedia, which is excellent and free. I think Wikipedia is an outlier, though. It's high-profile enough that people actually donate money to it, which is exceedingly rare. In some countries, the government donates only a small amount to well-known charities like the Blind Foundation or the Red Cross because they are known to be high-profile and trusted enough that large numbers of the public will give to them directly -- but there is a long, long tail of deserving charities that almost no one has ever even heard of, which the government has to subsidise fully. What do you propose to do about the long tail of websites that no one cares enough to donate to, once you shut off their main (and possibly only) source of income?
(OTOH if that intention is conveyed in p. 37 of an EULA in dense legalese, it seems clearly designed to swamp the user. I'd like to see a lot more attention paid to this in legal circles.)
We aren't talking about a Clockwork Orange type of scneario. You're trivialising real rape when you refer to easily avoidable online-advertising.
Your mind "rape" is in no way or form analogous to rape.
No, it isn't. It's defined in terms of penetration. Both legal definitions and dictionary definitions.
If your argument depends on a word having a different meaning from the dictionary definition, it's your argument that is wrong, not the dictionary.
> My mind is part of my body. I feel violated.
Violation is not rape.
> define rape
> The act of seizing and carrying off by force; abduction.
> "the rape of Europa by Zeus."
> The act of pillaging or plundering.
> "the rape of the city by the invaders."
> Abusive or improper treatment; spoiling or abuse.
> "the rape of the land by polluters."
Who knows? Maybe one day there'll be a "rape of the mind" dictionary entry in there.
Well, when there is you can claim your argument doesn't trivialise rape. Until then your claim is baseless.
Seems to fit well for my intended purpose. I see no reason to avoid using the word.
But we are.
I'll bite. Is hearing or seeing any idea that you have not previously consented to likewise mind rape?
If not, where do you personally draw the line? And, just as importantly, who do you feel should get to decide in the general case?
Advertising is by definition noise. Superfluous. Information I did not ask for. Irrelevant stuff that someone paid money to put in front of me. Information I explicitly ask for is not advertising, it's simply information.
My cognitive functions are inalienable, they are not theirs to sell to the highest bidder, nor are they currency to pay for services with. I have attention deficit disorder. It's hard enough for me to focus without these corporations trying to grab my attention. I consider their attempts to do so a violation of my personal integrity. I consider ad blocking to be justified self-defense. I will literally do everything in my power to avoid looking at ads.
I always try to make sure my online contributions are worthy of the valuable attention of their readers they take up.
I'll bite: yes. If you show me images of goatse or mutilated bodies in a war zone without my consent that’s mind rape. Same with bring politics forcibly into the workplace, showing Fox News (or MSNBC or whatever) at the bbq joint while I’m trying to eat or at the gym while I’m trying to exercise, or screaming at me in protest while I’m trying to access family planning services.
Just like women have the right to walk down the street in whatever clothing they want without getting raped, I have the right to experience the world without constantly being bombarded by commercial and political mind rape.
> If not, where do you personally draw the line?
Consent is implicit via set and setting. If you want to challenge peoples viewpoints go to college or start a poker night with a bunch of philosophically diverse neighbors who like to argue politics. If you want to shove ads down everyone's throat, go join an influencer support group.
Everyone else deserves to live free from constant mental assault.
> And, just as importantly, who do you feel should get to decide in the general case?
Judges, the people who interpret laws.
Exactly. Our minds are sacred.
Do men, and lesbian and bisexual women, have the right to walk down the street without seeing a woman dressed in a way they find distracting?
I think you will say that they have no such right. But if so: What makes this form of attention-grabbing behaviour (wearing a skimpy dress) acceptable, and the other form (advertising) unacceptable?
This example highlights that (a) we are, in fact, capable of managing distractions to quite some degree, and (b) in both cases there is another party involved whose interests oppose our own, but whose rights nevertheless also need to be considered.
Billboards on a highway: mind rape.
Interestingly, I agree that it doesn't have to be evil, but in practice it is, so close to 100% of the time that the exceptions are actually not worth discussing.
> advertising at its core does _NOT_ have to be evil
Advertising has inherent and irreconciliable conflicts of interest that make it worthless to any rational person. They're trying to sell you stuff, it's literally guaranteed that they will be overstating the pros and downplaying the cons. When you want to make an informed decision, the last person you want to listen to is the advertiser. You want to listen to people you personally trust or independent third parties, not the seller who has every incentive in the world to lie to you.
Therefore the existence of advertising is incompatible with a rational society. There is no such thing as "non-evil" advertising. It doesn't inform anyone. On the contrary: it is disinformation, inherently untrustworthy.
I don't use gmail because why would anyone want to use gmail for anything but temporary throwaways that'll get spammed.
I don't use google maps. nokia heremaps and openstreetmap (I use magic earth) are better in most ways, worse in others. When I go to a different country, I click "download country" and have a fully searchable map. No, I don't want a map that needs a data connection. No, I don't want to have to visually search the map for the thing I'm looking for, because someone barfed up a salad of dots that are place ads for things unrelated to my search. Google maps is not usable to anyone who has used something else. People who always use google maps don't know any better.
I do use google translate. This does not support your argument, because that's a service that is free, and does not display ads. You saying that the current ad-free service will disappear if ads were blocked from it... Can't make the comment on here that I want to make, so I'll let you imagine <words>
Youtube... Who give a crap. There were sites with videos before, there are other sites now. No, no one can host a huge expensive platform like that for free. So how about the people posting stuff, pay for their stuff being hosted. Then those people can inline talking ads or put a coke can on their desk, in their videos. You know, how ads in videos have been done since the existence of the video format, in 1920 all the way up to right now.
Google products, google customer service, and google the company, are inferior to the competition in almost every way. Except for google translate. Which again - has no ads.
Google Maps has had the ability to download maps for offline use as long as I can remember -- at least since 2013.
>This does not support your argument, because that's a service that is free, and does not display ads.
All Google services are ad-supported, at least indirectly. That's because Google pays for their development and upkeep, and Google's primary income stream is ads.
Now, speaking of reading, I unfortunately stopped reading after your first sentence. This is because you immediately made it clear you are not communicating in good faith.
You have a good day, and enjoy winning all those arguments you yourself made up. The adults in the room ignore people like you and just move on.
>I specifically gave an example, you then purposely ignored most of what I wrote to create a claim I did not make
No. Your next sentence implicitly claims that Google Maps is unable to download maps in general, and I succinctly contradicted this claim. Google Maps is able to download maps, but there are size limits, and Australia is much too big for it to download in a single offline map. True, it would be more convenient if it could download the entire country -- but wouldn't those other apps likewise be more convenient if they could download entire continents, or even the entire world at once? Why can't they? I haven't found the offline map size limit in Google Maps a hindrance in practice, and I've relied on it all over the world for years.
In case you've bravely shrugged off the mountains of bad faith that you have no doubt uncovered in this reply so far, and are still reading: Search works on downloaded maps, though only for car trips (not public transport or walking).
I'm confused how the "inner browser" meaningfully helps you accomplish this. How is this any easier or more effective than just having a website that hosts its own advertising assets (or proxies them) and obfuscates/randomizes its DOM structure to make ads difficult to target with simplistic ad-blocking rules?
Right not it is not hard to write an adblocker, just block network requests and DOM elements (regardless of whom hosts of proxies them).
A browser in a browser would make blocking dom as hard as attaching a debugger and manipulating a price that has been hardened.
Network requests may still be able to be blocked, but it is going to make ad blocking harder.
Hell, the inner IFrame is probably going to get around IFrame recursion and domain rules too.
We're going to eventually end up with IFrame fork bombs, and IFrame topologies that cannot be meaningfully mapped to Euclidean space (amongst all the other privacy, user control, etc. concerns, of course).
> How is this any easier or more effective than just having a website that hosts its own advertising assets
advertisers REALLY don't want you to do that because it's far too easy to cheat.
I expect that they are already cheating as much as possible to convince their customers to continue paying for advertising that has a negligible effect on the bottom line.
Adtech and PR firms would have you believe that it is impossible to sell a product or service online without first paying them $10k/m. It's also why google search is so awful - if they could get you the information you were looking for they are sidelining their customers, so their search has to, by design, be limited so that their customers are more prominent in the search results than non-customers.
Note: I'm not saying that this is by design; they could get to this stable equilibrium simply by each isolated team within search, advertising, etc aggressively pursuing its own metrics.
I don't know how we got from "don't download and install random software from untrusted sources on your devices" to "let anyone with a website run code directly on your hardware. Sandboxes are impossible to breach!"
I get that it's cool tech and the promise of writing software to run on many different platforms is exciting, but from a real world/user perspective it's insane.
The whole point of WASM is that it's the alternative to downloading and installing random software.
It hasn’t been the end of the world, but it hasn’t been great either.
I really doubt it, but if that did happen then I could simplify my filter list to just a single wildcard. Silver lining.
I think it's an inevitable future tbh. The users have lost - they just dont know it yet. Google's WEI [1] is their first foray into this, and i dont doubt there will be future iterations they try to push through. The browser-in-browser is but one alternative idea.
Sure. This site is one of very few sites I can bear to visit. I come here for the comments, I don't even open the links anymore, I just assume people will quote anything important.
When I made my own website, I deliberately set out to avoid as many of these obnoxious dark patterns as humanly possible. The result was basically a marginally improved motherfucking website and I'm actually pretty happy with it. I think that's how websites should be.
If the web is gonna turn into an opaque proprietary mess for the benefit of advertisers, it doesn't even deserve to exist.
> Are you going to stop buying from ecommerce sites
Absolutely. I already avoid it.
> viewing youtube
Absolutely. I already use yt-dlp, if that stops working I'm just gonna forget about it.
> and reading your gmail?
I rarely read it anyway.
The parts of it that try to force ads on me, sure.
> Are you going to stop buying from ecommerce sites, viewing youtube, and reading your gmail?
I would, yeah. I've already stopped using all google services to whatever extent possible and deleted my google account long ago. I do sometimes watch a youtube video (in an external player) if one is linked to me, but I don't think I'd particularly miss youtube if it were gone altogether.
I would hope that there will remain at least one e-commerce site that doesn't try to force ads on me. But if there isn't, I'll drive to the store.
E-commerce is the online sector with the highest incentives to deliver an ad-free and user-friendly experience, because they actually want to sell products. If you're selling something you should do everything possible to get out of the user's way and let them make a purchase. This includes having your site load and operate extremely fast, not using cookies and not using advertising. This also includes having the highest quality content on your page, so that users find what they're looking for and to build enough trust that they want to do business with you.
As for YouTube there's premium and for e-mail the ad-free and spy-free options are legion.
If we exclude the online content that is free and without ads, the online content that we can pay for and the online content that we can pirate, that's already a huge chunk of what is valuable on the internet. So I don't think the ad-fueled internet has the upper hand here.
I'd be ok losing youtube. There's some good content there, but there's so much garbage and I can only hear people begging me to like and subscribe so many times. I've got more dvds and blu-rays than I can watch, and there's so many at good will too.
All I get in gmail is transactional mail for other people. It would be no loss. My personal email is at fastmail, and I'd expect them not to participate in the browser in browser thing, but if they do... That's fine. Email isn't that important anymore. What am I going to miss? If you want to contact me, send me a letter or call me or text me or ... ?
It's not just a advertisement and a viewer, it's also the bots.
Adtech is where it's at now just cause it wants you to see it but because a industry of faking viewership built up around it.
No other advertisement has really had to deal with how ads are bought on per viewer basis.
All the targeting tech is equally a response to "personalization" as it is to "fraudulent botters"
You can then understand that if ads reverted to the old static billboard or tv commercial state, there's probably be little incentive to harass the user.
I think that the only way to get to the endgame I want, which is "advertisers simply give up, the sites sell the ad-space directly, with no tracking necessary and no sharing of information between sites" is for everyone to click on more ads for things that they aren't interested in.
Make it a browser plugin: the plugin works quietly in the background, and clicks on every single advertisement it sees, going as far as possible in the funnel, all the way to checkout, but without doing the final payment.
Until the signal/noise ratio of adverts are 99.999% noise, we're still going to have this arms race.
It's also the new flash since like flash it's just a bucket of pixels. Like when say VisionOS comes out and their browser has made tweaks to all the HTML form elements so they work well with finger gestures in the air but of course here this page is just a block of pixels so it will have the wrong interface for the device.
Every time there's an article about some kind of "Here's a really simple core to build stuff from scratch" technology people seem to get really excited.
I was hoping we'd be going the other way and building web tech into OSes!
The far more likely way we'll see push back against Ad Blockers is by simply detecting that an Ad did not play and then refusing to display content until it does.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel-incompleteness/sup....
I would pay for such a service.
Eventually, AI will be something we can run locally on a typical desktop, or even a cell phone, and at that point we could locally host that kind of ad blocking, but trusting all of your traffic to some random company that promises to delete ads but not abuse their position seems naive given our situation today. It preserves the worst dangers of ads while adding even less control and transparency for the user.
Run the whole thing in a sandbox and have the AI exfiltrate the content (but not the ads) as a static DOM (no js). Once you know which DOMs go with which URL's you can gossip those peer-to-peer and not bother actually talking to the site at all (although one of us should hit the actual site every now and then, just in case the content changes). Isn't that more or less how cloudflare works?
But even without WASM, there is the “tiktok strategy”, of pushing bytecode to a self-made interpreter, that frequently changes its semantics.
Your proposal, while feasible, turns this into a static linking affair. This comes with many risks, like becoming complacent and not updating the "inner browser" due to browser incompatibilities and bugs. It creates a giant mess of dependency update hell if you aren't regularly updating the webview.
At that point, you might as well ship a desktop app that does something similar and proxies ads through the first party server since it's probably less work.
You are right that it would work. I just don't know if going to such lengths is required to achieve the same thing.
A good counter is that a desktop app could be exploited to alter the behavior via reverse engineering. But a browser would show you the WASM as well, so I'm sure you could reverse engineer it and alter it with an extension like a traditional binary.
Maybe I'm missing something though - I'll admit that I'm an advocate of WASM but don't keep super up to date on all advancements.
user doesn't want to download an app, since that has a lot of friction. Going to a url and waiting (even if the download time is the same) feels like there's less friction, and so this idea of shipping a blackbox is more desirable.
The only problem really is the jankiness of any non-browser controls. The user expects a good right-click context menu, keyboard navigation, scrolling, etc, which all would have to be implemented if you're compiling a native app into WASM. But if the app itself is just HTML+javascript, then shipping a WASM browser, then using that browser as the app layer solves all of those UX jankiness (since the user should not really be able to tell it's a WASM browser).
The idea is insidiouly bad for user freedom, but great for businesses like google (who wants to control the user space completely).
iFrame, yet how clunky, ghastly to work with; is what driving the web. Gmail, Facebook all use them in their apps.
It's a feature that if deprecated would cause a broken World Wide Web; as if it isn't broken already... One could say.
Like a reverse proxy inside the browser, but with a server component.
When i first heard about their idea I couldn’t really comprehend it, and actually I still find it hard to understand. But they think it will be big!
Inasmuch as any app, eg., a video player, can include DRM or otherwise lock things down.
This is feasible, but its unclear how successful it would be -- it would just start an arms race to hack it.
For now.
Now, maybe that's just a potential usage that trust-me-bro it'll never actually try to use or access in RAM or on disk... but how on earth is that number for a chat client so much bigger than either Firefox with 100+ tabs or even Java-based IDEs like Webstorm?
“Big number is scary” is not a good way to understand performance.
Plus, admittedly I didn't think about this thoroughly just now, this sounds like a cheap hack for speed. You could still have an OOB access that would land in some valid memory and thus lead to an exploit, right? It's just made very unlikely by making these areas very large and having ASLR. Proper bounds checks wouldn't have that problem.
VIRT is not a good measure of actual memory usage because it includes shared pages like file cache and libraries, RES is better.
Shameless plug: I developed a tool that try to compute a better value for memory usage: https://github.com/tatref/linux-mem
[1] https://foldoc.org/Big+bag+of+pages
[2] https://github.com/google/sanitizers/wiki/AddressSanitizerAl...
Javascript engines aside, that sounds like a great sci-fi movie macguffin material.
> So I started making a browser engine (for fun) a few days ago, it felt kind of inevitable so here we are
And I got to admit, it is pretty neat.
> The RoveMax Model 3 was developed in total secrecy by Kerbal Motion's R&D team over the course of a year and a half. When it was finally revealed to the company's chairman, he stared in shock, screamed 'WHY', and subsequently dropped dead on the spot.
The reaction is about the same, anyway.
> known issues
> basically every site doesn't work ;)
I got https://shadow.goose.icu/?http://captive.apple.com/ to work!
To make the web entirely like a TV, everything should be rendered on canvases. To let you truly deploy your org chart, each team should be responsible for one isolated canvas.
...sounds like the Spotify desktop client.
...or Flutter-for-Web.
> But making a new browser engine is impossible!
No. It. Isn’t! (Also I don’t really care how possible/feasible something is.)It's just how the universe works.
I'd put my money on C, almost everything is bootstrapped from it.
Forth is a another candidate if you'd have to build everything yourself.
"Yo dawg, I heard you like browsing, so we put a browser in your browser so you can browse while you browse"
Aim: fun and perhaps learn something about how layout works.
You can get surprisingly far quite quickly with JavaScript and <canvas>
At least for mine, I got text wrapping and scrolling working :)
Second: I'd love to be able to see it access Wikipedia!
(Wikipedia should be a fairly "low-hanging fruit" in terms of functionality that must be implemented to achieve compatibility -- if I were writing a web browser, I'd always start with Wikipedia compatibility first, then once that has been obtained, move on to more challenging, technologically complex sites... But that being said, Wikipedia is probably a bit more complex these days than when it was first implemented... still, it would be a great "win" to be able to browse Wikipedia with it!)
Anyway, wishing you great luck with your browser!
1. Wikipedia changes so rarely that it's almost considered a short of a misfeature, so it's hardly a moving target the way that other stuff would be
2. Even despite the breadth of subject matter, most pages are fairly similar, and the more exotic stuff will be used infrequently via templates and confined to supplementary items like infoboxes
3. Your bang-for-buck once you have a passable implementation will be enormous (not to mention: doesn't outright contribute to the decay of society), in contrast to e.g. a social networking site where a quarter of the world uses it and 3/4 either revile it or are indifferent to it when stacked up against their preferred platform
One thing to be considered is that the general look of unstyled pages that is common to almost all browsers isn't actually prescribed by any spec—browsers are free to come up with their own UA style sheets—so anyone developing a new browser should just make unstyled content look by default like what it would look like under reader mode. Pretty crazy that mainstream browsers haven't changed the way unstyled content is presented.
The linked page has a screenshot of the engine. You have to click through to get the full viewport experience (with keybindings).
Safari is the new i.e. in the sense that i.e. was in the late 2000s/early 2010s, meaning it’s the browser that we would like to ignore due to how weird it is compared to the browser we normally target. And how stubborn the vendor is in neither acting like the majority browser, nor giving up and adopting a different engine (or in the case of iOS, even allowing a different engine to run).
I’m hearing: iOS is •considerably more secure• like Blackberry was.
The web is dead. All hail the Chrome Platform, where the official definition of correct behaviour is “whatever Chrome does.”
How dare Apple force web developers to target more than one browser engine. Interoperability and platform agnosticism is for losers.
It's becoming increasingly clear that the vast majority of web developers are now exclusively using Chrome and resent the idea of testing elsewhere.
(Of course usually when one delves into exactly what features Safari is missing, specifically the ones which piss off web developers, it’s push notifications. And to that I salute Apple for bravely holding the line against that nonsense.)
IIRC push notifications are supported in Safari.
I work in this field too and I’ve heard it all before — and 99% of it is bullshit. Web performance is a solved problem and has been for a decade, unless you build some ridiculous Rube Goldberg machine of libraries atop libraries.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about but the snark and continuous incorrect assumptions aren’t constructive so this is where our polite debate will end. Good day, sir!
At some point maybe the web dev world will understand that, sometimes, you just have to live with the fact that there is no one true best solution, and instead build tools that are built with cross-platform in mind (like Qt, SDL, etc.).
Yup, looks like canvas for sure, can't copy-paste anything and all the lines are clipped because it's not even conforming to my window size.
I think we all have newer versions than 1.5, so no problem... right? ;)
Lovely opening quote and by my own hobby project procrastinate high bar allow me to wonder when the "few days ago" exactly were ?
Great project
Something about coming full circle, but that full circle is inside of a dumpster fire.
Also, I love this. This is fine.
Goodbye World wide web, it was nice knowing you.
Text selection doesn't work. I guess it's rendered to canvas... but would there be any way to make this work?
Famous last words
I get a page of White and Black and <shadow> as a title.
> As with all my recent projects, the name is because …
This makes me whisper the name in my head
It's not like one of those browser engines that are promising but not quite there yet, like NetSurf, Servo or Ladybird.
Man, this thing was small and fast
I used the last version of Uzbl in an old Debian container to debug a game I made specifically supporting the iPad 2, which is quite resource constrained, because Uzbl was based on a similar version of WebKit. WebKit somehow had to fit the iPad 2 and still be quite fast, so Uzbl, which is very bare-bones, felt very fast indeed on a decent computer.
I was looking at similar browsers, apparently epiphany (Gnome Web) is the only remaining open source browser based on WebkitGTK+ that's still maintained. Last version of Surf was released in 2021, Midori is actually a Gecko browser which I need to check out [1]. I guess someone could contribute and update Surf or Uzbl or fork the old Midori.
By looking into it, I found this browser:
qutebrowser is a keyboard-focused browser with a minimal GUI. It’s based on Python and Qt and free software, licensed under the GPL. It was inspired by other browsers/addons like dwb and Vimperator/Pentadactyl. https://qutebrowser.org/
It is fast!
> Not sure why my original post was downvoted.
I didn't downvote, however I initially found your message a bit off-topic. The article is about a brand new browser engine, for fun, in js, and you are saying that you wish the dev worked on this abandoned browser UI. These things are actually quite far, in the intent, motives and technically.
It doesn't load in (updated) Firefox, which is interesting. It only shows that the FPS is around 60. Not as many extension (vs LibreWolf). I rarely use FF (opting for LibreWolf).
On Brave (no extensions at all, except built in protections), the site runs at ~121FPS and the fonts look normal enough (no zoom, page at 100%). Fonts continue to look fine even when I zoom to 150% or higher.
I expected that my CPU temp would increase, maybe the fans might kick in... nothing. Cool as a cucumber. I have 4 browsers all opened on this page.
Interesting project. I read what @EvanAnderson wrote (evil software). I tend to agree. Respectfully, I don't see how this would be used. Browsers that already run JS don't need this. Browser that need this usually don't run JS (fails on Dillo, NetSurf, Lynx for example).
As the post says, it's just for fun :)