Luakit: A fast, extensible, and customizable web browser | Hacker News Reader

Luakit: A fast, extensible, and customizable web browser

luakit.github.io

181 pointsthunderbong19 comments

Surprisingly, still GTK 3 which means software rendering.

If they get it to GTK 4 and recent WebKit release they'll get a lot of DMA-BUF usage to bring many of those WebKit->GTK->Compositor copies to 1 (or in some offloading cases, zero).

Hopefully none of the "extensibility" is tied to gtk3. AIUI gimp and inkscape extensibility is what kept them using python2 for so long.

Luakit has been my main browser for a few years now. I like it, but it's slow and some sites don't work in it, so I fallback to ungoogled-chromium and LibreWolf quite often.

Oh, and sometimes there are WebKit incompatibilities[1], which means I have to hold back upgrading WebKitGTK on my system until it's fixed.

[1]: https://github.com/luakit/luakit/issues/1081

As a Lua user and a big fan of Qute et al browsers, I really want to like Luakit, but they've had a video bug[1] (they don't work at all) for a long time, and basically just ignore the issue as "not our bug" because it's apparently a webkit bug.

[1]: https://github.com/luakit/luakit/issues/882

Well it is a Webkit bug. Epiphany/Gnome Web has the same issue. All they could do is either fix whats been broken in the Gtk port of Webkit for years or to start from scratch and use Chromium instead. Neither option is one that a small developer can easily do.

Big SciTE energy, really. There's just something about binding these powerful components together with Lua...

https://scintilla.org/SciTE.html

It's extremely easy with GTK these days too because libpeas has a luajit backend (along with SpiderMonkey, Python, and of course anything native) and they all are backed by GObject Introspection to call into the C libraries/app.

Can this be used to automate web browsing tasks?

as in, read and reply to tedious posts, forward funny stories to my friends and just generally free us from our phones? the same way a video recorder watches tedious tv in our place and an electric monk believes in silly things for us?

Oh man, that electric monk reference takes me back.

Between oblique references on HN and my collection of online libraries I believe I need one.

Also, if you have a Lua jit in the client and another on the server [0] who knows how far you can go? (Just need a wasm compiler I guess)

0. https://openresty.org/en/

Douglas Adams reference for those out of the loop (me).

Sure, it works with Selenium but every other popular browser works with it as well.

What do you have in mind?

I'm not really into Lua so I prefer Nyxt, but it's nice that both exist.

https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/

This would be awesome if they got native Windows support rather than through wsl

Webkit is useless. if the project is not keeping updated , it will results in incompatible web engine . The webkit itself have so many incompatibility against latest web standards.

Anybody know what the adblocking is like?

its pretty good... not better than brave, but the browser itself is a tad slow, but you probably won't feel it in a 8 core machine.

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