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Comment by bengoodger | Hacker News Reader

Genuinely curious - what do people want to see from a new/different rendering engine?

The web is crazy complex these days because it is an entire app platform.

The incentive for anyone building a browser is to use the platform that gives you the best web compat especially at the outset when you don’t have enough users of your app to be able to make big changes to the platform. Even Chrome didn’t start from scratch - it used WebKit!

The Chromium community has built an excellent open platform that everyone can use. We are fortunate to be able to use it.

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I think Google has proven with their recent actions concerning android that they really can't be trusted with big, critical open source projects.

The Play Store services are not a critical open source project, though. The AOSP is still intact and maintained in accordance with the licensing.

The application signing backtrack is an issue, but more of a political problem than a technical one. America's lesson here has been written on the wall for years: regulate your tech businesses, or your tech businesses will regulate you.

Where is the source code for AOSP 16 QPR1?

Where are the security patches of the past couple of months?

What is QPR?

> trusted with big, critical open source projects.

You talk as if the community has appointed Google to take care of these projects. Google is spending $$$ writing code and open sourcing it. Not the other way around.

And as with anything open source, if you dont like the direction of open source code - fork it.

If I have an open source project, you dont say 'bitpush cant be trusted with the project'.

> Genuinely curious - what do people want to see from a new/different rendering engine?

It should be fast when rendering HTML/CSS. I don't really care about JavaScript performance, because where possible I switch it off anyways.

It should be customizable and configurable, more than Firefox was before Electrolysis and certainly much more than Chrome.

It should support addons that can change, override, mangle, basically do everything imaginable to site content. But with configurable permissions per site.

It should support saving the current state of a website including the exact rendering at that moment for archiving. It should also support annotations (like comments, emphasis, corrections) for that. And it should support diffs for those saved states.

And if you include "the browser" in that:

I want a properly usable bookmarks manager, not the crap that current browsers have. Every bookmark should include (optionally, but easily) the exact page state at the time of bookmarking. Same for history.

Sync everything to a configurable git repo: config, bookmarks, history, open windows/tabs, annotations and saved website snapshots.

I want easily usable mass operations, like "save me every PDF from this tab group", "save all the pictures and name them sometopic-somewebsite-date-id.jpg" or "print all tabs that started with this search and all sites visited from there as PDF printouts into the documentation folder".

I want the ability to watch a website for changes, so the browser visits in the background and notifies me if anything relevant is different (this could be a really hard thing to get right I guess...).

I want "network perspectives" (for lack of a better word): show me this website as it would look from my local address, over this VPN, with my language set to Portuguese, ..., easily switchable per tab.

I want completely configurable keybindings for everything, like vimperator, but also for the bookmark manager, settings, really everything.

And I want a pony ;)

> I don't really care about JavaScript performance, because where possible I switch it off anyways.

your needs are not the majority's and you know it

Maybe. But it was, as i've understood and answered it, a question about /my/ needs, not what my guess about the majority is.

> The web is crazy complex these days because it is an entire app platform.

I'd prefer something that's not crazy complex, that's not "an entire app platform" designed and implemented by Google. Google essentially controls the W3C (Mozilla would vanish if Google stopped funding it), and controls the monopoly rendering engine.

Half of websites are better without JavaScript and web fonts, and 99% are just text, images, and videos with maybe a few simple controls. For the other 1% I can fire up Google Chrome and suffer the whole platform.

I want a web rendering engine for the 1%, that does the simple stuff quickly and isn't a giant attack surface around 30 years of technical debt and unwanted features calling itself an "application platform."

I too have nostalgia for a time when prices were reasonable, politicians didn't philander and children respected their elders.

And yet here we are :-)

For what it's worth, despite it being /en vogue/ to rag on Google, the Chrome team has some of the most talented and dedicated folks focused on building a vibrant and interesting web for most people in the world.

> 99% are just text, images, and videos

This actually reminds me that early in the HTML5 era one of its key selling points was that you could play videos using just the <video> element. There would not be a need for Flash, Silverlight or JS. However these days it is extremely rare to come across a site that can successfully play videos with JS turned off. Complicated JS has de facto become a requirement for videos but it doesn't have to be.

I think the concerns are not about feature requests but about leveraging embrace-extend-extinguish dynamics to push the web as a whole closer to being locked into dependence on Google as a platform. There are mountains of articles on the topic, ranging from ad blockers to privacy to DRM. But the critiques are old news to anyone who's been following the topic for a while.

Full support for Ublock Origin. Perhaps at the native level rather than as an extension.

A ublock origin browser?

I'd like to see browsers support the Gemini protocol and the Gemtext format.

I would like scratch made browser to focus on performance.

Chromium browsers eat my RAM and drain my computer battery.

Try Safari. No browser is snappier or more power efficient.

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