Hacker News Reader

Comment by ronsor | Hacker News Reader

They did build a browser; it may not be a very compliant or complete browser, or even a useful one, but neither was IE6!

View on HN

It didn't even compile, which makes me consider wether your comment is just ignorant or outright maliciously misleading

The version that was live on GitHub the day they published their blog post was missing compilation instructions, didn't cleanly compile and didn't pass GitHub Actions CI.

The project itself did compile most of the time it was being developed - the coding agents had been compiling it the whole time they were running on it.

Shortly after the blog post they updated the GitHub repo with compilation instructions and it worked. I took this screenshot with it: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/cursor-simonwil...

The "it didn't even compile" criticism is valid in pointing out that they messed up the initial release, but if you think "it never compiled" you have an incorrect mental model.

Also, didn't it use Servo crates? I don't think you can say 'from scratch' if 60% of the actual work is from an external lib.

If I install an Arch Linux, I don't say I 'installed Linux from scratch'.

It used cssparser and html5ever from the Servo project, and it used the Taffy library for flexbox and CSS grid layout algorithms which isn't officially part of Servo but is used by Servo.

I'd estimate that's a lot less than 60% of the "actual work" though.

My bad, I was misinformed, thanks for correcting me, I thought it used the renderer, not just the parser. Thats honestly way better than what I thought.

I think it was mostly a joke about IE being horrible.

I believe it was basically a broken, non-functioning wrapper around Servo internals. That’s what I’d expect from a high schooler who says “i wrote a web browser”, but not what I’d expect from a multi-billion dollar corporation.

They aren't really a multi-billion dollar corporation. A lot of it is them just pumping up their valuation. Stuff like this proves that in a lot of ways.

They are running > 300 DC's...

Talking about Cursor not Cloudflare.

They have equipment in > 300 locations. How much per location? More than a rack cabinet?

My understanding is that it doesn't even compile if you clone the repo.

It didn't and it had some pretty weird commit history and emails. Overall not a super great sign...

It does now. It didn't on initial announcement day.

They didn't build a browser from scratch.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com