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Comment by Uehreka | Hacker News Reader

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I'm going to fucking crash out if another person says they're making a browser and their inline layout does this shit[1] I swear to god.

I held off on commenting on the last AI browser post because the author said "it's not even good" so they recognized it's trash (it was).

Please educate yourself on how inline layout is supposed to work[2] first. (no, you cannot lay out text span-by-span[3] either...)

[1] https://github.com/chrisuehlinger/viberowser/blob/df6f4a265a...

[2] https://drafts.csswg.org/css-inline-3/

[3] https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-3/#boundary-shaping

You found it! Yeah the 4th version of the browser is in Haskell and is only a couple hours in, so it’s nowhere near done. The Go version achieved Acid3 compliance in 7 hours, but I expect this one to take a lot longer since Haskell is a bit more difficult to work with and there’s probably less Haskell in the training dataset.

> The Go version

Where can I find the Go version?

I’d been archiving/scrubbing each one so that the next assistant wouldn’t be able to use the previous branch as a guide, but since you asked, I pushed the archive of the Go one, feel free to rip it apart: https://github.com/chrisuehlinger/viberowser-go

https://github.com/chrisuehlinger/viberowser-go/blob/93f2638...

Please stop using Acid3 as some holy grail that lets you say you built a browser.

I have no idea how/if this passes Acid3 but this is not inline layout.

So I called out Acid3 in the original comment (and mentioned why it’s not the holy grail) so people wouldn’t get the idea that I was building full-on modern browsers. I’m not sure what I need to say to make y’all happy. I’m just excited that these tools are capable of doing non-trivial work and I’m having fun throwing tasks at it to see what comes out. I’m not going around telling people to download or use these things.

Brother.

Your browser does not have the concept of breaking a line once it gets too long[1].

Your browser does not even shape text during layout and it renders text using a DrawString[2] function from a library that only applies kerning. No complex shaping to be seen in a light-year radius.

There is no trace of bidi-reordering either. I can't link to anything here since there's nothing to link to.

I will leave this[3] here too but I'm not going to draw conclusions without a deeper understanding of wtf the agent did here and how Acid3 works.

From now on if you still don't understand how this does not deserve the title of a browser I will assume you are trolling.

> I’m not going around telling people to download or use these things.

My problem is that you're telling people you built a browser. Some people have standards for what can be considered even a "toy" browser (this is not it).

[1] https://github.com/chrisuehlinger/viberowser-go/blob/93f2638...

[2] https://cs.opensource.google/go/x/image/+/refs/tags/v0.35.0:...

[3] https://github.com/chrisuehlinger/viberowser-go/blob/93f2638...

It's easy to have acid 3 compliance if your acid 3 compliance test is printing 100/100 and then checking to see if 100/100 was printed

Why don’t you do something useful with your superpowers?

In the past year I’ve used AI coding assistants on a life-saving medical device product (no, followup commenter, I did not ship unreviewed vibes in a medical device product), a tool for editing documentation used in healthcare (no, followup commenter, it does not use LLMs to generate documentation), a piece of custom cue calling software for theater and to reverse engineer a TCP protocol to help modernize a piece of water quality measuring equipment.

But hey, every once in a while I like to have a little fun ;)

Yeah none of those are nearly ambitious enough for someone who is spitting out browsers in less than a full workday.

This is at least a 100x speed up. You should be cranking out operating systems in a few days. Why haven’t you built an integrated OS, programming language, browser, and game engine yet?

I would love for these self professed AI assisted hacker gods to dogfood said browsers, before, for example, building them 3 times over in different languages for no reason.

At the moment I’m kind of just excited that this way of orchestrating works at all, and in the process of refining it I’ll probably have it build a couple more “browsers”. But yeah, once I’ve got a setup I’m happy with, I totally plan to go all in on an approach, up the ante from Acid3 to the Web Platform Tests (which do support HTML5 and modern Web APIs), and start using it (if not as a daily driver, at least enough to get a sense of where it’s strong/weak).

I will of course be complaining vehemently on HN whenever someone’s website fails to render properly in my janky obscure browser, as is tradition.

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