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Comment by vivzkestrel | Hacker News Reader

- extremely stupid question but please entertain me here a bit

- why dont any of the modern browsers open and load pages instantaneously anymore, why does it take seconds?

- is this because of backward compatibility support where you are supporting html, css and JS features all the way back to the 90s

- apart from gecko and v8 why dont we have browser engines?

- are you familiar with anyone building an entire browser engine from scratch? how many WhatWG specifications would they have to support

- with all the GPT hype of late, why havent we seen a single GPT yet capable of building a browser engine from scratch supporting the last 20 years of html, css and js specs?

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> why dont any of the modern browsers open and load pages instantaneously anymore, why does it take seconds?

Right click > Inspect. Go to the "network" tab, reload the page. Maybe do the same on the "performance" tab.

> are you familiar with anyone building an entire browser engine from scratch?

Ladybird [1] is exactly that. Started as browser for the SerenityOS project [2] but ended up being spun off as its own project.

[1] https://ladybird.org/ [2] https://serenityos.org/

> with all the GPT hype of late, why havent we seen a single GPT yet capable of building a browser engine from scratch supporting the last 20 years of html, css and js specs?

Macsurf is a browser project for Mac OS 9 leveraging LLMs[1] to do this. Tbh it makes sense for this given how time-consuming (absurd? Though the fact it exists tickles me) it'd be otherwise for essentially a single person to support the scope of web tech it does for such an incredibly niche userbase.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48339534

> why dont any of the modern browsers open and load pages instantaneously anymore, why does it take seconds?

If we are talking about a blog page, just a static html - it should take some ms. No problem here.

But if we are talking about some heavy pages and fetch requests to other places, well...

Or simply a page with f 10Mb header image.

>apart from gecko and v8 why dont we have browser engines?

gecko (Firefox), blink (chrome and friends), webkit (Safari, Kagi and some other, mostly linux distro browsers) are the only stable ones. Servo and Ladybird are on the way, but it will take quite some time for them to mature.

>are you familiar with anyone building an entire browser engine from scratch?

Ladybird. No idea about specifications.

>with all the GPT hype of late, why havent we seen a single GPT yet capable of building a browser engine from scratch supporting the last 20 years of html, css and js specs?

Well, aside from the fact that this will be a one expensive project - you (someone) will have to test this code anyway. Also this: https://ladybird.org/posts/changing-how-we-develop-ladybird/

> apart from gecko and v8 why dont we have browser engines?

You mean apart from Gecko and Blink (v8 is a JS engine, not a browser engine.)

But we do, for open source engines we also have WebKit and NetSurf and some others.

Ladybird is a has new browser engine and coming along nicely: https://ladybird.org/

if a website's bundle is <14kb, it will load instantly.

https://endtimes.dev/why-your-website-should-be-under-14kb-i...

Chrome (which I don't use) provides a really good profiler that can give you answers down to the milliseconds on what's happening during page load and also actions. Web tech provides so much functionality but web dev often don't bother optimizing their sites. I'm not saying browsers are blameless, but at least you get good tools that'll give you hints.

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