Comment by hawski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hawski | Hacker News Reader

To my overly long TODO-list I added a web browser project. I would like to see something akin to Links [0] or Lynx [1] with a bit of Dillo [2], but also for mobile.

Features & non-features:

- it would generally work like the reader mode (no other modes) trying to place navigation links in a predictable place

- user can easily select text size and color schemes

- night mode (Android does not have one)

- because of it's content focus it could offer great offline capabilities like full-text search through archive and version comparison

- probably ignore most or all CSS

- probably no JavaScript support

- ad blocker for the rest

Can such a thing use it's own rendering engine on iOS? As I said I don't care about JS.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_(web_browser)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dillo

What's the use of night mode? Even if someone needs to browse web in the darkness (which is a bad idea anyway), it should be implemented somewhere in the OS, not in applications.

Sometimes you need to browse in the darkness. It should be implemented in the OS, but it isn't. I don't have a mobile OS on my TODO list.

The night mode would be just a small additional setting on top of a color scheme selection.

If it's not implemented in the OS, wouldn't it make more sense to create an OS-level utility?

OS-level utility needs APIs that are not there in case of Android. All night-mode apps for Android are just a reddish overlay. It often falls apart when you something can't go through the overlay like AFAIR system passwords. I tried to use apps, but met with this wall several times.

Android did have a night mode, but it was experimental and removed in later versions. So other than alternative ROMs there's nothing there.

My 1st gen Pixel XL has had night mode since I bought it 1.5 years ago, and it has continued to work all the way to Android 8.1.0.

it is implemented in android, iirc

At this point it's probably easier to come up with an efficient HTTP/HTML/CSS/JS replacement plus matching browser than to write a complete browser from scratch.

You might find Min to your liking.

https://minbrowser.github.io/min/

I've been kicking around some related ideas:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6bgowu/what_if...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com