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Comment by millimeterman | Hacker News Reader

I disagree about Chrome. It's absolutely not perfect, but considering its sheer complexity - browsers are probably comparable to an operating system at this point - bugs are fairly rare and performance is quite good.

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Considering its sheer complexity its is indeed well-executed. I just wish I didn't need something that complex to read a document on the internet.

I mean, modern websites do a lot more than display documents. They're certainly bloated, but they increasingly need to "do everything." Normal people do so much of their computer usage in the browser that it could probably _be_ the operating system and most people wouldn't lose any functionality (see: ChromeOS).

You don't! I switched to using links on the linux framebuffer and it rocks. Yea, there are a few sites that I have to pop over to X and Firefox, but for the vast majority of web sites that I visit, including this one, it works like a charm.

And it's lighting fast. Trully stunning. 10-20ms to render on a circa 2008 thinkpad.

And it's pretty good straight C, and very hackable, and only around 70,000 LOC. First thing I did was join it with guile and write a bit of glue code and I'm now adding features to it faster than you could git clone firefox, let alone begin to read its code.

A large fraction of HN stories are articles on nytimes.com. How readable is a typical page on nytimes.com in links?

It's great. Loads in less than a second. Text and images. Never have to worry about popups.

I agree, but Windows for example is also complex. I wouldn't find it acceptable if it froze for 1 second everytime I switched between programs. Complexity is not really an excuse for bugs. If it's so complicated it creates so many issues, maybe it shouldn't be this complicated?

I mean, that problem is hardly common and Windows is definitely full of similar bugs. And I'm not sure it's possible to make web browsers much simpler without losing functionality - the websites they have to support necessitate the complexity.

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