Ask HN: Does anyone else desperately want an alternative to mainstream browsers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Does anyone else desperately want an alternative to mainstream browsers?

13 pointskizer9 comments

I keep wishing for a "people's browser" not backed by any kind of corporation. I know it's a very complicated piece of software, but it would be wonderful to have another open source browser not derivative from KHTML or Gecko that's fully customizable and built by a lot of people. Anyone else feel this? Maybe it's just me.

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I'm a lifetime Firefox user and have been feeling this more and more as I observe changes with Mozilla and the Firefox browser. I think it's possible there already is a good candidate out there that the community could focus their attention and energy into, but I haven't looked extensively. A new project is exciting and a great opportunity to establish the correct vision from the start.

I'm certain there is plenty of ability out there; the components of a browser span many types of software (networking, parsing, graphics, text shaping, font rendering, JS and WASM execution engines, GUI), so from the get-go it would be easy to divide up the work at a high level and find programmers with experience in the particular sector.

I want an alternative to mainstream browsers but the outlook is bleak. Perhaps what I want more is an alternative to the mainstream internet.

I also feel you there.

The timeline of web browsers on wikipedia [0] has a good list of browsers. Some notable browsers that are not just copies of Chromium or Firefox:

* Palemoon (Goanna engine, derived from Gecko but forked a while ago)

* Netsurf (Independent engine, mostly good for basic HTML pages)

* Pre-2013 Opera (Proprietary Presto engine, no longer maintained, never open sourced)

* IE11 and before (Proprietary Trident engine, going EOL this year, never open sourced)

* Text/terminal browsers (lynx, w3m, etc, independent but only support text in the terminal)

Of those, Palemoon is probably the only contender as an independent browser with open source code that can support at least parts of the modern web (although the experience is rough, Palemoon was forked when Firefox still ran as a single process, meaning a bad tab can crash the whole browser, and web components don't work).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_web_browsers

I think a web browser is particularly suited to a large number of developers, like an OS, since it has so many components from different threads of software development (networking, parsing, JS + WASM Engine, layout & graphics, text shaping, font rendering, GUI). Further, the top level components are easy to decompose again (layout engine, composite engine, SVG renderer, CSS effect renderer - for example).

A modular browser would be nice - where custom components can be swapped in for certain functionality (layout, networking, JS engine, CSS engine, renderers for various MIME types).

I already have more than one. It is easier to find or create alternatives when the focus is not on graphics.

Good point.

Not really, I like Chrome.

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