Hacker News Reader

Comment by eatonphil | Hacker News Reader

Drew has said [0, 1] that it's not possible/practical to build a browser today (enough counterexamples exist for this to be not really true) but the way his projects are going I kind of expect him to announce one in the next few years.

[0] https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/13/Web-browsers-need-to-stop...

[1] https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....

View on HN

NetSurf[1][2] still exists, and while it's not a small program, it's definitely not as large and unwieldy as Chrome or Firefox. And it's good-enough to browse simple sites like Wikipedia or HN with, heh.

[1]: https://www.netsurf-browser.org/

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

I used Dillo for a time. NetSurf is now my browser of choice for constrained systems. I sometimes use it on Termux.

The SerenityOS team are building a browser from scratch and it is even passing some of the ACID tests. The pretty significantly along. So it is possible with enough dedication, but whether you can be competitive with Chrome is a different matter.

Their browser needs to run on a single platform, their own platform, and only one rendering backend, etc. Thus it is a lot less complex than Chrome or Firefox.

I think that supporting multiple platforms is one of the smallest challenges for a browser. CSS and performant JavaScript that manipulates DOM is far more complex a problem.

Yeah and is more work then the OS itself...

But hey having a browser and ext2 should be good enough ;)

> expect him to announce one in the next few years.

9 months ago:

https://drewdevault.com/2021/09/11/visurf-announcement.html

Days.

https://drewdevault.com/2022/05/30/bleh.html

Must feel nice to have an article written about you!

Given your karma, I assume you already know this, but from the guidelines:

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

There should be a guideline for following one username around a thread and quoting guidelines at them across multiple comments because you don’t like them. Your solution is quite noticeably worse than the problem and fouled up the thread a bit more than the user you’re chastising, which is quite ironic.

Kagi is building Orion on top of WebKit and based on my testing it is already very solid even though it's extremely early in the development

EDIT: Well, ignore, I didn’t realize we are discussing from scratch browsers :)

There are good counterexamples but that is not a good one because Drew was and I am talking about browsers from scratch.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com