this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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The company behind Opera browser also runs a loan shark operation (www.spacebar.news)
submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Also a bunch of somewhat less heinous cringe shit.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago (5 children)

Yes, Chromium flavours vs Firefox flavours is not healthy.

It's less unhealthy than a defacto Google monopoly though.

It's impossible to build a new web browser... At least until someone proves otherwise.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

My estimate (source: sounds good in my head) is you'd need a dozen or so browser experts working full time for years to build a browser capable of rendering most modern "web-app" style websites.

The core specs have a lot of integration tests (one of the shittier ones written by yours truly!), and most of the specs are pretty readable for experts (I hate the CSS Device Adaptation Module Level 1 spec though).

There's just a lot of it and a lot of subtle interactions which is where the time would go.

If you were foolish enough to set many millions of dollars on fire* to do this you'd end up with a browser lacking in key non-core-spec areas too. Off the top of my head: print layout, security, JIT performance, HTTP2 / HTTP3, general browser performance, UI polish, PDF rendering, mobile version, plugins, and DRM "support" (good luck getting the DRM gatekeepers to let you bundle that stuff with your browser). Add some more years for all of that.

* and/or smart enough to make it an open source project and convince people to do it for free, see the other commenter's link to Ladybird below

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

This appears to be a good excuse to hate on CSS Device Adaptation Module Level 1, let me quote from it so you understand the great sorrow I had when I needed to understand it:

This section is not normative. This section describes a mapping from the content attribute of the viewport element, first implemented by Apple in the iPhone Safari browser, to the descriptors of the @viewport rule described in this specification.

...

Below is an algorithm for parsing the content attribute of the tag produced from testing Safari on the iPhone. The testing was done on an iPod touch running iPhone OS 4. The UA string of the browser: "Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8A293 Safari/6531.22.7". The pseudo code notation used is based on the notation used in [Algorithms].

...

If a prefix of property-value can be converted to a number using strtod, the value will be that number. The remainder of the string is ignored.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

you know what the solution to this is. gotta reset the web from scratch.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Me and my mate had to come up with some fake policies for a fake Pirate Party and one of our policies was that the Irish government should commission a new internet browser. After all, the current bunch have a massive budget surplus that they want to get rid of before Sinn Féin get in.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

I'll watch its career with great interest, thank you for the link!