this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
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    the perfect browser (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
    submitted 4 weeks ago by cqst@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world
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    [–] vaguerant@fedia.io 3 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

    As long as we're filling out our fantasy browser brackets, I'm hoping that the Servo engine and browser/s can become viable. Servo was started at Mozilla as a web rendering engine only, before they laid off the whole team and the Linux Foundation took over the project. Basically revived from the dead in 2023, the current project is working on an engine and a demonstration browser that uses it. It's years away from being a usable replacement for current browsers and the engine is certainly the main project. A separate browser which employs Servo as its engine is a more likely future than an actual Servo browser.

    Still, you can download a demo build of the official browser from the web site. Currently, it's only usable for very simple web sites. Even Lemmy/Mbin display is a little broken, and I think of those as fairly basic. YouTube is out of the question. One of the sites that's been used to demonstrate its capability to render web pages is the web site for Space Jam (1996) if that gives you any idea of its current state.

    The original 1996 Space Jam web site, running in the Servo demo browser.

    [–] stetech@lemmy.world 1 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

    Honest question, since I have no clue about web/browser engines other than being able to maybe name 4-5 of them (Ladybird, Servo, Webkit, Gecko, … shit, what was Chromium’s called again?):

    What makes browsers/browser engines so difficult that they need millions upon millions of LOC?

    Naively thinking, it’s “just” XML + CSS + JS, right? (Edit: and then the networking stack/hyperlinks)

    So what am I missing? (Since I’m obviously either forgetting something and/or underestimating how difficult engines for the aforementioned three are to build…)

    [–] qqq@lemmy.world 2 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (2 children)

    JavaScript alone is not a simple beast. It needs to be optimized to deal with modern JavaScript web apps so it needs JIT, it also needs sandboxing, and all of the standard web APIs it has to implement. All of this also needs to be robust. Browsers ingest the majority of what people see on the Internet and they have to handle every single edge case gracefully. Robust software is actually incredibly difficult and good error handling often adds a lot more code complexity. Security in a browser is also not easy, you're parsing a bunch of different untrusted HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You're also executing untrusted code.

    Then there is the monster that is CSS and layout. I can't imagine being the people that have to write code dealing with that it'd drive me crazy.

    Then there are all of the image formats, HTML5 canvases, videos, PDFs, etc. These all have to be parsed safely and displayed correctly as well.

    There is also the entire HTTP spec that I didn't even think to bring up. Yikes is that a monster too, you have to support all versions. Then there is all of that networking state and TLS + PKI.

    There is likely so much that I'm still leaving out, like how all of this will also be cross platform and sometimes even cross architecture.

    [–] vaguerant@fedia.io 1 points 4 weeks ago

    Adding on to this, while this article is fast approaching 20 years old, it gets into the quagmire that is web standards and how ~10 (now ~30) years of untrained amateurs (and/or professionals) doing their own interpretations of what the web standards mean--plus another decade or so before that in which there were no standards--has led to a situation of browsers needing to gracefully handle millions of contradictory instructions coming from different authors' web sites.

    Here's a bonus: the W3C standards page. Try scrolling down it.

    [–] stetech@lemmy.world 0 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

    Thanks for these explanations, that makes a lot more sense now. I didn’t even think to consider browsers might be using something else than an off-the-shelf implementation for image/other file formats…, lol

    [–] qqq@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago

    Sorry I didn't mean to imply they don't use shared libs, they definitely do, but they have to integrate them into the larger system still and put consistent interfaces over them.

    [–] Kidplayer_666@lemm.ee 1 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

    Well… according to ladybird, at this point they are more conformant than servo in web standards…

    [–] PlantPowerPhysicist@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 4 weeks ago

    does the ability to view websites other than Space Jam '96 really improve your life?

    [–] AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 1 points 4 weeks ago

    Servo is still making quick progress though.

    https://servo.org/wpt/

    [–] NateNate60@lemmy.world 2 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

    I'm never going to be one to dog on something before I try it. If it's good and can offer the same or better experience as Firefox then sign me up. The biggest sticking point for me, though, is potentially losing Firefox's massive add-in library. I really like my uBlock Origin and Restore YouTube Dislike and my VPN extension and Metamask and all the other crap I've got there.

    [–] Abnorc@lemm.ee 2 points 1 week ago

    I think I could get by with Bitwarden/uBlock as a minimum. Addons like enhancer for youtube are super nice though.

    [–] ComradeRachel@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 weeks ago

    Copyleft is the true path

    [–] mlg@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago

    Hey it could be worse. It could be the completely and utterly worthless MIT license.

    [–] lemon@sh.itjust.works 0 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (2 children)

    I’m OOTL. Are these actual issues people have with the project?

    C++ might not be as memory-safe as Rust, but let’s not pretend a Rust code base wouldn’t be riddled with raw pointers.

    BSD tells me the team probably wants Ladybird to become not just a standalone browser but also a new competing base for others to build a browser on top of – a Chromium competitor. Even though BSD wouldn’t force downstream projects to contribute back upstream, they probably would, since that’s far less resource-intensive than maintaining a fork. (Source: me, who works on proprietary software, can’t use GPL stuff, but contributes back to my open-source dependencies.)

    [–] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 0 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

    BSD tells me the team probably wants Ladybird to become not just a standalone browser but also a new competing base for others to build a browser on top of

    skeletor facts until-we-meet-again meme format, saying that every major web browser uses a rendering engine with a copyleft license

    [–] lemon@sh.itjust.works 0 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

    Don’t have time to factcheck so going to take your word for it. Interesting bit of knowledge! Honestly wouldn’t have thought that. How else are Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi and co getting away with building proprietary layers on top of a copyleft dependency?

    I’m no legal expert. All I know is that when I’m picking dependencies at work, if it’s copyleft, I leave it on the table. I love the spirit of GPL, but I don’t love the idea of failing an audit by potential investors because of avoidable liabilities.

    [–] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

    The three currently-maintained engines which (at their feature intersection) effectively define what "the web" is today are Mozilla's Gecko, Apple's WebKit, and Google's Blink.

    The latter two are both descended from KHTML, which came from the Konquerer browser which was first released as part of KDE 2.0 in 2000, and thus both are LGPL licensed.

    After having their own proprietary engine for over two decades, Microsoft stopped developing it and switched to Google's fork of Apple's fork of KDE's free software web engine.

    Probably Windows will replace its kernel with Linux eventually too, for better or worse :)

    How else are Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi and co getting away with building proprietary layers on top of a copyleft dependency?

    They're allowed to because the LGPL (unlike the normal GPL) is a weak copyleft license.

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    [–] exocortex@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 4 weeks ago (4 children)

    What is the problem with a BSD-license? I'm not familiar with the different open source licensing models and their problems.

    [–] Allero@lemmy.today 1 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

    Basically, it allows you to steal all the code and use it in your closed-source programs, giving a green light for corporations to use open-source code without giving anything back.

    GPL doesn't allow that, forcing you to open-source anything that was produced using other GPL-licensed code. That's, for example, why so much of Linux software is open-source - it commonly relies on various dependencies that are GPL-licensed, so there is no other legal option other than sharing the code as well.

    [–] communism@lemmy.ml 0 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

    It's not "stealing". It's explicitly allowed. Using IP according to its licence is the opposite of stealing.

    [–] Prunebutt@slrpnk.net 1 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

    Ok, then call it "plagiarising".

    [–] communism@lemmy.ml 0 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

    That is definitionally not plagiarising. It follows IP law, which is the opposite of plagiarism.

    [–] Prunebutt@slrpnk.net 1 points 4 weeks ago

    There's more than a legal definition of plagiarism.

    Plagiarism is when you sell the work of others as your own without attribution. There are bucketloads of examples of legal plagiarism.

    I'm pretty sure that everything H. Bomberguy discussed in his plagiarism video was legal, for example.

    [–] MITM0@lemmy.world 1 points 4 weeks ago

    Remember the Minix operating system that runs on your processors ? It's a proprietary spyware now because of BSD licencing

    [–] HouseWolf@lemm.ee 1 points 4 weeks ago

    It's not really an issue for the end user. But it's basically made for companies to take advantage of free hobbyist developers without needing to give anything back in return.

    So if you're the kind of person who runs to foss software to get away from corporate tech bull, having a license that benefits companies more than users just kinda feels scummy.

    [–] phlegmy@sh.itjust.works -1 points 4 weeks ago

    It's not a viral copyleft license, so you're free to use the source code without giving anything back.

    This has pros and cons over something like GPL, but people like to circlejerk GPL and pretend it's always the best option 100% of the time.
    For situations where you have to sign an NDA and are unable to release source code (eg; console game dev), MIT and BSD licensed projects are a godsend.

    [–] mesamunefire@lemmy.world 0 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

    Everyone knows links2 is the best browser.

    #links2gang

    [–] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 0 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

    ........I have no idea what this is referencing. Duckduckgo?

    [–] gay4dudes@sh.itjust.works 0 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

    Its a new Browser build from the ground up. I think its called ladybird.

    [–] cm0002@lemmy.cafe 0 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

    It's a monumental effort really, building a browser engine from scratch and taking it to daily driver usable is probably among the most difficult programming challenges. It's way easier to build a new Linux kernel from scratch than a browser engine lmao

    Even Microshit tried and gave up because it was so hard

    [–] Railcar8095@lemm.ee 1 points 4 weeks ago

    Even Microshit tried and gave up because it was so hard

    They also failed at building operative systems, so not sure they are the best example.

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