Browsing for Browser#

I touched upon this in my rant on everything internet (and cloudflare 💩).

💩 Google is evil and by extension their browser engine (chrome) too.

You know spying and all...

Also don't forget that they were installing slop 💩 on your machine without you knowing...

Browser prisons#

This is as sad as it can get as browser runs (almost) 24/7 on my computer and it is the gate to the Internet... to knowledge, work and entertainment.

I don't use any chromium based browsers - but mozilla is evil too if not more and the alternatives are nowhere.

Brave browser is still chromium under the hood with all the warts that thing has - I still prefer my pimped-up firefox (especially uBlock Origin and NoScript).

There is ladybird project but recently they joined furries and so I am not holding my breath for that one.

We don't have alternatives - only chrome flavours (with Manifest v3 coming soon; although brave might still be viable) and firefox flavours and both are run by evil companies:

Damn.

What to do?#

I gave it a little thought and what is the hardest part of browser which makes it so difficult to entry?

Well, the browser engine, right?

But what is browser engine?

In nutshell (some part could be compartmentalized):

  • networking stack (HTTP, websockets etc.)
  • render HTML and style it with CSS (<<< THIS)
  • integrated javascript engine (with DOM manipulation)
  • integrated wasm engine

My thoughts:

  • internet protocols were implemented and reimplemented multiple times across projects and programming languages - this could be fully lifted from somewhere
  • javascript engine was implemented few times too and probably could be lifted also
  • same for wasm

The biggest obstacle is the parsing of HTML and rendering with CSS.

That is the biggest mess of all.

We have sites which are decades old which still work on all of our modern browsers (all two of them 🤣 😭)...

This is also the reason why no one ever stepped up to create viable alternative - that is until the ladybird browser project.

They got to alpha stage rather quickly (in a year or two?) but still have long way to go to do all the fixups so that they can deal with all the quirks of HTML/CSS.

The standard evolved and its implementations too (it was two-way street often times) and so across decades we have various historic versions of HTML and CSS.

Ladybird tries to match big browser treatment of the standard and nonstandard behaviors and that is why it will take time to get there.

Different approach?#

What about just give up on this?

I mean, what if we browse internet as someone with a disability?

Their readers do not care about CSS at all - sure some websites might be really incomprehensible without CSS but I believe this could be workarounded in the renderer (or left to rot).

I am not saying that regular people will give up on the browsing with fancy CSS but for someone like me who puts value on other things (privacy, hardware sovereignty, full control) that could be viable option.

The website (their server) cannot see if I am rendering their polished design correctly or at all - interacting with site could be in spartan mode where we don't need to be prisoners in one of the two (or three) camps.

A browser with full control over javascript which will not allow some rogue website to do whatever they want on my machine would be good enough for me to sacrifice nicely rendered page with CSS while still be able to do my e-banking and reasonable internet browsing.

Hmmm 🤔