Wow - an actual new web browser with its own completely original rendering engine, not based on Chrome/Firefox/Safari. Never thought I’d see the day! Still early in development though
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in reply to @dog's post:
It spun off from SerenityOS which is also a pretty interesting and cool-looking project!
Worth noting on the new web rendering engine front that Servo is still being actively developed as well.
I used to work with the founder of this project back when I worked on WebKit at Apple. I...am unsure I will trust the direction he'll take this. I don't think he's Brendan Eich level bad, but I would need to refresh my memory.
I'm always happy to see people try this but having their biggest sponsor be Shopify is a bad sign out of the gate
Looked up the tag for this on fedi and this link makes me skeptical about the guy behind the project (not just being a dipshit but the bad code management choices too)
As a company, mostly their extreme embrace of AI and shitty business practices (there was an entire class action lawsuit over them not paying out properly to employees they laid off for instance).
But the bigger issue to me rather than Shopify itself is just the fact that they are being funded by large corporations and co-founded by a billionaire. As much as they say "they're one time donations with no strings attached!", there's always strings attached, because you might want another one of those one time donations. There's no reason to believe a browser like that isn't just trying to become Chrome 2.
Sorry to kinda spoil things but the projects lead is a real dick https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814
Yeah, this sucks. :/ That was three years ago, so hopefully he's less of a jerk now? But I have nothing to go on one way or another.
(I do feel like a thread full of strangers saying "fedi sent me" running in to yell at him isn't going to change his mind though)
i don't have much optimism that he's improved at all
https://goblin.camp/@ray/112717670738435906
https://social.wake.st/@liaizon/112717586365965262
(thankfully i knew not to get too optimistic since about two years ago)
I had previously blocked the guy on twitter and I don't even remember why, now I don't know if he said some shit there or if it was because of blueblocker
Almost 2 years out for just an alpha, and no Windows when it does. I hope it works out.
I feel like that's inherent to any new web engine starting from scratch.
See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_web_browsers
I haven't looked at every line in that graph, but I'm pretty sure the only fully web-functional independent browsers are Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera, and the last lineage of those to start from scratch was KHTML in 2000 :/
Oh this is very interesting. on a professional level I wonder how they're working on CA and trust stuff!! Gonna go read, thank you for the heads up!
just reread other comments and I hope he's not a dick. and I think it's really REALLY important to develop genuinely new alternative players in the browser space for so so so many reasons. And the "oh the new thing might not be perfect so I'll stick with my daddy warcrimes browser" take doesn't feel like It, to me!! this is probably the spiciest and stupidest I've been yet on cohost to be honest, and it makes sense it's about some fuckin tech, lol. god, me, why am I like this
It is really important, but this seems like a billionaire corporate project funded by large corporations and I don't see why it wouldn't just do the same shit that Chrome already does, just with a different set of guys getting the payoff for it.
It's not about it being perfect, it's about it just...going the exact same way. And it's going to be quite a few years before we even see this thing in any meaningful way, so right now it's just A Billionaire And His Annoying Dev Bro Getting Money From Shopify For Their Startup. It's not much to get excited about when there's not even a browser to look at.
It's super important that we have more browsers out there, but the whole point of having more browsers out there is to be able to escape the nightmare strangleholds that Google and Apple are putting out there on the web, and I don't have a lot of confidence that these two particular guys are interested in doing that instead of just interested in getting a paycheck until they can bail.