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  • Hacker News
  • I have a question: what are you planning to do with it? It is curiosity. Thanks and congratulations for the work
  • I was wondering if you could add a Acid2 rendering screenshot to the site, please? It tests some different things than Acid3, so I'm curious how it fares.
  • Very cool and I wish you the best of luck (I genuinely hate this generation browsers) - but my experience with bun and other complex zig tools is that a segfault always awaits behind the corner
  • The render of the HN page looks close at first glance, but the engine clearly does not support SVG yet - those tiny arrows are all missing. Also it renders "Hacker News" on the header garbled with overlapping texts so it seems that the text-shaping engine lacks a proper inline box model. I would also be interested in seeing renders of more modern pages.
  • What's the Speedometer 3.1 [0] rating for that browser paired with an M5?

    [0]: https://browserbench.org/Speedometer3.1/

  • For reference, Safari is doing around 53, and Chrome is around 60 for M5, of which they were bragging about [0]. So curious to see whether there's any gains from your custom browser.

    [0]: https://blog.google/chromium/a-double-victory-for-web-speed-...

  • Your own engine?! Wow, that's incredible. Is this gonna be like Servo where people can build a browser around this, or will it be a standalone browser?

    I recently switched from Arc to Helium but it's still Chrome with different paint. When I was using Opera 12, it was the most standards-compliant browser so it became my main. What are the goals for cwbrowser (and is the name permanent)?

  • Congrats! Even if this is vibecoded, this is a hard task to get just a barebones renderer working.

    I do concur with the few other folks here that the ShowHN is meant for actually showcasing something rather than the landing page with a screenshot. I would expect it to link to a downloadable binary or the source.

    Showcasing Web Platform Tests coverage would be better than just Acid 3.

    For anyone else wondering why this is hard: I'm writing a browser engine that renders to png. I dug into the source code of other browser engines and came across scenarios that I had never imagined. I learnt about font rasterization, execution contexts for scripts, etc. There's a tonne of stuff to be learnt by building something like this.

    Supporting iframes and each group of the web platform APIs, each add another layer of complexity that I definitely dont want to be tackling as a solo dev.

  • And don't forget Cloudflare will just ban you from the internet if it doesn't recognise you.
  • Faster than chrome and 100% clearance of acid3 is certainly interesting, and a great achievement for a solo dev, good job!

    I’d love to see something entirely FOSS dethrone the big corp browsers, hope that’s the goal here.

  • Firefox already exists, and for all its flaws it is both free and open source.
  • Is this open source? May be being blind but cannae find the source anywhere
  • Modern browsers should no longer score 100 on Acid 3 though.

    >By April 2017, the updated specifications had diverged from the test such that the latest versions of Google Chrome, Safari and Mozilla Firefox no longer pass the test as written

  • Aha, I'm getting 97/100 on Safari
  • hmm. i wonder if any of the stuff they have changed since then is stuff i could legitimate not do without in a browser
    by 0gs
  • Exactly. It's meaningless now and I stopped looking at it a few years before 2017 when I ran a Web dev shop
  • https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt/commits/master/aci... shows the history of the web-platform-tests copy of WPT, which has mostly followed Hixie’s earlier updates to Acid3 by simply commenting out assertions that no longer match what specs say.
  • Yes, but considering the goal of his project is a proof of concept, that is, proving this project is possible, acid3 is a good place to start to prove the worth of the project and aiming 100% first make more sense. Tweaks will be needed one way or another to make it equivalent to the big 3.
  • Acid3 is 100 tests but to have a browser that works on any real percentage of the internet you need to pass the over 52000 tests and nearly two million subtests [1] that make up the Web Platform Tests [2]

    This is like the difference between a college degree and passing a spelling test.

    1. https://servo.org/blog/2023/07/20/servo-web-platform-tests/ 2. https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt

    Not to mention this site is clearly vibe coded and has a vague call to action and no source code available thus indicating possible vaporware.

  • If you're going to "Show HN" you should show something. This just a hastily-extruded [1] landing page with no details.

    Also, using an agentic framework and writing code by hand "a lot of the time" does not count as "from scratch".

    [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49129191

  • It’s from scratch not by scratch
  • Working with it for 2 years is impressive nevertheless.

    Working with an agentic framework for more than a week make me want to throw it over the cliff