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Re: Web browser: stuck with Opera-9.62



On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 19:16:40 +0100, Riccardo Mottola wrote:
> A programmer and I started an effort to make a small but acceptably 
> usable engine+browser with few dependencies, by making a clean 
> implementation of WebKit for GNUstep without using the obj-c+ abominion 
> and use Obj-C and AppKit/Foundation features directly, however the 
> project gathered no momentum and is a quite complex task. At the moment 
> something very small exists with which you can browse and search 
> (textfields do mostly work now) but living without JS and CSS and tables 
> is almost impossible today. Everybody claims to be interested in such a 
> small engine, however once it is not a "Safari" or "firefox" replacement 
> they turn imediately away and don't contribute anyway....

You may also want to take a look at NetSurf: http://www.netsurf-browser.org/
Which is written in C and has it's own rendering engine and small
dependency footprint.

There's also wildfox, which strives to be minimal (whatever minimal
means when it depends on Qt, but I'm not judging it.)
http://www.mayaposch.com/wildfox.php

There are enough attempts to write browsers out there already, please
don't write yet another one, but try improving what's there first.
I think if you write yet another one, you're just wasting your time as
well as everybody else's. Browsers always turn into operating systems.
Maybe something could be done about the core of the problem, which is
actually the inefficient structure of the thing we call web, which isn't
primarily used as a source of information anymore, but rather as some
way to design fancy user interfaces. Maybe someone™ should try doing
something about that.


Best regards,

        Moritz


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