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SingAlong 38 minutes ago [-]
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.
anonymous_user9 6 hours ago [-]
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".
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
nsonha 4 hours ago [-]
It’s from scratch not by scratch
timhigins 4 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
Kon5ole 12 hours ago [-]
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.
NetOpWibby 7 hours ago [-]
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)?
krackers 12 hours ago [-]
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
heisgone 8 hours ago [-]
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.
gsnedders 6 hours ago [-]
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.
assimpleaspossi 8 hours ago [-]
Exactly. It's meaningless now and I stopped looking at it a few years before 2017 when I ran a Web dev shop
0gs 9 hours ago [-]
hmm. i wonder if any of the stuff they have changed since then is stuff i could legitimate not do without in a browser
5555watch 12 hours ago [-]
Aha, I'm getting 97/100 on Safari
torgoguys 9 hours ago [-]
96/100 with Brave on Android
vee-kay 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
vivzkestrel 6 hours ago [-]
lots of questions for HN folks here from a noob dev
- how exactly do you go about writing your own browser engine
- what specs are you supposed to follow
- how do you measure or determine if your browser engine is compliant
- how long do you think such a task would take (no AI / with AI)
- how do you test something like this?
5555watch 12 hours ago [-]
What's the Speedometer 3.1 [0] rating for that browser paired with an M5?
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.
Nice. Will you also release a version without Javascript (and without css)?
ernsheong 6 hours ago [-]
Hello, how does cwbrowser compare with Lightpanda?
bubblebeard 7 hours ago [-]
Super cool! Any plans to release it for Linux? Would love to test it but I have no Mac unfortunately
mplewis 6 hours ago [-]
how much of it was vibe coded?
nicoburns 7 hours ago [-]
This is cool! And as someone else who's been building their own browser engine: welcome to the club!
Do you have WPT tests results, and/or screenshots of it rendering real websites?
peesem 12 hours ago [-]
i'm assuming this is written with LLMs given the writing on that page and the nature of the other "products" on that website. i would not call that hand-written, as the page does in the second paragraph
coolwulf 12 hours ago [-]
I did use LLM for the landing page since I don't have much time on it. The browser however not that much. I did use claude and my own cwcode to help developing this, but a lot of times the zig code had to be written by hand. Hope this answered your question.
adipose 8 hours ago [-]
this admittedly makes it even a harder sell to have so little (any?) source code available on github, gitlab, codeberg, whatever.
what's the deal with that? why is Google Drive zips your main distribution method, with no source available?
and finally: are you going to change this?
LoganDark 9 hours ago [-]
Huh, cool, let me know when it's available. I like trying out alternative browser engines every now and then.
ranger_danger 8 hours ago [-]
closed source?
m00dy 5 hours ago [-]
The whole thing looks like a giant AI slop
esafak 9 hours ago [-]
What's the goal? Did you learn anything interesting?
snvzz 5 hours ago [-]
No source code, no binary, just a page with some claims about code that might even exist.
Eh.
fragmede 8 hours ago [-]
In terms of engines, Fastrender, by cursor, is AI generated in rust. Don't know why no one's picked that up and run with it yet.
tyre 8 hours ago [-]
Cursor was lambasted from the start because they wrote blog posts about writing a browner “from scratch in rust” but it was neither without dependencies nor actually worked.
It was not serious engineering. It was a side project experiment with yeeting tokens into the sun.
tetrisgm 11 hours ago [-]
Congrats. I’d love a very agent friendly browser by the way
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.
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
Working with an agentic framework for more than a week make me want to throw it over the cliff
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.
I’d love to see something entirely FOSS dethrone the big corp browsers, hope that’s the goal here.
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)?
>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
- how exactly do you go about writing your own browser engine
- what specs are you supposed to follow
- how do you measure or determine if your browser engine is compliant
- how long do you think such a task would take (no AI / with AI)
- how do you test something like this?
[0]: https://browserbench.org/Speedometer3.1/
[0]: https://blog.google/chromium/a-double-victory-for-web-speed-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
What license will you release under?
Do you have WPT tests results, and/or screenshots of it rendering real websites?
what's the deal with that? why is Google Drive zips your main distribution method, with no source available?
and finally: are you going to change this?
Eh.
It was not serious engineering. It was a side project experiment with yeeting tokens into the sun.