ChakraCore VS ProtonMail Web Client

I thought it would be a fun weird project to make Servo work with MS' abandoned JavaScript engine:

https://github.com/chakra-core/ChakraCore

Of course it is written in C++ and you'd probably want a pure Rust browser. But it is sad seeing that fairly complete open source JIT JavaScript engine sit and rot.

The JS engine is open source: https://github.com/chakra-core/ChakraCore

ChakraCore

Not to forget the engine Charka: https://github.com/chakra-core/ChakraCore

The only bit of the old Edge that had its source emancipated. It was/is? quite performant.

As a Linux user, I very much think Microsoft should have continued Trident and Chakra. Apple also should have continued releasing Safari for Windows. Our web QA setup was entirely built around Macs back then, but it was great to be able to test sites with Safari on Windows, and to have another responsive browser on Win32.

Edge was initially using Chakra but has been rebuilt using Chromium and the V8 engine.

https://github.com/chakra-core/ChakraCore/wiki/Architecture-...

I've found the source code to be quite readable too - albeit from a bug-finding perspective, not a strictly pedagogical one.

Furthermore, the new architecture decouples the JavaScript interface from the engine, enabling the use of other JavaScript engines such as Hermes, V8, or Chakra.

ChakraCore

I am astonished at the omission of ChakraCore, open sourced by Microsoft but sadly abandoned by them after they switched Edge to Chromium: https://github.com/chakra-core/ChakraCore. But it looks like it’s still chugging along as a community effort rather than being completely abandoned.

The source code is here https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClients

> Finally, in keeping with our long track record of transparency, Proton Pass is open source so anyone can review and verify our security architecture

They sure do enjoy writing that sentence without including any hyperlinks. This (https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClients/tree/main/applicati...) appears to be the browser extension and https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClients/tree/main/packages/... appears to look like the backend referenced in the extension's readme, but that directory's readme is zero bytes so (shrug)

Fork the frontend and make your own lightweight option

PS: I hope that we selfhosters will have a modern, efficient, easy to use mail suite one day with modern features like JMAP, good self-learning spam integration, automated checks and validations for SPF/DMARC/DKIM or whether the IP/host suddenly appears in a blocklist and integrated encryption at rest for emails. Something that isn't 30 services in a container image, with 30 different configuration styles. Maybe even with an API integrated that's compatible to the ProtonMail frontend (like the neutron server once intended to be). Anyway, I'm sorry for dreaming. ;)

And if you want to customize it further you can use Stylus to add custom CSS, Tampermonkey to add JS, or even modify the whole thing yourself from source (if you run it locally it syncs with your actual account).

There are lots of useful End to end encrypted webapps such as Protonmail, cryptpad, cryptee and many others. And part of why we trust them is that the client side code is open source, so we can see that end to end encryption is really going on and is really secure. Its impossible to verify what code they are running in their server, but if the data we send them is already encrypted we can rest easy.