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ladybird
Discontinued Ladybird web browser [Moved to: https://github.com/SerenityOS/ladybird] (by awesomekling)
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> The real problem is that nearly all website render terribly. It just can't keep up with the complexity that it the modern web. It's a real shame.
I was thinking since quite a while now to write a wrapper around the Serenity OS browser [1] that supports JS, CSS and WASM, and passes ACID 3 tests [2].
I did have a quick look at the source, but couldn't think of a nice way to wrap it as it's quite closely tied to the Serenity OS GUI.
[1] https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Userland/...
[2] https://lunduke.substack.com/p/serenityos-web-browser-passes...
You're in luck, Andreas has been hacking on that since a couple of months. They're calling the Linux version of the browser Ladybird: https://github.com/awesomekling/ladybird
Netsurf has also been ported to the Plan 9 OS fairly recently. https://github.com/netsurf-plan9/netsurf
If Gemini interests you, I'd appreciate your feedback on an approach with similar goals I call KyuWeb: https://github.com/GarrettAlbright/KyuWeb
Re: domains -- good point.
I found some screenshots of Dillo 0.6 -- interesting to see how little the GUI has changed over time, since 2002: https://web.archive.org/web/20020611213502/http://dillo.cips...
I'm not a software engineer, just an unix-minded end-user, but I've always seen this sort of consistency as very good, thoughtful engineering. Having an almost unchanged GUI for 20+ years is an indicator of well thought out defaults early on, I suppose.
Similar projects that come to mind are mhwaveedit and mtPaint (the latter was inspired by the former, /1, 2). I need to do audio work, so mhwaveedit is a gem that, for me, has replaced Audacity almost entirely. Blazing fast, with a consistent, extremely well thought out GUI again.
Eric S. Raymond used Audacity as an example of great unix-y GUI design in "The Art of Unix Programming". I've often thought, that, by now, Audacity somewhat suffers from "feature creep", including GUI-wise. mhwaveedit has managed to escape adding features.
Quoting a passage grom TAOUP: "Several features of this UI are subtly excellent and worthy of emulation /.../. But these are details. The central virtue of this program is that it has a superbly transparent and natural user interface, one that erects as few barriers between the user and the sound file as possible." /3
I'd say Dillo managed to maintain the same core idea in terms of web browsing, have as few barriers between the user and the HTML file as possible. No added bloat, for 22 consecutive years. This is quite remarkable, actually -- as compared to GUI (and other) changes of many other browsers. Obviously, the scope of those "other browser projects" is different as well; it's a different world.
Also, possibly the consistency of the GUI has to do with the use of FLTK, which kind of forces the devs to focus on the bare essentials.
Let's hope that these indications of Dillo's death (because no homepage) are greatly exaggerated. Greetings and a thousand thanks thus far to all of Dillo's devs!
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtPaint
2. https://github.com/magnush/mhwaveedit
3. http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch06s01.html#au...