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Okay. Okay!!! I did it!!!

I made a web browser!!!

It is the world's *worst* web browser!!!

But it is a web browser!!!

(The video glitches at the end. This is Ubuntu's fault. The video is supposed to show me loading mastodon.social and "(Page is empty.)" displaying because I choke on the JavaScript. I'm exhausted and not fixing this.)

in reply to mcc

mcc
mastodon - Link to source
mcc
• •
I just made a fucking web browser and you want me to debug why Ubuntu can't create a working screen recording. Come on
in reply to mcc

Glyph
mastodon - Link to source
Glyph
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just for the record I don’t want you to do that
in reply to Glyph

mcc
mastodon - Link to source
mcc
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@glyph I know *you* don't, but Ubuntu does, and that's why I'm switching to pop_os
@Glyph
in reply to mcc

mcc
mastodon - Link to source
mcc
• •
I cannot even express to you how terrible this web browser is. Literally all I did was launch a copy of Servo within the process, except I forked Servo, to have a payload hacked into the layout engine DOM parser that records every text node and adds it to a list. (In the process it actually renders the page to a 80x40 image, which gets thrown out.) Then I exfiltrate the list and display each node on its own line. You cannot follow links. Alt text doesn't appear yet so it can't even load zombocom
in reply to mcc

mcc
mastodon - Link to source
mcc
• •

The goal here is to be able to go to the Servo zulip/mailing list thing and say "hello, I made this working thing but I did it wrong, can you explain to me how to do it right?". Trying to decide if I've got there now, or if to hit that point I need to integrate tokio (right now while the page is loading you have to mash the space bar or the page doesn't load. Did I mention that?) before that's non-humiliating

Current source if for some unfathomable reason you want it

github.com/mcclure/cuervo/tree…

in reply to mcc

mcc
mastodon - Link to source
mcc
• •

Okay so I posted a bit of a blog post on the Servo zulip mailinglist thing explaining what I made with Cuervo (that's the text mode web browser based on Servo, see upthread), I don't know how much you'll get out of this but if you think "digging into incompletely-commented Rust programs and trying to figure out wtf the parts do" is interesting you might find this interesting.

servo.zulipchat.com/#narrow/ch…

EDIT: This link does not work logged out!! Sorry!!

This entry was edited (3 months ago)
in reply to mcc

mcc
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mcc
• •

After taking time off to work on a command-line audio DAW (a much more reasonable project), this week I returned to my command line web browser project, Cuervo. It's now up to date with servo top-of-tree, is confirmed to build without git hacks, and has *scrolling!* Also you no longer have to tap the space bar every 0.5 seconds to stop it locking up

github.com/mcclure/cuervo/issu…

I tried to take a video of the scrolling to show you, but this hard locked up Debian, so I figured tonight wasn't my night


Build error · Issue #1 · mcclure/cuervo

Hey, maintainer of ratatui here! 👋🏼 I originally wanted to give this a try a while ago but it got lost in time. Now I'm checking this out and hit a build error: Updating crates.io index Updating cr...
GitHub
in reply to mcc

Kevin Granade
mastodon - Link to source
Kevin Granade
• •
your description reminds me of the time I took a Heavy Enterprise web rendering engine that had been developed as a delivery system for page renderers written in Perl (technically Mason, but don't look up what that is if you value your sanity) and noticed you could just yoink the perl part and replace it with V8.
The result RAN, but...
in reply to Kevin Granade

mcc
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mcc
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@kevingranade I told Zulip I wanted to make that, and they're like "Oh that's very interesting! We should make an API to let embedders access the DOM." but that sounded like it was gonna take months so I was like "OK. I'm gonna do it in the worst way possible"
@Kevin Granade
in reply to mcc

The Doctor
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The Doctor
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We all choke on JavaScript. It's okay.
in reply to The Doctor

mcc
mastodon - Link to source
mcc
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@drwho I'm just gonna ship it like this and claim I am taking a hard ideological line against "React"
@The Doctor
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Jonathan Isom
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Jonathan Isom
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While it has been a while since I have used it, Lynx seems to be worse.
in reply to Jonathan Isom

mcc
mastodon - Link to source
mcc
• •
@jeisom the initial goal is to make lynx that supports JavaScript.
@Jonathan Isom
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Clive Thompson
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Clive Thompson
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@jeisom

I dig that goal

@Jonathan Isom
in reply to Clive Thompson

mcc
mastodon - Link to source
mcc
• •

@clive @jeisom There used to be an app named Links that did this (lynx + javascript) but then the JS support bitrotted. So I'm hoping by building on top of an embeddable browser engine I can make something that will not bitrot.

brow.sh does this also (with Firefox instead of Servo) and in a highly futureproofed way but it is a slightly more awkward, heavyweight solution

@Clive Thompson @Jonathan Isom
in reply to mcc

Clive Thompson
hometown - Link to source
Clive Thompson
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@jeisom

aha, very cool -- did not know about these!

Super interested to see your Servo experiments -- I was poking around the servo repo a month ago wondering what it would be like to spin something out of it

@Jonathan Isom

Tim Chambers reshared this.

in reply to Clive Thompson

mcc
mastodon - Link to source
mcc
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@clive @jeisom It is very easy to embed in a Rust app, you just include it as a crate. The embedder API is a little limited but it is still growing…
@Clive Thompson @Jonathan Isom
in reply to mcc

Brian Swetland
mastodon - Link to source
Brian Swetland
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@jeisom Intriguing. I wonder how many js-heavy sites can work without extensive simliar-to-chrome/firefox page rendering/css/canvas/etc stuff (I'm definitely not up to speed enough on modern trends in web programming to guess).
@Jonathan Isom
in reply to Brian Swetland

mcc
mastodon - Link to source
mcc
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@swetland @jeisom I think few of them are relying on this in practice because you don't want to make a game that fails with screen readers. The thing that worries me is captchas
@Brian Swetland @Jonathan Isom
in reply to mcc

Brian Swetland
mastodon - Link to source
Brian Swetland
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@jeisom Though a lot of captchas these days support an audio fallback, I think? Perhaps easier to support than whatever the "count the motorcycles" or "look at these random letters we scribbled on" approaches do.
@Jonathan Isom
in reply to Brian Swetland

mcc
mastodon - Link to source
mcc
• •
A terminal can more easily represent graphics than it can convey audio. The goal is for this to work over SSH
This entry was edited (3 months ago)
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