Why browsers are bloated

https://github.com/WebKit/webkit/blob/master/Source/WebCore/platform/Scrollbar.cpp
https://github.com/WebKit/webkit/blob/master/Source/WebCore/platform/win/ScrollbarThemeWin.cpp
Let's reinvent the fucking scrollbar, which every goddamn platform with a UI already has, and make it behave subtly different from the native one!

Right-click a native scrollbar in some other app:
- Scroll Here
- Top
- Bottom
- Page Up
- Page Down
- Scroll Up
- Scroll Down

Right-click a scrollbar in Chrome:
- Back
- Forward
- Reload
- Save As...
...

Right-click a scrollbar in Firefox and Opera:
Absolutely fucking nothing happens!

What the fuck!? How did these terminally retarded idiots get involved in creating one of the most important pieces of software to the average user?

check 'em

>>201
Nice base 200 dubs >>201-san.

>>191

Inactive tabs (or minimised windows for that matter) shouldn't need any repainting.

Right. What I was talking about is throttling the JavaScript timer frequency for inactive tabs, ala
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=633421
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=66078

I'm sure you'll implement something like this when you write a JS engine for your browser.

>>189

Where can I tweak this parameter? Please expand on this, I'm interested.

dom.min_background_timeout_value

>>203
If I ever write a browser, I'm not reimplementing the biggest shits in the broapping world known as JS and HTML.

>>204

JS

World's most widely deployed functional programming language son

>>205
I never said it wasn't.

Herpes is probably the most widespread STD. So what? It's still a fucking STD.

>>206
If I was G-d I would implement it.

So much work, so little time...

>>192,193
Flicking the mouse wheel just causes a series of scroll events that are indistinguishable from scrolling in a short burst. The smooth wheels generate scroll events the same way. Inertial scrolling requires detecting when the user has taken the finger away from the device so it can continue to scroll, and stop scrolling once the finger touches down again.

>>203
A setting buried in the horribly obscure about:config interface that only takes effect for background tabs, globally, is not quite the same thing as an easily accessible (probably via some menu item) control to modulate the current tab/window's background AND foreground update frequency.

So the question remains, is there a unique DOM event that would fire solely for this throttling, to warn the web app of the slowdown?

Amusing to see the "BUT MUH ANIMATIONS!!!" developers are complaining as usual...

On the subject of Firefox settings accessibility, it would be great if they added the possibility of adding any about:config item as a menu item, like Opera's Quick Preferences but far more flexible.

>>203,204
If this project ever gets that far I'll definitely be writing one. A browser that doesn't handle at least most of HTML5 and JS won't be so interesting even if it's much less bloated, because most people will just see it as something like a theoretical exercise. A browser that can work with most websites out there now, including the JS-heavy stuff, on par with other major browsers like FF and Chrome, but also much smaller and more flexible, will get noticed. I've mentioned this before in >>120, this is not about finding better protocols and web standards but about better implementations of them.

Is there real work being done on a non-bloated browser engine? (and that's feature complete)

>>210
real slow work. IRL is taking up too much time.

>>211
Would you mind sharing your work? Even Nikita has a github.

>>212
Github is the last bastion of bourgeois hipster chauvinist pseudo-intellectuals in cyberspace. If we could only nuke the site from orbit and take its inhabitants with it, the shackles of the Von Neumann era would disintegrate and we could finally move on with real, serious, honest-to-god programming.

>>212

IIRC Cudder had some imageboard with source code for some Anonix OS, which got merged with Temple OS afterwards.

>>213
Christ, it's just a git hosting site. Chill out bro.

>>212
Not yet... but you're free to beat me to releasing an ultra-tiny HTML5 compatible browser.

>>216
html5 technologies

>>216
Have you given any thought on how to implement CSS3 yet, Cudder?

At times I've entertained the thought of writing a fully-featured web browser for Plan 9, and what always stops me in my tracks is the CSS3 insanity. I can't conceive of how one could write a box layout engine that supports all those transformation/transition/gradient/box shadow effects without the code coming out looking more like a poor man's Macromedia Flash.

>>218
Yes, I'm leaning towards "not at all".

The animation stuff (http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-animations/ ) is conceptually easy as all it's doing is modifying properties periodically (and forcing a relayout/redraw), but it's still quite superfluous to the goals of this browser: display the useful content, minimise the eyecandy and extra fluff.

Transformations are also conceptually simple, but implementation is going to involve a lot of extra bitmaps to be rendered to and plenty of pixel-shoving, which would probably be better done on a GPU... again, not a really useful/important thing to have for just displaying documents.

code coming out looking more like a poor man's Macromedia Flash.

I'd rather write a low-bloat Flash-compatible plugin instead (and I actually have a piece of one written already, for a demo over a decade ago); SWF is a great format that Adobe really fucked up when they bought Macromedia.

Found this interesting chart of Chromium binary size... unfortunately it requires JS to work:
http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/bloat/

The HTML parser is 120.5KB, of which the tokeniser is over 40KB(!) and the tree construction is nearly 30KB. For some reason, there is an "HTMLToken.h" which is itself 2.8KB. The one I currently have is ~1KB tokeniser and 12KB tree construction.

let's make a new web browser in 4kb

>>219
Can you make a browser engine without all the CSS3 and HTML5 shit? Just something that can render text and pictures, place them on screen readably, and allows the user to control stuff like turning Javascript on/off and configuring proxies? No fucking gradients, graphic effects in CSS, videos, etc. Can you do that?

>>222
Can you?

>>222
How am I showing my epic three.js animations to my Reddit friends without web 3.0 technologies?!

>>222
How about pdf then?

>>223
No. I don't even know any assembly.

>>225
Not needed in a web browser. Download it and open in an actual PDF reader. Reading PDF in browsers sucks ass anyway, as it tries to download only a part of the pages and when you want to skip a lot of pages it makes you wait for them to download.

>>226

No. I don't even know any assembly.

You don't need assembly.

>>222

Most pages today use CSS3, so they will just not work.

>>221
http://web.archive.org/web/20070609230328/http://www.kakeeware.com/i_kb.php

Although that one is cheating a bit.

>>226
Agreed.

>>228
They just won't look the way the author intended, which is perfectly fine (a big NO THANK YOU to those idiots who think grey-on-black text is anything but completely unreadable...)

Cudder, why don't make your browser open-source so others can help with development, criticize, propose ideas, test for bugs, etc.?

pretty pls

>>226
You said to make a engine without anything that's used today. So I suggested to use pdf as replacement for html.

>>231
I don't know what TMZ's for pussies and housewives you go to, but most of useful sites I go to use just text, images and Javashit.

>>232
That's offtopic

>>233
Ottfopic.

>>230
It will be (public domain, in fact); there's just not much of any "source" at the moment besides a parser and a crude DOM viewer.

I'm also too busy at the moment so feel free to contribute... a tiny CSS parser and associated datastructures for keeping track of CSS rules would be the next step. Aim for CSS2.1 although there's a useful parsing spec for CSS3 which you can use.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgzNDA
It's faster because it is less bloated, even if you ignore the multithreading. Chrome's, Cudder's and netsurf's engine is even faster because they are even less bloated.

>>235
How the fuck is anyone supposed to contribute if they don't have the source to your code? Even if they did an independent CSS parser, there would be a huge impedance mismatch when you try to combine them later. You'd probably end up rewriting the whole thing anyway.

Stop being autistic and put a tarball up somewhere. You geezers never finish anything because you insist on perfecting it before you show anyone.

>>237
We should figure out a way to share code with each other without making it completely public (until an autist leaks it).

>>238
Setup some git repository and post the address here.

>>237
I put up a tarball for you here:

http://www.pensacolafishingforum.com/attachments/f70/9023d1278523048-massive-tar-balls-galveston-texas-tar-ball-galveston-texas-jpg