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Why browsers are bloated

Name: Anonymous 2014-07-27 0:20

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?

Name: Anonymous 2014-08-01 13:23

Hey Cudder, is it true that you are a girl?

Name: Anonymous 2014-08-01 14:11

>>41

Xhe is halfway beetwen it

Name: Anonymous 2014-08-01 19:15

I always wonder why there are no more browsers using Firefox's rendering engine other than Firefox itself. There are a half-dozen webkit browsers. I don't like webkit. I wish there was something like luakit but with Firefox's rendering engine.

Name: Anonymous 2014-08-01 20:05

>>43
They stopped allowing other browsers using it or something, I guess they mixed the firefox and geeko code

Name: Anonymous 2014-08-01 23:45

>>44
Tons of browsers using Gecko besides Firefox:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software)#Usage

In the past, Gecko had slower market share adoption due to the complexity of the Gecko code, which aimed to provide much more than just an HTML renderer for web browsers.[19][20][21] Mozilla's engineering efforts since then have addressed many of these historical weaknesses.[22]

The Gecko engine also provides a versatile XML-based user interface rendering framework called XUL that was used extensively in mail, newsgroup, and other programs. Another reason for much of the complexity in Gecko is the use of XPCOM, a cross-platform component model.[23] However, its use has been scaled back.[24]

If Webkit is supposed to be the simpler alternative, I don't even want to know waht Gecko code looks like...

Name: Anonymous 2014-08-02 1:09

>>41

anal sex doesn't make you girl.

Name: Anonymous 2014-08-02 2:03

>>39
I don't see how using excessively verbose code with tons of needless indirection/abstraction and mind-numbingly-long variable names is in any way more productive. The same goes for reimplementing basic UI functionality and creating trivial classes - it's busy work, useless time-sinks to give the impression of being productive.
I don't think you completely got my point. I'm saying the world of paid programming values productivity a lot more than they value optimal design. Programmers who produce verbose code that achieves the specifications within a shorter timeframe are valued higher than programmers who take longer to produce optimal code and design. I'm not judging the value of this being good or bad, I'm just saying that this happens.

The same goes for reimplementing basic UI functionality and creating trivial classes
I am not the designer of Chrome and I cannot give any rationale why they chose to work this way. I can only assume they had a good reason to specify this as a feature.

Name: Anonymous 2014-08-02 2:45

>>47
I'm not judging the value of this being good or bad, I'm just saying that this happens.

You're trying to have your cake and eat it too. They're apples and oranges. Don't play sour grapes just because someone cooled your jets off.

Name: Anonymous 2014-08-02 4:27

>>48
You need to reduce your use of figurative language. I'm having trouble comprehending your message.

Name: Anonymous 2014-08-02 7:03

>>45
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/04/webkit-best-option-for-camino-as-mozilla-drops-gecko-embedding/

Name: Cudder !MhMRSATORI 2014-08-02 12:07

>>45
Gecko code is actually not as verbose and thus easier to read, despite there being far more of it; I think this is the equivalent of the WK InlineFlowBox above:
https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/a4f779bd7cc2/layout/generic/nsInlineFrame.cpp
https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/a4f779bd7cc2/layout/generic/nsBlockFrame.cpp

Theres's also a lot more comments.

>>47
Programmers who produce verbose code that achieves the specifications within a shorter timeframe are valued higher than programmers who take longer to produce optimal code and design.
Code needs to be input, and verbose code takes more time to write - even when using an IDE that autocompletes 40-character-long variable names. Verbose code also comes from overly complex design, which leads to writing more code than is actually needed. The total time spent on design and implementation is likely more than an approach of creating the simplest design that works, and writing the minimal amount of code to accomplish that.

Name: Anonymous 2014-08-02 17:32

>>51
Shalom!

Name: Anonymous 2014-08-04 6:23

>>41

Would you cuddle the cudder?

Name: Cudder !MhMRSATORI 2014-08-04 11:58

More insanity, this time from the Mozilla side:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=630181

Put the complex quadratic-time text-wrapping algorithm of TeX into a browser? What the fuck!? I'm going to bet that 99.999% of browser users out there don't give a flying monkeyfuck about justified text. Just count up the number of spaces in each line, divide the width remaining by it, and add that to each one. Done. Fast and simple and good enough.

Name: Anonymous 2014-08-04 12:19

>>54
Shalom!

Name: Anonymous 2014-08-04 13:19

>>54
Firefox is a modern web browser, and that is a good idea. I don't know if it will be implemented but I think it will, eventually.

Name: Anonymous 2014-08-04 15:18

>>54
The person who filed that bug is not a developer and it's evident from the comments that the developers themselves don't badly want to implement it. Granted the Mozilla developers did seem to think that implementing a pixel accurate PDF engine using HTML5 canvas was a good idea...

Name: Anonymous 2014-08-05 7:59

>>54
:-/
I am so mad now

Name: Cudder !MhMRSATORI 2014-08-05 11:42

>>56
I bloody well hope not! How much energy (human and machine) needsd to be wasted on figuring out [i]where to split a line of text[/i}!?!?

In fact I am used to systems that do not even tr
y to split at whitespace. If the available width
is x columns wide, they would just split the li
ne at that position, no exceptions. Easy and com
pact and really not so hard to read if you're us
ed to it, but I don't think the majority will li
ke this, so for my browser I will compromise on
an algorithm that doesn't split words, but is no
t any more complicated than that.

When people read webpages, their primary goal is to consume the content, the information (no matter how vapid it may be.) The majority of them are not there to gawk at the linebreaking or font rendering, so any added complexity there for small improvements will be imperceptible and wasted for almost everyone. Don't even get me started on the idiocy of "smart" quotes, ligatures, and all that other extraneous shit.

Name: Anonymous 2014-08-05 12:56

>>59
Shalom!

Name: this shit it old 2014-08-05 14:51

>>11-14
Walk the thread, we've discussed netsurf, links2, jumanji, dillo, etc.. Cudder might enjoy Dillo.

If you still don't get it, stop using, supporting, and advertizing the larger market shares of web browsers.

>>36
So you are saying we should use Elinks, or adapting it with the cURL library? You still need to render colour. Unless you are seeking doing it VT100 max colours.

Name: >>10,61 !2l1ZW3Z9JI 2014-08-05 15:04

>>19
Shit, my old post are there. It's been 2 years. It feels so long.

Name: Anonymous 2014-08-05 15:30

Cudder, We need to open a gitlab to share code. I've been wanting to do this all my life:
This is also going to be the web browser that puts YOU in control. Per-site/per-domain/per-path settings for security and privacy; a UI that doesn't treat users like idiots by hiding everything;
http://dis.4chan.org/read/prog/1321853871/127

Do we use that tor-fossil repo we have here somewhere?

Name: od says 2014-08-05 17:00

the web has faaar grown out of control

really, how open is a protocol if you need a team of hundred programmers to implement it?

what is needed is a reset, a reboot to a more simple protocol. of course this will never happen but lets entertain the idea nonetheless.

a protocol that cannot be implemented by a programmer in his spare time over a week is not open, OKAY?

so let's go back and think about why all this shit has to be so complex, aside from encryption, does it really need to be? do we even need HTML anymore? haven't we LOOONG crossed the point at which it would be economical to just send images over the wire?

Name: Nice Squares 2014-08-05 17:02

>>64
it would be economical to just send images over the wire
Back to the imageboards with you, mister.

Name: Anonymous 2014-08-05 17:04

>>64
HTTPS is fine for it's multiple uses.

HTML needs to be done away with. ASCIIdoc or orgmode should be the markup standard. Images are fine. Animations are best suited to video now.

Name: Anonymous 2014-08-05 23:57

https://github.com/unconed/TermKit/

Name: Anonymous 2014-08-06 1:21

>>67
What's the point of a terminal app that isn't light on resources? Mad 1337 cred if you set it to green text?

Name: Anonymous 2014-08-06 2:33

>>67
http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit/

This is everything that's wrong with programmers today. They see something they find just a little difficult, and build an insanely complex system to replace it with an even more arcane set of rules and behaviour.

Name: Anonymous 2014-08-06 4:33

>>67
Node.js
Unix has bad usability
Stopped reading this shit. The author should go stick a broomstick up his anus.

Name: Anonymous 2014-08-06 5:51

>>67-70
The big problem I see with TermKit is the lack of a unifying concept for its interfaces. Unix terminal applications aren't powerful despite the shitty unstructured nature of byte streams; they're powerful because byte streams are easily mungeable. Layering HTTP and JSON over that just adds new complexity for applications to deal with (News flash! Not every application is a web app!)

People in the 70s and 80s also tried to make everything fit their preferred structured data paradigm (at the time I believe it was mostly records) and they failed then, too. Serialization formats come and go but the pipe marches on.

Name: Cudder !MhMRSATORI 2014-08-06 10:42

>>63
At this point it would probably be better to share ideas only.

>>64
really, how open is a protocol if you need a team of hundred programmers to implement it?
Maybe you don't. That's what I'm trying to do - find simplicity in complexity.

a protocol that cannot be implemented by a programmer in his spare time over a week is not open
Depends on what it does. There's justifiable complexity, and there's extraneous complexity. The former is fine, the latter is the problem.

>>67
:facepalm:

>>71
they're powerful because byte streams are easily mungeable
They expose the full power of letting the application interpret data as it wants to. The complexity and annoying failure modes of trying to enforce a type on the data make it a stupid thing to do - remember resource forks on old MacOS and the typed (text, binary, record, etc.) files used in old mainframe systems? Not surprisingly, they disappeared.

Name: Anonymous 2014-08-06 10:53

>>72
Not surprisingly, they disappeared.

Not entirely, they're just better hidden now.

Name: Anonymous 2014-08-06 11:46

>>72
Shalom!

Name: od says 2014-08-06 14:06

>>67
termkit seems like just more shit piled upon shit. really the opposite of the way to go imo.

>>72
simplicity? about how "open" the web is and from the looks of it, a few years from now everything will be unspiderable SPA's which only works in the last version of the big 3 "evergreen" browsers. And you'll only be able to ever find anything using one of two different search engines. they got us by the balls mate. you need big teams, big infrastructure, to even get started.

Name: Anonymous 2014-08-06 23:43

>>75
As far as I am able to tell this is the goal of the big three browser implementors. Not versioning standards like HTML5 can only make sense if you don't plan on anyone else ever implementing your "standard".

Name: Anonymous 2014-08-07 2:52

why does shitfox use rdf?
i read https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/RDF_in_Mozilla_FAQ but i could not understand a thing.

Name: Anonymous 2014-08-07 2:56

there is https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/RDF_in_Fifty_Words_or_Less

which is not fifty words or less.

Name: Anonymous 2014-08-07 8:04

>>78
Basically, if you know CLOS, it's a half-arsed implementation of CLOS. RDF's are bookmark objects that can be printed and shared among lisp images.

Name: Anonymous 2014-08-07 19:13

>>72
At this point it would probably be better to share ideas only.
Why, you are publishing it soon? I really want to do the domain controls, cookie and temp file requests, esp. certs handling.

Unless you have that done already. CSS, I rather do something else, like Xlib instead, even Cairo.

IMHO, I want to ignore HTML5, ans just go with WHATWG.
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