Re: [dev] Talk about sane web browsers

On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 7:30 PM, Uriel<lost.goblin_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> You can't have a "sane web browser"[1] with an insane rendering
> engine. All you are doing otherwise is giving a turd another coat of
> paint.
>
> At the moment my only hope for a minimally sane web rendering engine
> is http://www.netsurf-browser.org/
>
> The latest released version is not too useful, but development seems
> to be fast and they are moving forward quite fast.
>
> Peace
>
> uriel
>
> [1]: Of course there can't be a sane web browser, but a different coat
> of paint on top of webkit is not going to be any saner than Chrome,
> and unlike all this so called "sane browsers" at least Chrome mostly
> got the process model right.

I think it's more like, "You can't have a sane web browser with an
insane web". As long as the content creator makes assumptions of how
the user wants the content presented, and things break when the
assumptions are violated, there can be no sane web experience. And
that's still better than the model where the creator's assumptions are
simply enforced upon the user. (Of course, this can be gotten around
by just avoiding all the broken parts of the web, but I find that
rather impossible given that my livelihood is tied up in it.)

FWIW, I made a post of this sort in uzbl's Arch Forum thread recently,
and it doesn't appear that anybody responding to it got what I was
driving at. Dieter, in fact, admitted not understanding me. It didn't
seem worthwhile to continue the thread there, since I don't really
want to convince browser programmers that their cause is hopeless -
and that's really what "victory" for me would look like on that front.
I'm still quite interested in both uzbl and surf, and I'm hoping one
of them will prove me wrong and actually tame the web into a uniform
UI / presentation experience that somehow smooths over any dumb things
the content creators do without sending me back to Firefox to handle
broken pages all the time.
Received on Sun Sep 06 2009 - 23:50:50 UTC