Re: [dev] Talk about sane web browsers

On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 1:50 AM, Ray Kohler<ataraxia937_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Again, uzbl and surf developers are *not* 'browser programmers', they
are not writing any browsers, they are painting a very thin coat of
paint over existing turd browsers out there.

uriel
Received on Mon Sep 07 2009 - 09:50:08 UTC