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Mozilla, the developer of the Firefox web browser and other open source projects, has announced its Mozilla Information Trust Initiative. This initiative involves Mozilla "developing products, research, and communities to battle information pollution and so-called 'fake news' online."
Although the announcement from Mozilla claims that the "spread of misinformation violates nearly every tenet of the Mozilla Manifesto", this initiative does raise some concerning questions. Should a web browser vendor be actively patrolling content on the web? Is such patrolling of content harmful to a truly open web? Is this merely the first step toward web browsers censoring or controlling the dissemination of information available on the web? Would the resources expended on this initiative be better spent improving the performance and efficiency of Firefox?
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday August 12 2017, @07:18AM (5 children)
So there an opening for a new browser built on the original C browser/build environment using GTK?
Oh and the feature fix list is long by now.
The $$ questions is how to fund it or who will sponsor..
(Score: 2) by chromas on Saturday August 12 2017, @11:18PM (4 children)
It's so old now, you're probably better off starting from scratch. I doubt ol' Phoenix could handle the 1.21 jiggabytes of javascript every page imports now. But it sure would be nice.
Unfortunately, 100% of all modern browsers that aren't Firefox or IE are all Chromium forks. Boo. When Opera dumped its code to make a Chromium fork, some of the devs left to make their own Chromium fork (Vivaldi). When Brendan Eich left Mozilla, he started up his own...Chromium fork (Brave). Boo.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday August 12 2017, @11:53PM (3 children)
So which open source (Unix) browser is the best now in your opinion?
What would be the best starting point for a new browsing project that aims to beat the others? should it use C? C++? JS? Objective-C/Swift/C#? what rendering engine or make a new one?
One approach would be to simply strip a lot of webmonkey stuff such that the complexity and resource requirements are reduced. I tested this using a greasemonkey like proxy. It works very well.
I'll sure would like to see a more sane program language than Javaterror.
Not sure if CSS and other slap on are good or bad as a concept.
The browser could sure use a "Browser process XX uses jiggabytes of memory - want to KILL it like yesterday NOW?" ;)
(Score: 2) by chromas on Sunday August 13 2017, @12:02AM (2 children)
Emacs. :D
Also, it'd be cool to get more people onto Pale Moon development. It's effectively a fork of Firefox without the ui and extension shenanigans, but I think it's got very few people behind it at the moment.
It would also be nice if people would quit trying to turn web browsers into operating systems.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday August 13 2017, @12:12AM (1 child)
Web pages with some runnable code are good for when say you want to have a page where you can input some parameters and have the formula output without consulting the server of the page. Faster response and less load. Same goes for say vector browsing of mapping applications etc. Or realtime display of cameras or control loop setups.
Thus code has it uses. I can see that. The problem is moron webmonkeys have gotten in a position to make decisions they are neither qualified for and have perverted incentives to fuckup.
And javascript sucks as a language. I'm less sure how much javacode sucks. It can be used to say build a interactive vector map browser. A lot less messy than building something that has to be installed on the client computer.
(Score: 2) by chromas on Sunday August 13 2017, @12:39AM
Sure, well there's no law saying the script language has to be javascript—in fact, there's a parameter just for specifying the type—it's just that most browsers only support js. You don't even need to have the server return html.
Imagine clicking a gmail shortcut and getting a qml file that represents a Qt application which appears on the desktop like any other program (but you can see the source because it's not compiled). Then it could use javscript or python or whatever to handle events and stuff. Or even a compiled language if you want something good. No reason it couldn't be done, other than using a web browser as an SDK is cool while using an SDK as an SDK is lame and oldschool and $other_buzzword.