So, What is what you look for in a web browser?
What are the features you want/need?
I kind of want to explore UWP/Electron to create a prototype of a web browser, leveraging the fact that either chromium and chakra are two great capable engines
and I'd like to see if I don'get bored I can do some stuff,
If you are wondering what is this all about you can check the next UWP javascript sample
MicrosoftEdge
/
JSBrowser
🌲 A web browser built with JavaScript as a Windows app
JavaScript Browser
A web browser built with JavaScript as a Windows app.
http://microsoftedge.github.io/JSBrowser/
This project is a tutorial demonstrating the capabilities of the web platform on Windows 10. The browser is a sample app built around the HTML WebView control, using primarily JavaScript to light up the user interface. Built using Visual Studio 2015, this is a JavaScript Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app.
In addition to JavaScript, HTML and CSS are the other core programming languages used. Some C++ code is also included to enable supplemental features, but is not required to create a simple browser.
Additionally, we’re taking advantage of the new ECMAScript 2015 (ES2015) support in Chakra, the JavaScript engine behind Microsoft Edge and the WebView control. ES2015 allows us to remove much of the scaffolding and boilerplate code, simplifying our implementation significantly. The following ES2015 features were used in the creation of this app: Array.from()…
and in the case of Electron you can find many here
but this is a good example also
wexond
/
browser-base
Modern and feature-rich web browser base based on Electron
Wexond Browser Base
Wexond Base is a modern web browser, built on top of modern web technologies such as Electron and React, that can also be used as a framework to create a custom web browser (see the License section).
Table of Contents:
Motivation
Compiling and editing Chromium directly may be challenging and time consuming, so we decided to build Wexond with modern web technologies. Hence, the development effort and time is greatly reduced. Either way Firefox is based on Web Components and Chrome implements new dialogs in WebUI (which essentially is hosted in WebContents).
Features
- Wexond Shield - Browse the web without any ads and don't let websites to track you. Thanks to the Wexond Shield powered by Cliqz, websites can load even 8 times faster!
- Chromium without Google services and low resources usage - Since Wexond uses…
with UWP you can do it either with JavaScript (as shown above) or with C#, VB, C++, in Electron just JavaScript (or [rust, cpp] native modules if you want to be fancy)
please share your features, questions and comments!
in any case, I will report back my experiences on working with such platforms!
Oldest comments (19)
This is probably something I’d be skeptical about. Not to say you shouldn’t do it, but browsers seem like a tough tech to break into.
I’d love a browser that managed resources better and cut off memory hogs.
But in terms of user features that might be more achievable in electron world, I think it would be pretty cool to have a dev-tool-first browser. A browser that made inspection, console, etc. more front and center. I feel like that could be a fun differentiator.
OP! This!
As a power user, I like Vivaldi a lot -- customize everything.
As a developer, I prefer Firefox Quantum -- unmatched dev tools.
I can't immediately think of what a browser could bring to the table to make me install/load a different one... because they all war to be your default, I barely even use Vivaldi anymore.
You'd have to get crafty with real estate, I think. Since the current tools sort of overwrite the content visually, something clever might be done with semi-transparent overlays... perhaps specific extensions along the line of various tests (Mozilla's Observatory, Google's Mobilefriendly, etc).
The ParrotOS of web browsers?
This.
I agree with you, there was a time I kind of had fierce opinions on browsers but now days, as long as it renders my stuff consistently I'm fine with it.
Something like Firefox Developer Edition? mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/
I've never tried though I use regular Firefox (beta channel) every day
Don't worry I'm a bit skeptical too but I want to see if I'm able to do something with it, when it comes to browsers I'm that guy that just need it to render the stuff, that's why I wanted opinions.
Now that seems an interesting thing, I'll try to see what can be archivable here
Netscape?
I want a proper implementation of whatever the current HTML standard is and a button to turn off JavaScript for the current site. That's pretty much it. I stopped caring for customizability as most browsers decided that thy won't let me anymore...
Hahaha, well that's up to the browser vendors sadly, my skills are not in that level
thank you, I just have a question
what do you mean by this?
Currently, I am using 3 devices with different os (macos, windows, android) as my primary way to access the internet.
It's really important that the browser at least syncs the bookmarks & passwords with those different devices.
Ah indeed, this is a must have for many, I get it
In the case of Dev Tools
for UWP it seems there could be an interesting option in the future
however there might be hidden support for this since the new edge tools preview can indeed debug webviews inside an UWP App (
there is a edge tools dev protocol that is similar to the chrome dev tools protocol, but it is an early preview)
In the case of electron
There is quite a lot of stuff in there
I'll keep you posted!
I'll be echoing Ben Halpern's concerns, and adding that overall if you want to build a browser you don't want to be that far from the rendering system as e.g. Electron puts you.
What I'd actually want from a good browser is:
Good luck if you're intent on giving it a go.
Btw, Brave has some cool ideas. It basically just fails me on the extensions, so can't actually use it.
brave.com/
This was one of the examples I first thought, but it seems they have moved away from electron based tech
Well, as far as I know - and I could be wrong - electron really doesn't give you a lot of control over what's actually going on inside the browser. It simply gives you a way to interact with browser based applications and a more of a behind the scenes application with access to your filesystem and other things normal applications tend to need.
Yes that's the usual case, it uwp for example you are able to control the web view navigation as well as things that doesn't happen inside it, screenshot as an example, I believe this to be true in electron as well
Yeah I do understand resource usage and the security issues, I was actually just looking for the user features feedback, but I guess I did ask the wrong question since I'm not going to use other than electron/uwp as a base, so perhaps I need to update the post to clarify that