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I'll share more detail tomorrow. And by details I mean code. I'm happy to share anything about it now.
So it is a browser. It is not a web browser. That's the point. I recently heard about the W3C adopting Mozilla's mass surveillance scheme as a web standard. The point is to turn web browsers into a data vacuum so they can sell your data to third parties and make money.
Of course when the W3C is composed of commercial web browsers all members are going to vote for that.
For a long time I've been unhappy with web standards. They aren't built for the user. If your web browser was built for you it wouldn't be sending out half the data it does. Plenty of headers that have zero utility for you. Even a browser like Tor browser of Mulvad browser have to take something that is basically a piece of spyware and attempt to strip it back hoping they got everything.
But what if it were never added in the first place? Why doesn't tor-browser and other privacy browsers just start from the beginning and only send the necessary data? Well because web standards are so complex that only a company with commercial interest in data collection could afford to make a browser without borrowing another one. As long as you are implementing that standard you will have to fork some spyware. Even if you didn't you'd have to send all the data required to have full coverage of the standard.
Point is maybe the web is dead. The internet is a good thing but maybe the web itself is just an arbitrary standard set by people with different interests than you. So what then? Gopher? Gopher's not an entirely bad option. It's downsides is it isn't application oriented. You can't do much with it. Even if people adopt Gopher (unlikely) they will still want some of the more application and media oriented things the web offered. So at minimum they will need a second application for that. That will be the web unless someone offers another application for that side of the web.
Funny thing is that while Gopher isn't built for application like content, in fact that is a shortcoming of the web as well. It's a content first platform that keeps getting used to deliver applications. So if we as developers are trying to deliver applications and users want these applications, why don't we use a platform that delivers applications? And while we're at it do it in a more locked down environment. Far more locked down than the web.
So what did I make? It is a browser that navigates not to html files that might have javascript in them, virtually guarenteed. It navigates to javascript directly. That javascript doesn't have access to all of the resources needed to make a content platform behave like an application platform because it is an application platform. This is harder on programmers but instead programmers are expected to bring their own resources rather than tap into the browser's resources which can be exploited.
Admittedly making some applications would be more difficult. We don't have HTML. You could make decent games in it. I just rendered a scene with 370 FPS. A lot of already existing games would be pretty quick to port to it. We would just have to take out the web specific things from them. HTML, DOM, web links, cookies. All of those things are missing.
But the point is it's not the web, and it isn't moving backwards to a text only system.
Plans for what need to be developed:
Demo: https://gvid.tv/v/Dckz9X
Something worth pointing out that might be obvious is this is not a web viewport using a javascript canvas. You could build that and it would look very similar. I could have used electron to build something very similar. But at that point you are running a web browser locked down to one tab. I wanted to use no web technology. I argue that http is not a web technology but is just a text transport protocol. Web is the act of having HTML pages that link to each other. Technically http as a standard is set by the W3C, but it would not be hard to ditch http.
Glab: Goatly LoDown App Browser: JavaScript Locked-Down SpyWare-Resistant Bloat-Free Application Browser (Resistant to water up to 10 meters.)
My top wish for all browsers: vertical tabs with hierarchy tree and bookmarked/hibernated tabs.
I'll have to look if there is a good way to store a javascript sandbox context. Then we could do better hibernation than web browsers. For most web browsers if a tab hibernates it's just remembering the URL, not the state. So the page refreshes if you come back.
Contexts within the same domain should share a domain object that persists and creates a way to have real time IPC (inter-process communication) between tabs of the same site.
Maybe instead with have a persist object. The persist object has children (browser,domain,url).
Read it, like Greek.
Summary please, like I'm 5.
Web standards are made by people who aren't you, and they want what you don't want. Developing software that ignores their standards but offers some of the same cool things is a way to undermine corrupt pieces of shit. Browsers have too many features and those features get exploited by people wanting to extract data. Browsers are also too complicated to be made by honest people without something to gain.
Old pre-web solutions were boring and only had text. The web was initially built to do nearly the same thing. What if we start 90% over only taking the best bits into something new, more simple, and without the history of what it once was and what it is now.
Javascript is nice to distribute really small programs to people that can run in a locked down state. That's sort of what the web does now but gives that javascript access to a giant data-store that is your life. What if we only worried about running the javascript without associating it with the soft-spyware environment of a browser.
Now javascript isn't as evil because it's really javascript + browser environment = that people worry about.
Also this takes after Terry Davis's mantra that large standards are bad.
Will anything actually run or work?
Yay, voice drop! Now the NSA knows your identity based on your voice print and they can target you for gangstalking.
But yeah good idea fukn saved
My trick is to use a new mic every day so they can't get a consistent fingerprint. I have a stream of mics being sent to my house from Amazon, and then I just return them at Kohls the next day.
Update:
The browser now supports Gopher as a protocol.
Actually it supports
file://
, dict://, ftp://, ftps://, gopher://, http://, https://, imap://, imaps://, ldap://, ldaps://, pop3://, pop3s://, rtmp://, rtsp://, scp://, sftp://, smtp://, smtps://, telnet:// and tftp://Regarding the adoption of 'PPA' don't you think the people who care about privacy can just move to browsers that won't implement these standards? I don't think Librewolf will implement this, there's Falkon, qutebrowser, and Ladybird is being developed, maybe one of those will be to the modern web what firefags was to the old web.
It’s supposed to replace cookies. Once all the major browsers adopt it sites like caniuse will be telling developers to make sites that use it.
So either people will stop using things like librewolf, or librewolf will cave. Either way it means nearly zero people escaping PPA.
Well fuck. Yeah you can see this thing happening. The web is unusable with pale moon right now or troonscript disabled.
Would you trust 'troonscript' more if it wasn't attached to a web-browser? Basically my premise is modern browser + javascript = sploits. They just happen to be legal sploits, accumulating your data and tracking you. If the only thing a program does is render things to the screen it shouldn't be a problem.
I use the term troonscript neutrally what I mean is I've come to realize there already is a ubiquitous threat to privacy namely troonscript-based tracking and I've caved in to that more or less. Well, uBlock has a built in blacklist but I'm deffo not blocking all third party scripts. But I refuse to go back to the days of manually allowing websites in noscript or uGaytricks upon each page load. When I flick through a magazine I don't have to wait for pages to load I think it's natural to expect pages to appear instantly and privacy is important but time is also a valuable resource. So yeah I'm allowing some degree of spying.
Thanks dude.