AnnouncementsMatrixEventsFunnyVideosMusicAncapsTechnologyEconomicsPrivacyGIFSCringeAnarchyFilmPicsThemesIdeas4MatrixAskMatrixHelpTop Subs
1

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:

  • Multiple tabs
  • Supporting more transport protocols than http/https, like gopher, ssh, git
  • Custom DNS system that can indicate a preferred protocol or port for a domain
  • Custom DNS system that can indicate a different preferred IP when the protocol or port are specified
  • Giving it more resources like websockets while assessing escape exploits
  • Make it so you can resize the window (currently is just running 800x600)
  • Port some games I've already made to it.
  • Render some content from json (maybe a rough goatmatrix client)
  • Make an import and caching system for leveraging code at other URIs
  • Support video

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.

Comment preview