Today, we're excited to introduce Gosub, a new open-source browser engine that we are building from the ground up in Rust!
Gosub aims to be a modern, modular, and highly flexible browser engine. While still in the early development and experimentation phase, Gosub is shaping up nicely, and we’re looking to onboard more contributors to help us bring this project to life.
Some of the key highlights:
* Written in Rust: We're leveraging Rust's safety and performance features to create a robust and efficient engine.
* Modular Design: The project is organized around modules, allowing for clean separation of concerns and easier collaboration. It also allows us to easily swap components based on needs and allows more freedom for engine implementers in the future.
* Collaborative and open source: We’re building Gosub with the intention of making it approachable and open to contributions, aiming to create a project that's easier to understand and collaborate on compared to existing browsers.
With Gosub, we're aiming to build something more approachable that can evolve with the latest web technologies, all while being open to contributors from day one.
We’re looking for developers with or without experience in Rust. You just need to be interested in browser technologies. There are plenty of opportunities to work on core modules, document our progress, and help shape the project's direction.
We can already render simple pages, including the hackernews front page. However, to render most sites correctly, it is still a long journey, so come and join us!
Some examples: https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/124kphe/what_do_y...
The Firefox engine is great if you don't want something controlled by Google. And it's going to be much easier to develop plugins or extensions for that versus trying to write your own browser from scratch, which to be honest will probably cost hundreds of millions of dollars. If not more.
I do imagine tools like this being useful for something like web scraping, but it's never going to be an end user product.
I am reminded of this:
“I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.”
– Linus Torvalds, announcing the software that became what we now know as Linux
Mozilla had one a while ago: https://github.com/browserhtml/browserhtml . I'm sure it could be updated.
I switched back to Safari and it worked normal immediately.
I've heard this a number of times; but circa 1991 I'm not convinced. The critical GNU components to scaffold Linux adoption were:
- GCC + C runtime
- A shell (plus a bunch of small utilities)
You could make a reasonable argument that Linux was and remains a much bigger achievement, namely because GNU has never actually managed to make a usable kernel (Hurd still has no USB support, for example. I don't know if this is for technical or political reasons). On the flip side, there were plenty of compilers and shells kicking around that Linux could have bundled.
RMS makes all sorts of wild claims about how much of a distro is "GNU software" (a criterion that is never clearly defined - is any non-kernel GPL software part of GNU?) by comparing lines of code; but at the time of these claims distros tended to bundle anything and everything that you might possibly want.
Contemporaneously to all this, 386BSD had created a full freely-distributable Unix with no GNU code; and its descendants might have captured the mindshare were it not for an extended copyright battle from AT&T.