New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
LowEndBrowser
Boltersdriveer
Member, LIR
Hi guys we should expand into making our very own browser - for the community, by the community 
. Thoughts?
Comments
We already have Links2, elinks, lynx, w3m, etc... why re-invent the wheel?
We can't even get a game of minecraft going....
Maybe you people just didn't schedule it well :P . And because:
1 - We can't be happy with Chrome/Firefox
2 - Safari and Opera is great for what it does, but the high memory usage and CPU is killing it.
3 - It would be nice to start our own browser for being Low End.
You first. I have literally no idea how to develop a browser that supports CSS3 let alone DOM parsing.
@Xeoncross Of course some dumb ass will now come along and give you a hard time about you not knowing how to write a browser.
edit: I actually wrote one once. Royally sucked but it worked.
luakit maybe? http://luakit.org/projects/luakit/
It's actually can be a matter of minutes to write a browser, but that will be based on IE
Just curious. Who will be using it? How low will low end be?
LOL a DOM parser!!!! HAHAHA!!!
Forget it
@Go59954 lol Visual Basic?
@draco: I was aiming for 256MB of RAM optimally, probably 384MB to be more realistic. The problem with most of today's browsers are that when you close the tab, it's memory is still loaded in memory and that sometimes increases RAM to 1GB or more.
@Boltersdriveer: YeSSS, and it's more of a designing than writing
@Go59954: Hell even the WebKit usage in Visual Basic is also terrible.
the stupidest idea I've heard in the long time
@alex nah reading your posts are worse.
@alex: Get lost. This site wouldn't truly be "low end" if we only talk about Low End VPS's now, would we?
no idea what are you talking about
Why doesn't that surprise me?
@drmike: He doesn't have a good grasp of the English language at all. ;D
Joking, of course.
Wow, I think everyone needs a hug this morning.
Wow, I think everyone needs a gun! this morning.
Why not join the development team of those other popular browsers and make it better by identifying areas they could strip out or lighten up? Then EVERYONE benefits from your work.
It doesn't work like that rajprakash. The majority wins right? Well take a wild guess whether or not more features - or a less-useful, stripped down browser is going to be chosen.
Now, if you join a project that has the same community mindset and goals as you (such as lynx, w3m, etc...) that would be worth it.
Actually it's usually the guy in charge of the project who wins. Very rarely have I seen majority rules. The one time I did see such, the project director quietly got his way about three months later and no one noticed.
Yep, a perfect example of that is some of the changes to ubuntu.
The only catch with writing a lowend browser is that you also need to implement a lowend WWW to go with it.
Any modern browser is fine with memory usage as long as you only browse static HTML pages with no scripting or or other 'external' media content.
As well as teach "designers" that web pages with 20-30 scripts isn't that great of an idea.
That's something we have to cover at least once a week on my end with my clients.
"Multimedia" content sucks memory. Something as simple as a jpeg image has to be decompressed for on-screen rendering. Video has to be buffered and also decompressed for your viewing pleasure. Javascript requires the browser to interpret/run the script, which takes memory.
The issue isn't that browsers have become bloated, it's the web that's become bloated. I think it's called "rich content" or something like that.
The browser is only the messenger, delivering the web to you.
Don't shoot the messenger.
@sleddog, I think that was the point I was trying to raise. Folks who think that they're developers, are pushing too much content to visitors which maxes out their browsers and ups their memory usage.
A perfect example of this, at least it used to be, is the main fan site for The Guild. Something like 100+ scripts on their front page with over a 3 meg load size, not including the medias.