Problem statement
- The browser is ubiquitous in society. It is the modern day operating system. The chromium browser has ~35 million lines of code with millions of lines of code added every year.
- The competition for browsers has been dwindling. The only people that can compete are massive billion dollar companies.
- Any new "browser" that emerges are just chromium reskins. Why is that?
Idea
- Smaller teams cannot write 35 million lines of code, it is beyond their reach.
- The browser serves many use-cases, what if we broke the browser up into many different apps?
Browser use-cases
- Sharing, reading, and linking documents
- Displaying multimedia (e.g. images, videos)
- Displaying visualizations
- Allowing the user to submit information via forms
- Allowing the user to interact with website to display complex information (e.g. accordion, menus, drawers, etc.)
- Allowing the user to query for information and have that data displayed without full page reloads (AJAX)
- Allowing the user to have a desktop application experience
Sharing, reading, and linking documents
- To start, create a document rendering browser
- Support HTML 5
- Support CSS 3
- Support HTTP 1.1, 2.0, and TLS protocols
- Gracefully handle when we cannot properly render a page by opening the link in the OS default browser.
- Maybe focus on rendering blogs really well.
- Maybe have a premium feature with a server running puppeteer that will render first paint and send the html and css to the browser.
- Maybe remove website specific styling altogether and instead design a consistent design that optimizes navigation and readability.
What do you think?
- I just cannot get over how on one hand browsers are so ubiquitous in modern society and yet immune from real competitive.
- We need fresh ideas in the browser space and we cannot feasibly do that without dramatically reducing its complexity.
- I want a minimal, modern set of browsing tools where I don't have to make any sacrifices between usability and compliance with the standards.