After my previous rant (https://devrant.com/rants/3836329) I wondered what it would take to build a very basic web browser. So I went ahead and wrote (read: kanged) one. You can find its source code at https://git.ghnou.su/ghnou/browser. The code is a single file and is 57 lines long, 29 if you disregard the copyright notice.

This is obviously satire, but it goes to show how easy it can be. Of course people would just import a library if they could. All the hard work has already been done after all.

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@RememberMe can't argue with that 🤣 to be fair though, this is what most of them are doing!

@Condor most of the effort that goes into Firefox and Chrome is in the actual internals. So tech like V8, Spidermonkey, layout engines, rendering engines, network plane, security services etc. Building the browser itself isn't that much work.

@RememberMe Webkit2Gtk does support JS, and appears to use neither Spidermonkey (Firefox) or V8 (Chrome). I have no desire to find out what JS engine Webkit uses. I looked up my user agent in DDG (which returned Webkit obviously), and opened a Wikipedia page about it in "my" web browser. The rendering and layout engines are also included. A feature I did miss was search in that Wikipedia article. Shouldn't be too hard to implement I guess. But Webkit2GTK is a fully-fledged engine. Calling it the guts of a browser in its own right wouldn't be an overstatement.

@Condor it uses Apple's JavascriptCore, their own JS engine (since WebKit is majorly developed by Apple).

What would making your own browser do anyway? It's not going to change anything about the internals, like the RAM usage. That's dependent on the engine.

@RememberMe This is literally NPM

@RememberMe This is not a serious project. I have no desire to make a web browser of my own (as that would indeed depend on the engine, which is the same as the others I've tested). Realistically I'd probably start looking at elinks instead.

You know, you can “literally” drag and drop Chromium component on a C# Win form and poof you got a browser.

No, I never used this aprtoch to "cheat" some websites to do my own automation. Never