Show HN: I worked on a new browser for 2 years, today it passed Acid 3

121 pointsposted 12 hours ago
by coolwulf

34 Comments

anonymous_user9

5 hours ago

If you're going to "Show HN" you should show something. This just a hastily-extruded [1] landing page with no details.

Also, using an agentic framework and writing code by hand "a lot of the time" does not count as "from scratch".

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49129191

j16sdiz

4 hours ago

Working with it for 2 years is impressive nevertheless.

Working with an agentic framework for more than a week make me want to throw it over the cliff

nsonha

3 hours ago

It’s from scratch not by scratch

timhigins

4 hours ago

Acid3 is 100 tests but to have a browser that works on any real percentage of the internet you need to pass the over 52000 tests and nearly two million subtests [1] that make up the Web Platform Tests [2]

This is like the difference between a college degree and passing a spelling test.

1. https://servo.org/blog/2023/07/20/servo-web-platform-tests/ 2. https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt

Not to mention this site is clearly vibe coded and has a vague call to action and no source code available thus indicating possible vaporware.

Kon5ole

11 hours ago

Faster than chrome and 100% clearance of acid3 is certainly interesting, and a great achievement for a solo dev, good job!

I’d love to see something entirely FOSS dethrone the big corp browsers, hope that’s the goal here.

NetOpWibby

6 hours ago

Your own engine?! Wow, that's incredible. Is this gonna be like Servo where people can build a browser around this, or will it be a standalone browser?

I recently switched from Arc to Helium but it's still Chrome with different paint. When I was using Opera 12, it was the most standards-compliant browser so it became my main. What are the goals for cwbrowser (and is the name permanent)?

krackers

11 hours ago

Modern browsers should no longer score 100 on Acid 3 though.

>By April 2017, the updated specifications had diverged from the test such that the latest versions of Google Chrome, Safari and Mozilla Firefox no longer pass the test as written

heisgone

7 hours ago

Yes, but considering the goal of his project is a proof of concept, that is, proving this project is possible, acid3 is a good place to start to prove the worth of the project and aiming 100% first make more sense. Tweaks will be needed one way or another to make it equivalent to the big 3.

assimpleaspossi

8 hours ago

Exactly. It's meaningless now and I stopped looking at it a few years before 2017 when I ran a Web dev shop

0gs

8 hours ago

hmm. i wonder if any of the stuff they have changed since then is stuff i could legitimate not do without in a browser

5555watch

11 hours ago

Aha, I'm getting 97/100 on Safari

torgoguys

8 hours ago

96/100 with Brave on Android

vivzkestrel

5 hours ago

lots of questions for HN folks here from a noob dev

- how exactly do you go about writing your own browser engine

- what specs are you supposed to follow

- how do you measure or determine if your browser engine is compliant

- how long do you think such a task would take (no AI / with AI)

- how do you test something like this?

flowofcontrol

3 hours ago

Awesome work! Can't wait for it to land.

What license will you release under?

HelloUsername

4 hours ago

Nice. Will you also release a version without Javascript (and without css)?

ernsheong

5 hours ago

Hello, how does cwbrowser compare with Lightpanda?

bubblebeard

7 hours ago

Super cool! Any plans to release it for Linux? Would love to test it but I have no Mac unfortunately

mplewis

5 hours ago

how much of it was vibe coded?

nicoburns

6 hours ago

This is cool! And as someone else who's been building their own browser engine: welcome to the club!

Do you have WPT tests results, and/or screenshots of it rendering real websites?

peesem

12 hours ago

i'm assuming this is written with LLMs given the writing on that page and the nature of the other "products" on that website. i would not call that hand-written, as the page does in the second paragraph

coolwulf

11 hours ago

I did use LLM for the landing page since I don't have much time on it. The browser however not that much. I did use claude and my own cwcode to help developing this, but a lot of times the zig code had to be written by hand. Hope this answered your question.

adipose

8 hours ago

this admittedly makes it even a harder sell to have so little (any?) source code available on github, gitlab, codeberg, whatever.

what's the deal with that? why is Google Drive zips your main distribution method, with no source available?

and finally: are you going to change this?

LoganDark

9 hours ago

Huh, cool, let me know when it's available. I like trying out alternative browser engines every now and then.

m00dy

5 hours ago

The whole thing looks like a giant AI slop

esafak

8 hours ago

What's the goal? Did you learn anything interesting?

snvzz

4 hours ago

No source code, no binary, just a page with some claims about code that might even exist.

Eh.

fragmede

8 hours ago

In terms of engines, Fastrender, by cursor, is AI generated in rust. Don't know why no one's picked that up and run with it yet.

tyre

7 hours ago

Cursor was lambasted from the start because they wrote blog posts about writing a browner “from scratch in rust” but it was neither without dependencies nor actually worked.

It was not serious engineering. It was a side project experiment with yeeting tokens into the sun.

tetrisgm

10 hours ago

Congrats. I’d love a very agent friendly browser by the way