LWN: Comments on "Hv3 and the art of minimalist web-browsing"

Hv3 and the art of minimalist web-browsing

AdamW — 2008-12-31T22:02:41+00:00

Couple of notes:

hv3 is available packaged for Mandriva in Cooker; I keep meaning to get around to sending it to /backports for 2008 Spring and 2009, I'll try and do that this afternoon. However, Javascript support doesn't work in these - the code seems to expect a function to exist in libsee that in fact doesn't exist in any public release of libsee I can find. (Bruce, does the Javascript support work in Puppy? If so I'll have to see if I can figure how they're doing it).

There's an important reason *to* use hv3_polipo - if you don't, the SSL support doesn't work. That, at least, is my experience with it.

Hv3 and the art of minimalist web-browsing

muwlgr — 2008-12-26T09:12:54+00:00

Some time ago there was a browser written in tcl/tk called browsex or brx.
Now this project looks abandoned but then it was interesting as well.

Hv3 and the art of minimalist web-browsing

saffroy — 2008-12-25T16:37:24+00:00

I'm trying hv3 right now, and browsing has become fast again on my 7-year old laptop! :D

Firefox is nice and shiny and full of good features, but last time it felt fast was when it was still called phoenix...

Do big browsers have to be so damn slow, really?

Ways to block ads

i3839 — 2008-12-23T04:38:22+00:00

I use a combination of /etc/hosts and dnsmasq to redirect ad sites to 127.0.0.1. When I see a new ad is look up where it comes from and add the hostname to the list.

Hv3 and the art of minimalist web-browsing

nix — 2008-12-20T14:57:27+00:00

Whether you find web ads intolerable or not is surely a personal matter. I
certainly do, in part because thanks to amblyopia my eyes are rarely
pointing in exactly the same direction: if one has unwanted flashy blinky
brightly coloured adverts in its visual field, it'll completely drown out
the text visible in the other eye's field.

Other people may just dislike the attention-grabbing flashing, or perhaps
just think they're tacky. :)

Hv3 and the art of minimalist web-browsing

Tet — 2008-12-20T14:00:43+00:00

An ad blocker (the web is horrible with ads enabled)

I call bullshit. I've heard this claim many times, but personally I've never found it to be a problem. I surf the web without an ad blocker, and I barely notice them anyway. Now a flash blocker is without doubt necessary. But since hv3 doesn't yet support flash anyway, that's a non-issue.

Hv3 and the art of minimalist web-browsing

nix — 2008-12-19T23:22:16+00:00

Now, now: RMS escapism is web browsing by email. (Perhaps he's upgraded to
an actual web browser by now. :) )

Hv3 and the art of minimalist web-browsing

lysse — 2008-12-19T19:13:37+00:00

Actually, no I don't. If I start Firefox with Flash enabled, I only get three goes at it before Firefox itself refuses to open again until I get rid of the pox upon it...

You say "RMS escapistic", but all I can see is sheer pragmatism. Flash kills my machine. 90% of its practical use is watching Youtube videos, and I've got youtube-dl and mplayer for that. (And frankly, the rest of it, bar the last 0.1%, is non-Youtube videos. That's leaving aside the majority Flash usage - stupid loud annoying adverts, site intros and unwanted media streams that can't be turned off or bypassed.)

In any case, if you want Flash, use Firefox. The big shiny browsing experience is what it's used for. Asking every browser to support Flash is just demanding a pointless conformism; isn't one of the points of the free software ecosystem that diverse needs can be catered for with diverse software, without having to look to the profit line for justification?

(Oh - and don't be so bloody rude to people who are doing nothing more than expressing a view contrary to your own. It would be bad enough even if you HADN'T completely missed their point.)

Hv3 and the art of minimalist web-browsing

phillemann — 2008-12-19T13:21:02+00:00

That's just plain RMS escapistic. Yeah, there is this proprietary Flash format and that's bad, but just not supporting it is stupid. And yes, Flash is not in line with minimalistic and fast, but sooner or later you end up looking at a white page where a flash applet should be. And then you start firefox anyway.

Hv3 and the art of minimalist web-browsing

lysse — 2008-12-19T04:31:28+00:00

The sooner the Hv3 team promise that it will NEVER EVER support the Adobe Flash plugin the better!

Hv3 and the art of minimalist web-browsing

fandom — 2008-12-18T23:32:16+00:00

It is a separate renderer

Hv3 and the art of minimalist web-browsing

nix — 2008-12-18T12:21:38+00:00

There *is* a reason not to install hv3_polipo: if you already use polipo and see no reason to cache everything twice :) polipo is blindingly fast, but I'm pretty sure it's not faster than itself.

Hv3 and the art of minimalist web-browsing

jpetso — 2008-12-18T11:51:23+00:00

I'm pretty sure "Tkhtml3" has its name origins in Tcl/Tk ("Tk + html")
rather than in KHTML. Apart from not being aware of a Tcl/Tk binding for
kdelibs and obvious speed concerns, also the custom cache and using SEE as
ECMAScript engine would not be possible.

Hv3 and the art of minimalist web-browsing

csamuel — 2008-12-18T11:39:37+00:00

For a browser that's in alpha I'm very impressed. Renders a lot of sites very well and
blindingly fast!

The one bug that I've run into is that it doesn't support HTTP authentication yet,
which stops me testing it on a couple of sites I'd be interested in seeing how it does,
but hey, it's in alpha.. :-)

Well done folks!

Hv3 and the art of minimalist web-browsing

njd27 — 2008-12-18T11:03:02+00:00

Sigh. How many times have we been round this cycle now?

1. Design a nice minimalist browser. It's fast on low resource systems.
2. Get lots of users who appreciate the speed.
3. Wait a minute, we don't have necessary features such as pop-up blocking, adblocking, phishing detection, etc.
4. Add them. Oh dear, we've become a bloated big browser.
5. Rinse and repeat.

Hv3 and the art of minimalist web-browsing

jbh — 2008-12-18T10:36:28+00:00

Polipo (the bundled proxy) supports blocking, both internally (by domain or regexp) and by calling an external redirector such as adzapper. I use this with firefox and opera.

Does not play well with SELinux

tzafrir — 2008-12-18T09:56:23+00:00

Is there a sane and portable way to run mktemp -d ?

Hv3 and the art of minimalist web-browsing

phillemann — 2008-12-18T09:50:18+00:00

As with almost all alternative Browsers there are two vital things missing here:

-An ad blocker (the web is horrible with ads enabled)
-The Flash plugin, as mentioned - optimally _not_ using gnash but the official Adobe Flash plugin.

When those are implemented I'll surely give Hv3 a chance, since it's HTML rendering and Javascript ability both seem pretty good.

Hv3 and the art of minimalist web-browsing

pcampe — 2008-12-18T08:14:35+00:00

It's quite simply, fantastic.

Does not play well with SELinux

salimma — 2008-12-18T05:07:51+00:00

It unpacks the libraries it need into /tmp with random names, and loads them with text relocation, which SELinux denies to untrusted files. I'm not sure if there's a way to tell SELinux "grant textrel_shlib_t to files generated by this binary under /tmp" -- anyone knows?

Hv3 and the art of minimalist web-browsing

mikov — 2008-12-18T02:20:12+00:00

A few questions. What HTML renderer does it use? Is TKHTML3 a separate renderer or just a widget that wraps Gecko/KHTML? If it is a separate renderer, how does it compare to the others? If it is not separate, why would it be any faster?