Browsers in D (page 2)

On Wednesday, 20 December 2023 at 00:07:44 UTC, Adam D Ruppe wrote: > On Tuesday, 19 December 2023 at 23:40:48 UTC, Antonio wrote: >> [...] > > Oh, I'm old enough to remember the Chrome auto-update that broke standard HTML links! It was such a pain supporting it in the first few years, while IE and Firefox were both working pretty well at the time. > > But, like I just said in the other post, Firefox has near-zero support for being embedded in other applications. If you know of a way that we could reasonably use from D, let me know, but the only time I've seen an embedded Gecko is actually in the Wine project... and this had no other way to access it that I could find. > >> [...] > > Mozilla has closed *dozens* of bugs that affect me directly as WONTFIX, including fairly simple to fix regressions. That's why I can't use it anymore. > >> [...] > > If you wanna work on my other engine to bring it up to spec, feel free lol, but the screenshots speak to the functionality gap... When I was the CTO of my previous company, we embedded Gecko into a custom C++ GUI framework, to allow ALS people browse the web using gazes as an input method: it was a real pain ...

On Wednesday, 20 December 2023 at 06:29:30 UTC, Hors wrote:

Rust is better choice than D if you have to run code from untrusted resources (html, javascript, webassembly...) it's safer, plus faster.

That's not how it actually works in any of the browsers though. The code that implements those things is pretty universally C++, and the sandbox is provided through operating system resources instead of language features.

In the blog example program, you saw that there must be a Wv2App (or CefApp) declared in main before doing anything else. That object might appear to do nothing, but it actually encapsulates a key part of the security sandboxing of the newer browser: that's responsible for spawning the worker processes for different jobs on different domains.

This is also why there's so much message passing in the implementations - they can't see each other's memory directly!

On Wednesday, 20 December 2023 at 09:29:36 UTC, Paolo Invernizzi wrote: > When I was the CTO of my previous company, we embedded Gecko into a custom C++ GUI framework, to allow ALS people browse the web using gazes as an input method: it was a real pain ... Wow, yeah, I know it must be possible, but I couldn't even figure out how to get started. Like I said, pity Mozilla didn't recognize this use case, I think they could have really done something with it. Microsoft and WebKit (both from its KDE days and now with Apple in charge of it) have both really done a nice job making their things easy to adapt.

On Wednesday, 20 December 2023 at 14:24:45 UTC, Adam D Ruppe wrote: > On Wednesday, 20 December 2023 at 09:29:36 UTC, Paolo Invernizzi wrote: >> When I was the CTO of my previous company, we embedded Gecko into a custom C++ GUI framework, to allow ALS people browse the web using gazes as an input method: it was a real pain ... > > Wow, yeah, I know it must be possible, but I couldn't even figure out how to get started. > > Like I said, pity Mozilla didn't recognize this use case, I think they could have really done something with it. Microsoft and WebKit (both from its KDE days and now with Apple in charge of it) have both really done a nice job making their things easy to adapt. Lot's to say about Mozilla. There's the reason they've got that small market share. They lost focus on the real product they were offering

December 21

Re: Browsers in D

Posted by Adam D Ruppe
in reply to aberba

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Adam D Ruppe

Posted in reply to aberba

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On Thursday, 21 December 2023 at 11:55:50 UTC, aberba wrote:

I have this idea of building a web view based desktop app with a webserver and db backend for CRUD functionality. This looks like a great option.

Yeah, it is a solid choice with a long history. Did you know the Unix Printing System used to (I don't think it still does but im not sure) work this way? Some 15 years ago, it'd start up a local web server and you'd work with it through the browser.

I do kinda wish that the common browsers supported connecting through a local unix socket, so you wouldn't have to allocate a port... but you don't really have to allocate a port anyway - you can let the OS give you a random available one then you see what it assigned you and pop open the browser. So it still works.

Another interesting thing available nowadays is some programs will run a webview ui but also open a websocket server, allowing other websites to interact with it. With a websocket server, any random internet page is allowed to try to connect to it - yes, normal javascript is allowed to try to connect a websocket to localhost - and your server checks the origin header to see if it is a website you want to talk to.

The Discord desktop client uses this, for example, to let their official sites detect the local client and ask if you want to "open link in app" (which i kinda hate lol but it does) and also to communicate some special features to it, like a discord website can show who is currently speaking in the voice to display on your web streams. (I know this cuz i hooked into it to make my own thing lol).

But it is still a potential way to combine all these options for your users.

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