Item — HN Reader

I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

More seriously, yes, if you were starting a browser completely from scratch, this would probably be a good approach. There are some subtleties, but probably nothing that couldn't be solved with some elbow grease.

If anyone is seriously interested in exploring this direction, one thing that would be very interesting is a port of piet-gpu to run on top of WebGPU (it's currently running on Vulkan, Metal, and DX12). I've done quite a bit of pre-work to understand what would be involved, but don't personally have the bandwidth to code up the WebGPU port. I would be more than happy to work with somebody who does.

2 comments

I wouldn't start a browser from scratch, it's too big and compatibility is a never ending quagmire. I think it would be cool to do a new portable app platform with bits and pieces of the web platform like WebGPU, combined with new stuff, kind of like how deno is using web APIs outside the web. Maybe combined with the ideas from the redbean server.

By "work with somebody", do you mean your team at Google is hiring for this, or are you looking for community contributors?

At the moment, I am talking about community contributors. But if you have a credible plan for getting this done and the thing that would hold it back is funding, let's talk.

I have no credible plan and I would need some mentoring before I could even be productive. Sounds like you probably want someone with more relevant experience.