================================= Writing a graphical web browser ================================= I started writing a web browser recently, a graphical one this time. Here is a screenshot of its prototype, at about 2 KLOC: . There's no CSS or JS support, but there is relatively good support for images and complex text rendering with word caching. It also doesn't reimplement many things from scratch, but uses GTK, Pango, libxml2, and libsoup. HTML parsing and UI building are streaming, images are loaded asynchronously (and with a bit more code it's easy to get progressive image loading, GTK facilitates that). Form and table support are planned, but at this point it looks like those won't affect existing code and the overall architecture. Since one of the goals was to explore how hard it is to write a web browser like that, I'm planning to document the implementation in more detail in its documentation. But so far it seems that it can be quite small and maintainable. Another goal was to get a lightweight web browser without the issues of other lightweight web browsers (some of which are hinted above: faulty custom HTML parsing, poor or slow text rendering, poor image handling, custom fonts and colour themes). So far it goes pretty well too. Yet another goal was simply to find out how a GTK-based browser would look like, especially HTML forms in it. That is almost done too, though the forms aren't working yet. While most of the unclear/challenging/design-affecting bits are behind, perhaps the final major challenge is to get through the more routine parts, to a somewhat complete version. But I expected it to take a while, and one of the goals was to have something to tinker with, so it's probably achievable as well. I didn't sleep well and feeling rather tired today, so not working on it (or on anything), and just writing here. But there's no hurry, and I'm somewhat optimistic about slowly getting something nice. Pleased with the prototype, too. ---- :Date: 2019-07-19