
Nessie – Lightweight Web Browser - svenfaw
https://www.radsix.com/
======
benbristow
Seems to be blocked by Windows Defender as a Potentially Unwanted Application
(PUA).

I guess it's not wrong.

[https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/ec9ad4a4d6d1ddcb406d96ff...](https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/ec9ad4a4d6d1ddcb406d96ff0efb8c212cd91ef9fa821478d12cd06ac293c52a/detection)

~~~
zigh
I can confirm that: PUA:Win32/Hypnamer.A!ml detected by Windows Security

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forgotpwd16
>Its codebase is very small (about 2500 LoC currently) and could be open
sourced in the next few months if the project gains enough traction and
support.

Why not open source it from the start?

~~~
R0b0t1
This isn't a particularly noteworthy project -- I know a few people who made
the same thing to try out the IE webview.

I'd be more impressed if the webview was introduced by not using a OS
component.

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userbinator
277KB is still a bit large for something that just embeds the IE webview... it
reminds me of this one (original site is now gone, had to look in the archive)
which is only 2.7KB(!):

[http://web.archive.org/web/20081226192818/http://www.kakeewa...](http://web.archive.org/web/20081226192818/http://www.kakeeware.com/i_kb.php)

~~~
SinisterAlex
This is impressive. It launches and runs in Windows 10 - can not not figure
out how to use it thought :O

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_emacsomancer_
Can we add "for Windows" to the title?

~~~
okamiueru
Indeed. I didn't stop reading when I hit "Trident layout engine". I stopped
reading at "Requirements: Windows 7 or later."

Though I should have assumed as much given "trident layout engine", but here I
was hoping this had been open sourced or something along those lines.

I absolutely do not want to speak ill of anyone's project. But let's judge it
for what it is... it's a windows only, MSHTML based, proprietary software.

At that point, it honestly doesn't matter what it can do, or how it does it.
It's already off to the worst possible start for any hope of adoption. And it
will likely never see the light of day on either Linux or MacOS. Porting it
would tantamount to writing it again from scratch.

That said, if it works for windows users. It's not like it is a bad
contribution. So kudos for that.

On a less polite opinion: I honestly think a core component such as a web
rendering engine that is locked to a OS (pretty much exclusively
Trident/EdgeHTML) does the world way more harm than good. Any project with
some kind of future prospects of not being windows-only, does themselves
disservice for picking Edge. Valve did this with steam. I don't know how
painless the transition was when moving to WebKit and then to Chromium, but
I'm sure it wasn't free.

~~~
boogies
Same. If I care about a browser being

> ● Privacy-oriented: zero behavior tracking, zero telemetry > ● Lightning-
> fast startup time > ● Tiny binary size > ● Low RAM usage

why would I use an OS that’s the opposite of all of these? In particular, why
would I trust a proprietary application to be “privacy-oriented”?

~~~
R0b0t1
The prosumer market is huge and mostly Windows. Most dev work is still mostly
Windows (I think). HN is an anomaly.

~~~
arghwhat
HN is pretty average. Windows is less than half for devs (but is still the
largest OS share).

However, as is expected, those chosing to go out of their way to change their
machines would naturally be more vocal than those that are indifferent to what
it runs.

~~~
R0b0t1
Well, someone in this comment tree linked stats, but I think those stats and
the stats most people that visit this site come up with via observation
understate how many boring jobs there are in e.g. fortune 5000 companies doing
Windows-centric work.

~~~
arghwhat
There will always be bias in stats, but the numbers are from SO surveys - I
don't think SO is going to have "boring" Windows-centric development
underrepresented. I'd assume the contrary.

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chacha2
So this is just internet explorer with no back button?

~~~
glaberficken
Also without the slowness!

[Alt]+ [<-] or [->] works for going Back / Fwd

Interestingly Alt + N for new window and then Ctrl+Tab cycles the windows.

I like this old school workflow for some browsing tasks rather than tabs (but
not all the time obviously)

~~~
hadrien01
That means the slowness comes uniquely from IE, not from the engine? I find
that surprising, for some reason. I would have imagined the browser UI would
be easier to optimize.

~~~
john-aj
No, because Internet Explorer is (was) _not_ slow. That's just a meme, and
it's incorrect.

~~~
arghwhat
IE _was_ slow. The meme is from when this was accurate information. IE 10 and
11 made it _mostly_ competitive.

The Edge browser was pretty decent, awful tracking aside. Arguably better than
Chrome in many aspects.

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Santosh83
Isn't IE on track to be phased out? I guess that also means the Trident engine
component will also likely not be available on future versions of Windows?

~~~
dgellow
I cannot imagine Windows removing the trident engine, they have a strong focus
on backward compatibility and it's guaranteed a lot of businesses depend on
trident being available.

~~~
The_rationalist
But they could make it available on demand: it would trigger a download if
necessary instead of polluting disk space worldwide for niche usages

~~~
exikyut
It's necessary for internal Windows functions to work.

~~~
mumblemumble
The recent move to make Edge something you can't uninstall is a likely first
step in changing that. You can't remove the old "can't remove" browser engine
without first designating a replacement.

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roschdal
.no is not in the TLD.ini whitelist. Edit TLD.ini - Good times.

~~~
speedgoose
That's very unfortunate for the 0.00042 Norwegians who were going to use this
web browser.

~~~
sk0g
Not supporting websites from a fairly big country with a strong economy is a
failure on their part, either way. I bet they support TLDs like TV (Tuvalu),
or IO (Indian Ocean Territory).

~~~
baal80spam
No, they don't. This is the default setting file:

.com .net .org .co .io

Just add a TLD, restart and voila.

~~~
Jaruzel
No .gov ? Maybe that's a _good_ thing /s

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jart
How did you turn Internet Explorer 8 into a 130kb EXE file? Why are you
anonymous? Where is the source code?

~~~
SyneRyder
It's just using the MSHTML.DLL rendering engine built-in to Windows, sadly.

~~~
Jaruzel
I don't know how the author of Nessie specifically did it, but generally on
the .NET platform, you have access to the Trident rendering engine by adding
the WebBrowser control to one of the forms of your new application. From
there, you gain all the event based functions and callable methods you'd
expect a browser to use. I've written several of these type of 'toy' browsers
over the years, and they work just like IE does. The only caveat is that you
have to patch the registry first to allow the control to report (and render
as) a useragent above IE 8. You can set it to report/render as IE 11 as the
maximum.

Via NuGet, you can download the WebBrowser2 control which is based on the new
Edge Chromium based renderer. I haven't seen any new browsers using this
properly yet (and I've not played with it either yet) - it will be good when
people do, because although the renderer will still be Chromium, the browser
UI can then be anything you want. I'm looking forward to people challenging
the accepted browser UIs that we currently have.

Of course, if you want to avoid the WebBrowser2 control, there's webkit.NET
and Embedded Chromium which also can be built to bind with .NET apps.

~~~
SyneRyder
I thought I recognised your username!

In case Jaruzel's too shy to mention it, he wrote a Gopher browser for
Windows. If you're reading this thread because you're interested in small web
topics (Gopher, Gemini, Tilde.Town, NetSurf, alt browsers) then you might like
his browser too. It was my gateway into Gopher.

[http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/gopher-client-browser-for-
wind...](http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/gopher-client-browser-for-windows)

~~~
Jaruzel
Aww Shucks. Thank you!

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stormdennis
Just tried it out. Was surprised that youtube and google maps both worked.
Only thing I missed was tabs.

~~~
userbinator
It's just IE with a different UI, so any site that already works in IE will
behave exactly the same in this one.

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otabdeveloper4
> lightweight skin for the deprecated Internet Explorer

Fix't it for ya.

------
MayeulC
I think I would actually take dillo with an updated chrome over this: if I am
to use two web browsers, I don't necessarily need javascript on both.

dillo lacks a good UI for bookmarks, a browsing history (by choice, but I like
those), touch support (for postmarketos/mobile), wayland support, as well as
some https quirks. Otherwise, I like it a lot.

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mouldysammich
itd be neat if microsoft opened up their web engines now that they've moved to
blink.

~~~
sanxiyn
Obviously it would be of great historic interest, but as a living software,
just no. Go read this:
[https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/04/19/modernizing-d...](https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/04/19/modernizing-
dom-tree-microsoft-edge/)

IE implemented DOM without using tree. No, really. Up to 2017. After reading
the article, all my questions why IE was so buggy evaporated and replaced by
how could IE work at all.

MSVC up to 2015 also didn't create AST. Unbelievable, I know. The question is
not why MSVC's C++ support was so buggy; the real question is how could MSVC
implement C++ at all. [https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/rejuvenating-
the-micr...](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/rejuvenating-the-
microsoft-cc-compiler/)

After learning about IE and MSVC, I gained respect for Microsoft developers
and disdain for Microsoft. Tightrope walking is amazing display of skill.
Letting your employees to commute by tightrope walking for years is amazing
display of stupidity.

~~~
lioeters
Excellent article on Microsoft's journey of refactoring IE's DOM model. I
actually felt sympathy reading how it all started with a linear text-based
data structure, which must have seemed reasonable at the time. (In hindsight,
a tree should have been the natural shape, and they should have been aware of
parsers and ASTs. But can we blame them?) And how the layers of complexity
were added, using parallel data structures that needed to be synced on every
DOM operation.

By the time the article reached "Modernizing the DOM tree", I could just
imagine the years of devs suffering that the whole architecture must have
caused.

> According to an internal investigation, from IE7 to IE11, approximately 28%
> of all IE reliability bugs originated from code in core DOM components.

The second article is quite relevant too, how the C/C++ compiler used _token
streams_ instead of a real AST, until 2015! There are parallels to the above
issue with the DOM model, how the original design of the data structure was
inadequate, so they had to keep adding more layers of complexity. It's
understandable how it happened, but makes me wonder if they should have had
more experts in parsers/compilers during the design phase.

To give credit where due, both articles describe major successful refactorings
of core design. I'm with you, that after learning about their struggles, I
have more respect for developers at Microsoft.

------
est
The original Maxthon or TheWorld browsers worked exactly like this.

~~~
The_rationalist
Maxthon switched dynamically from trident to webkit. The best browser
performance wise is the one that switch it's engine on demand depending of a
known list of websites being faster on engine X or Y

~~~
frank2
My needing to rely on one modern browser engine is already too much software
complexity for my tastes.

In other words, I would have preferred to be able to live a typical day of my
life without relying on any software as complicated (and consequently
difficult for me to predict and control) as a modern browser engine.

So, arranging for that typical day to be reliant on two browser engines is
something I will strenuously try to avoid.

~~~
t0astbread
How do you view operating systems and kernels? They're pretty complex as well.

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bonaldi
UX reminds me of WannaBe for the Mac, which was far ahead of its time on that
front.

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xenonite
And it perfectly runs on macOS by using Wine.

~~~
rcarmo
So you're just using the MSHTML.DLL emulation, or copied it from a Windows
install? Either may not match the full Windows experience...

~~~
xenonite
Okay, I didn’t setup anything, so it’s probably the emulation.

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rafaelvasco
Editable start page HTML ? Yes please!

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pojntfx
Windows only!

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throwaway77384
I would absolutely love to have a new web browser out there. The internet
needs this. Is it Windows-only? That seems slightly odd.

~~~
SyneRyder
It's Windows-only because it's using the IE rendering engine made by Microsoft
that comes built-in to Windows itself.

The difference with a new lightweight browser like NetSurf is that they
actually have their own rendering engine crammed into their 12MB EXE (and it's
cross-platform).

