[Cryptography] So I wrote a new Web browser - PHB

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

On Fri, Dec 10, 2021 at 5:50 PM Jonathan Thornburg <jthorn4242 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 10, 2021 at 12:23:19PM -0500, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> > Announcing Phill's Hypothetical Browser (PHB).
> >
> > For years I have been saying, if only I had a browser that could do (X)
> >
> > This is not a joke, took me all of 30 minutes to get PHB running:
> >
> > https://github.com/hallambaker/PhillsHypotheticalBrowser
> >
> > This is a full Web browser built around WebView2 which is an API to
> > Microsoft Edge [[...]]
>
> So I take it this is Windows-only?  No Linux, Mac, *BSD, etc?
>

Currently WebView2 only runs on Windows. But the Edge browser already runs
on every major platform including macOS, Linux, Android, iOS and hololens.

There is a port to macOS currently in development. It seems very likely
that a Linux port will follow. There is no Microsoft BSD port but there is
no official Google Chrome distribution for Linux I can see, they point folk
to Chromium.

I am not sure about the state of iOS these days, does Apple still insist
everyone use their WebKit interface and nothing else? If so, WebView2 for
iOS might not come for quite a while. Or maybe WebView2 is an abstraction
layer already dealing with that.



On Fri, Dec 10, 2021 at 2:00 PM Henry Baker <hbaker1 at pipeline.com> wrote:

>  Hi Phillip:


>If you believe in strong typing, you might want to seriously consider
*Rust*.
>Of course, once you believe in Rust, then you might find Firefox a more
>conducive environment, as Mozilla is a major supporter of Rust.

I am familiar with Rust. But I don't see an advantage over C# which is also
strongly typed, memory safe, supported by open source compilers and tools,
etc.

Rust has some real advantages if you have a large legacy C++ code base and
what you want is a 'better C++'. The tooling for getting out of C++ ville
via Rust is very impressive.

I am sticking with C# because I have 50,000 lines of code and test suites
written in C#.

The goal of PHB is not to create a new browser distribution but to
influence the mainstream browsers and get them to implement features like
support for a user selected password vault provider via an open standards
based protocol rather than using every 'cloud' feature as a pretext to
making the browser 'sticky'.

That said, if we have any short term success, I would love to see a
parallel project producing a 'user centric' version of Firefox.
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