An AI-Supervised Remote Exam Went So Badly That 58,000 Students Must Retake It
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Earlier this summer, nearly 160,000 applicants took the entrance exam for UNAM, Mexico’s largest university. For the first time, they did it completely remotely, using a “lockdown” browser and AI-powered webcam proctoring software, over several weeks from late May th … ⌘ Read more

Chrome Is Using AI To Fix Hundreds of Bugs, Eliminate Full Browser Restarts
Google says AI-assisted workflows helped Chrome fix 1,072 security bugs across versions 149 and 150, more than the previous 23 releases combined. The company is also testing twice-weekly security updates and “dynamic patching,” which could apply most fixes without requiring users to restart the entire browser. “By leveraging … ⌘ Read more

Servo 0.4 Browser Engine Gets More Websites Rendering Correctly
Servo 0.4 was just released for closing out the month of July. This month the Servo browser engine with its servoshell demo browser began rendering more real-world websites correctly… ⌘ Read more

I think the problem here is that (i.e: <foo>) is being treated as HTML, which the browser renders as nothing, because that’s not even a valid element it understands how to render. Hmmm 🤔

@david@daiwei.me You might have ended up loading the page in an unfortunate moment while I was reworking it. 😅 The CHANGES file is there, in the browser:

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Works good. I fully get and support your reasoning behind that change. There’s only one downside. Quickly looking at some code snippets in the browser helps me to quickly judge whether it’s worth to clone a repo or not. Oh well. :-) After all I know that movqware always is.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Thanks for that. I’d been hearing about this in the context of browser plugins turning computers into residential proxies for web scrapers, but I hadn’t considered that a TV could be used the same way. ☹️

Free daily 3D mini golf in the browser? I smell a new obsession…

putt.day #62 ⛳ 10/12 Eagle
🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡🟢
https://putt.day/s/1VAFIDIxqpbT

@prologic@twtxt.net That’s a good way to keep spammers out:

Your browser did not pass the anti-spam check! Please make sure JavaScript is enabled and try again.

It was turned on.

This is just browser rendering

@balloonfu-sen@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Unfortunately I tried to support SFTP but ripped this out as Browsers (which the Swag framework uses under the hood as a framework to build PWA(s)) doesn’t support raw TCP connections. So FTP / SFTP is not possible without hacks like a proxy. Which I don’t really want to support. So only things that have some kind of HTTP API are possible viable publihsing backends right now. That is Github/Gitea, twtd, Yarn, etc.

@GabesArcade@gabesarcade.com The no-JS part is one thing, but you also have to disable the (nowadays common) forced-HTTP-to-HTTPS-redirect, because those old browsers can’t do modern crypto. And make sure that your webserver serves the correct page even if no Host header is sent by the client. And don’t even think about serving UTF-8 or even just putting utf-8 in the content type. 😅 And for the JPEG thumbnails I pass a special flag to ImageMagick so that IBM Web Explorer from OS/2 won’t trip. 🤣 And always use link rel="stylesheet" for CSS, because some browsers render inlined CSS as literal text. And … probably more that I forgot by now. 😂

@david@daiwei.me Not sure, actually. Let’s see. Those are the ones where I still have the original disks (or have bought them on eBay again):

• SuSE Linux 6.4 (it’s a massive 7 CD distro with a huge manual, best thing ever)
  
• OS/2 2.1
  
• OS/2 Warp 3 (red and blue spine because $reasons)
  
• OS/2 Warp 4
  
• PC DOS 7
  
• MS-DOS 6.22
  
• Windows 3.1
  
• Windows for Workgroups 3.11
  
• Windows 95 C
  
• Windows 98
  
• Windows NT 4 Workstation (still in the mail, though 😅)
  
• Windows 2000
  
• Windows XP Professional (last Windows I ever used on my private PCs)
  

(Plus a few “classic” office products as can be seen here: https://movq.de/blog/postings/2024-05-23/0/POSTING-en.html )

Okay, wow. Windows NT 4 wasn’t part of my timeline back then, so this is the first time I’m seeing it in action. And this thing came with IE 2, which I’ve also never seen before. (That’s interesting, because I remember using IE even on Win 3.x, but apparently that was already IE 3?)

It also makes me really happy to see my website work in these old browsers. Fullscreen images are “broken” because those are PNG or WebP, but the rest works just fine. 🥳

https://movq.de/v/56243a3e54

Servo Browser Engine Continues Making Much Progress On Less Than $8k Monthly
Released last week was the Servo 0.3 browser engine release along with their latest Servoshell demo browser. Today the project has published their monthly development recap to highlight all of the interesting changes made. Here’s a look at what they accomplished over the past month while doing so on less than $8k in monthly donations… ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Ah, the joy of making your own browser – welcome to the club. 😃 (I chose WebKitGTK back then and that was not super compatible with websites … CEF would have been better, but also harder to use.)

So I decided to change tact a bit with GoNIX and instead of trying to build apure Go browser from scratch (which I kinda of half succeeded, in at least it was able to render most static ssr sites), I’ve instead decided to write a new browsered using the Chromium Embedded Framework, otherwise known as CEF. So now I have a fully working browser in GoNIX 🎉 – However since my goal is to keep GoNIX pretty lcean and mostly written in Go, I delegated the cef part(s) to an OCI container image and run that with GoNIX’s box (command-line container runtime). It works great 👍

Ah, with lazy loading, browsers only start loading images when the load event occurs. And that takes time. Hm. Not a fan, I might revert this. 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I noticed that loading="lazy" might not be so great after all.

This is without lazy loading:

The total page load time is around 400-500 ms. Okay.

Now this is with lazy loading:

It finished much quicker, after about 250 ms. Sounds good.

But notice this gap right here?

This wasn’t there before. With lazy loading, it now takes something like 80-100 ms until the browser even starts loading images. This is Chromium, but Firefox shows a similar gap.

The net result is that there is a very noticeable delay/flicker when you open a page, because it takes so long until the images have loaded. Yes, the layout doesn’t shift around, but that has nothing to do with lazy loading.

How odd. 🤔

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yes, that’s what I was thinking, too. For a moment, I wanted to suggest to use <ol> instead of <ul> to fix that. However, that’s only gonna work for the first level, but subsections then miss their parent level.

And it turns out that I was wrong. At least sort of. There are some CSS tricks to fix it: https://stackoverflow.com/a/26243681 Of course, with text or retro browsers, this is not gonna fly.

I also came across this interesting article. I just skimmed it and it’s about real tables of contents with page numbers, so not what you have in mind, but cool nevertheless: https://css-tricks.com/a-perfect-table-of-contents-with-html-css/

I complain about this a lot:

https://movq.de/v/e7cb49eefb/hiccupfx

But to be honest, my blog did the same thing – to some degree.

This is fixed now. The trick is to add width and height to all <img> tags. That way, modern browsers know how much space to reserve for the image. Without this, they just reserve zero space, so when the image finally loads, you get jumpy layout.

This effect is even worse when you use <img loading="lazy"> – which I can finally use, now that the jumpy layout has been fixed. 🥳

Servo 0.3 Released With The Demo Browser Becoming More Useful
Servo 0.3 released today as the latest version of this modern browser engine developed in Rust. With Servo 0.3 the demo servoshell browser is becoming more useful and supporting additional modern web features while Servo also continues to possess much potential moving forward on the embedded front as an alternative to the likes of the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF)… ⌘ Read more

Commodore’s Callback 8020 Is a $499 Flip Phone That Blocks Social Media and Browsers
Commodore has unveiled the Callback 8020, a $499 Sailfish OS flip phone that runs most Android apps but deliberately blocks social media, browsers, email, and workplace apps to discourage doomscrolling. The “not dumb dumbphone” still supports messaging, music, maps, ridesharing, hotspots, a removable battery … ⌘ Read more

Let’s see which other browser-based clients I broke with that message…

Firefox 152 Adds JPEG XL Support, Redesigned Settings
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Linuxiac: Mozilla has released Firefox 152, the latest update to its popular open-source web browser, with updated settings, improved media controls, experimental JPEG XL support, and various platform-specific fixes for desktop and Android. A key update is the redesigned Firefox Settings page, which now features clearer groupings … ⌘ Read more

Euro-Office 1.0 Arrives To Open-Source Infighting: ‘Compatibility Is Not Sovereignty’
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: If digital sovereignty is important to you, and it certainly is in the European Union (EU), then you’ll be pleased to know that EuroOffice, a new open-source browser-based office suite alternative to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, has officially reached its … ⌘ Read more

Got absolutely jack and sick of all the fucking useless bots, C&C and shit™ hitting my Git server tonight 🤬 So I sat down and built a lightweight version of Anubis, called caddy-pow. So now going forward, you’ll have to (sorry) have a HS-enabled browser to hit git.mills.io which will hopefully make most (if not all) bots just go the fuck away 🤦‍♂️ #Hostile #Web

Web Browsers on Video Game Consoles
Article URL: https://vale.rocks/posts/game-console-browsers

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48487897

Points: 8

# Comments: 0 ⌘ Read more

Mozilla Firefox: Firefox bietet unbegrenztes VPN im Sommer
Mozilla hebt das Datenlimit für den integrierten VPN-Dienst im Firefox-Browser vorübergehend auf und erweitert die Serverauswahl. ( VPN, Firefox)

Image

Firefox Merges Support For Vulkan Video Decoding
Firefox has merged initial support for Vulkan Video decoding, giving the browser a more cross-platform path for GPU-accelerated video playback beyond Linux’s long-running reliance on VA-API. Phoronix reports: Firefox on Linux has long been focused on the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) that isn’t universally supported by Linux graphics drivers. This has left to efforts like NVI … ⌘ Read more

Launch HN: Intuned (YC S22) – Build and run reliable browser automations as code
Hey HN, we’re Faisal and Ahmad from Intuned ( https://intunedhq.com). We’re building a platform for building, deploying, and maintaining browser automations.

Customers primarily use the Intuned AI agent to automate websites that don’t expose APIs. Common use-cases include scraping data, pulling reports, and submitting forms. As the website changes, our agent also helps automatically heal the automation.

On Intuned, browser automations are … ⌘ Read more

Firefox Merges Support For Vulkan Video Decoding
As an exciting development for GPU-accelerated video decoding within the Mozilla Firefox web browser, initial support for Vulkan Video has landed in the web browser!.. ⌘ Read more

Ladybird Browser Stops Accepting Public Pull Requests
The Ladybird browser isn’t opposed to AI coding tools, but it’s just brought a new change to their code-contributing policies.

February 23: “Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI.”
I used Claude Code and Codex for the translation. This was human-directed, not autonomous code generation. I decided what to port, in what order, and what the Rust code should look like. … ⌘ Read more

How to Share a Link to a Particular Phrase
Modern browsers let you share a link that jumps straight to whatever text you wish to highlight. Here’s how the feature works. ⌘ Read more

Show HN: ABC Classic 100 Rankings visualised
This weekend is the ABC Classic FM countdown, which prompted me to dust off an old un-published data visualisation of rankings from previous years.

I’ve considered adding a search function, but I also kind of like that it requires a bit of exploration in the current form.

Some of the code is a bit clunky and I wouldn’t mind refactoring it. I’m also not sure about browser compatibility - I’ve only got access to a couple of devices to test it on.

Comments URL: [https://news.yc … ⌘ Read more

Ask HN: Is the web for machines (/llm.txt) the one we wished we had as humans?
I got really tired, as a human, of parsing the standard marketing heavy web we have today.
I’ve always loved the simplicity of gopher and gemini web.

Recently I found myself manually adding `/llm.txt` to most websites I visit because I find the content for LLMs strait to the point and clear.
The only annoyance is web browsers like chrome do not render the markdown.

So could the AI revolution actually fix the web for humans as a side effect? … ⌘ Read more

One step forward, two steps back on CA age bill (EFF Deeplinks Blog)
The EFF has a blog\
post looking at a new bill in California that would exempt
open-source operating systems from the Digital Age Assurance Act
passed last year, but has problems of its own:

While the open source exemption, if passed, would improve the law, the
remaining amendments proposed by AB 1856 would require all web
browsers and w … ⌘ Read more

Years ago, I used Kate, no, not somebody’s wife, but the KDE Advanced Text Editor, to export source code files and fragments into HTML with syntax highlighting. I think that’s where I got the initial <b> idea from. There were also bucketloads of <span style='color:#644a9b;'> all over the place, even inside <b>. No CSS classes defined upfront, all colors inlined. The final rendering in the browser looked great, but the source code ugly as hell in my opinion. However, I’m thankful for hinting me at <b>. I think this kicked off everything. :-)

The advertising cartel coming to your web browser
Article URL: https://blog.zgp.org/the-advertising-cartel-coming-to-your-web-browser/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48375175

Points: 20

# Comments: 3 ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de It’s the “Lyse types the entire HTML by hand” generator. Yes, no kidding. I write articles so rarely, that I can do that once in a while. It’s fun to some degree, but also not.

After some time, I finally recorded some Vim macros to insert <b>…</b>, <var>…</var>, <span class=s>…</span> etc. around the tokens. This helped a little bit. But I was still questioning my mental state doing it like that. I also had to fix a bunch of the end tags by hand, because the word movement wasn’t enough or the end movement went too far. Quite the annoying process for sure.

But I think the HTML looks a wee bit nicer and is maybe even semantically a little bit better than having only <span>s everywhere. I find the <span class="whatever"> just soo awfully long. Of course, I never look at the code again, but knowing, that e.g. there is a <b> and it saves so many bytes in comparison, makes me happy. It is a more elegant solution in my opinion. Not by much, but better nonetheless. It’s a matter of simplicity. Admittedly, even I can’t avoid the <span>s alltogether. Oh well. On the other hand, I’m sure that this does not make any difference whatsoever. I bet, nobody and nothing, like a screenreader, analyzes the HTML for that, where this would be truly useful.

Oh! Maybe text browsers, though. It just occurred to me while composing this reply. :-) Haha, I lost my bet quickly. w3m picks up at least the <b> for keywords and builtin types, <u> for filenames and <i> for comments. Yey. No different styles for <var> and <mark>, unfortunately. elinks only renders the bold. It’s cool that I had the right intuition right from the beginning, despite being unable to pinpoint it. :-)

All the <span> hell with common syntax highlighters is a downer for me that keeps me from looking more into them. If I wrote more articles, I might rig something up with Pygments. At least that’s somehow positively connotated in my brain. Not sure if it actually deserves it, but I dealt with that in some loose form (can’t even remember) years and years ago. Apparently, it wasn’t too terrible.

To prepare the table of contents, I used grep and sed with some manual intervention in the end. The entire process can be improved. Absolutely.

You wrote your own site generator, didn’t you?

Microsoft Unveils Scout, an Autonomous AI Agent Built On OpenClaw
Microsoft has unveiled Scout, an experimental always-on AI “autopilot” agent for Microsoft 365 that can operate across Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint, calendars, contacts, browsers, and external apps via MCP. “Autopilots stay active in the background, understand how work gets done across your apps and systems, and take action without need … ⌘ Read more

Websites Can Now Spy on You Through Your Hard Drive
Thanks to the newly detailed FROST technique, telltale SSD activity can be measured in the browser using simple JavaScript. ⌘ Read more

Servo 0.2 Released With Revamped Android Browser UI
For ending out the month of May is a new monthly release of Servo, the open-source, Rust-based browser engine being developed by Linux Foundation Europe stakeholders and the open-source community. There are many nice enhancements on the desktop side with Servo 0.2 while also improving the Android browser UI experience with Servo too… ⌘ Read more

Arias: Human proof for FOSS contributions
Rodrigo Arias Mallo, maintainer of the Dillo web browser, has written a
blog post
with a proposal on one way to ensure that a contribution is written by
a human and not AI; he suggests asking new contributors to record
their programming session using asciinema.

In the same way that LLMs generate patches, they can also generate
the asciinema recordings themselves. Then, the contributors c … ⌘ Read more

Browser-based file encryption tool using WebCrypto
Article URL: https://secvant.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48274018

Points: 5

# Comments: 2 ⌘ Read more

The Best Browser Extensions to Get More Out of YouTube
You can significantly improve the YouTube experience with these browser add-ons. ⌘ Read more

Show HN: ShadowCat – file transfer through QR Codes in a Browser
Article URL: https://github.com/unprovable/ShadowCat

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48234287

Points: 6

# Comments: 1 ⌘ Read more

Vivaldi 8.0 Arrives With ‘Most Significant Design Overhaul’ In Browser’s History
Vivaldi 8.0 is being pitched as the browser’s “most significant design overhaul” yet, featuring a new unified, edge-to-edge interface, six preset layouts, and deeper customization across tabs, toolbars, panels, and themes. The company is also taking a swipe at rivals chasing questionable AI features. Neowin reports: Af … ⌘ Read more

Google Publishes Exploit Code Threatening Millions of Chromium Users
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google on Wednesday published exploit code for an unfixed vulnerability in its Chromium browser codebase that threatens millions of people using Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and virtually all other Chromium-based browsers. The proof-of-concept code exploits the Browser Fetch programming inte … ⌘ Read more

Firefox 153 Nightly Rolls Out New Settings UI
The latest nightly builds of Firefox 153 have rolled out a new appearance for the browser’s settings area… ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de are you sure it’s the browser is getting slow or is it website developers adding more more crap to their sites?