Dan Q

Month: July 2024

Ladybird Browser

I’ve been playing with the (pre-Alpha version of) Ladybird, and it fills me with such joy and excitement.

This page, as rendered by Ladybird.
As you can see, Ladybird does a perfectly adequate job of rendering this page, including most of its CSS and virtually all of its JavaScript.

Browser diversity

Back in 2018, while other Web developers were celebrating, I expressed my dismay at the news that Microsoft Edge was on the cusp of switching from using Microsoft’s own browser engine EdgeHTML to using Blink. Blink is the engine that powers almost all other mainstream browsers; all but Firefox, which continues to stand atop Gecko.

The developers who celebrated this loss of rendering engine diversity were, I suppose, happy to have one fewer browser in which they must necessarily test their work. I guess these are the same developers who don’t test the sites they develop for accessibility (does your site work if you can’t see the images? what about with a keyboard but without a pointing device? how about if you’re colourblind?), or consider what might happen if a part of their site fails (what if the third-party CDN that hosts your JavaScript libraries goes down or is blocked by the user’s security software or their ISP?).

This blog post viewed in Lynx.
When was the last time you tested your site in a text-mode browser?

But I was sad, because – as I observed after Andre Alves Garzia succinctly spelled it out – browser engines are an endangered species. Building a new browser that supports the myriad complexities of the modern Web is such a huge endeavour that it’s unlikely to occur from scratch: from this point on, all “new” browsers are likely to be based upon an existing browser engine.

Engine diversity is important. Last time we had a lull in engine diversity, the Web got stuck, stagnating in the shadow of Internet Explorer 6’s dominance and under the thumb of Microsoft’s interests. I don’t want those days to come back; that’s a big part of why Firefox is my primary web browser.

A Ladybird book browser

Spoof cover for "The Ladybird Book of The Browser"
I actually still own a copy of the book from which I adapted this cover!

Ladybird is a genuine new browser engine. Y’know, that thing I said that we might never see happen again! So how’ve they made it happen?

It helps that it’s not quite starting from scratch. It’s starting point is the HTML viewer component from SerenityOS. And… it’s pretty good. It’s DOM processing’s solid, it seems to support enough JavaScript and CSS that the modern Web is usable, even if it’s not beautiful 100% of the time.

Acid3 test score of 97/100 in Ladybird.
I’ve certainly seen browsers do worse than this at Acid3 and related tests…

They’re not even expecting to make an Alpha release until next year! Right now if you want to use it at all, you’re going to need to compile the code for yourself and fight with a plethora of bugs, but it works and that, all by itself, is really exciting.

They’ve got four full-time engineers, funded off donations, with three more expected to join, plus a stack of volunteer contributors on Github. I’ve raised my first issue against the repo; sadly my C++ probably isn’t strong enough to be able to help more-directly, even if I somehow did have enough free time, which I don’t. But I’ll be watching-from-afar this wonderful, ambitious, and ideologically-sound initiative.

#100DaysToOffload

Woop! This is my 100th post of the year (stats), even using my more-conservative/pedant-friendly “don’t count checkins/reposts/etc. rule. If you’re not a pedant, I achieved #100DaysToOffload when I found a geocache alongside Regents Canal while changing trains to go to Amsterdam where I played games with my new work team, looked at windows and learned about how they’ve been taxed, and got nerdsniped by a bus depot. In any case: whether you’re a pedant or not you’ve got to agree I’ve achieved it now!

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Ranking Every Elevator in the Myst Series

This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Dustin Garner

Part of the joy of the collaborative Internet is that people can share their passion. Today’s example comes from this YouTuber who’s made an hour long video demonstrating and ranking the 35 elevators in the first five games in the Myst series.

Starting with a discussion of what defines an elevator, the video goes on to show off some of the worst of the lifts in the series of games (mostly those that are uninspired, pointless, or which have confusing interfaces) before moving on to the well-liked majority.

I only ever played the first two Myst games (and certainly haven’t played the first since, what, the mid-1990s?) and I don’t think I finished either. But that didn’t stop me watching the entirety of this video and revelling in the sheer level of dedication and focus it’ll have taken on the part of the creator. When I made my (mere 15-minute!) video describing my favourite video game Easter Egg I spent tens of hours over the prior weeks researching the quirk and its background, configuring a copy of the (elderly) game so that it’d play and record in the way I wanted, and of course playing through the game far enough to be able to fully demonstrate the Easter Egg. Dustin’s video, which doubtless involved replaying (possibly multiple times) five different games released over a 12-year window is mindblowing by comparison.

I don’t really care about the Myst series. I care even less about its elevators. But I really enjoyed this video, if only for its creator’s enthusiasm.

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Information Trajectory

Humans invented Wikipedia, which made accessing information highly-convenient, at the risk of questions about its authenticity1.

Then humans invented GPTs, which made accessing information even more-convenient2 at the expense of introducing hallucinations that can be even harder to verify and check.

Is humanity’s long-term plan to invent something that spews complete nonsense that’s simultaneously impossible to conclusively deny?3

Shonky MSPaint-grade graph showing ease of access increasing as ease of verification decreases, with a trend line going through Wikipedia (2001) through ChatGPT (2022) to an unknown future in 2043.

Footnotes

1 I’m well aware that in many subject areas Wikipedia routinely outranks many other sources for accuracy. But the point remains, because you’ve no idea what the bias of randomuser123 is; even if you check the sources they cite, you don’t know what sources they omitted to include. I love Wikipedia, but I can’t deny its weaknesses.

2 Sure, ChatGPT and friends aren’t always more-convenient. But if you need to summarise information from several sources, you might find them a more-suitable tool than those which came before. Why do I feel the need to add so many footnotes to what should have been a throwaway comment?

3 Actually, now I think about it, I’m confident that I can name some politicians who are ahead of the machines, for now.

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Science Weekend

This weekend was full of science.

Research

String of large electromagnets used for steering an electron beam.
If you wanna bend a stream of electrons travelling at nearly the speed of light, you’re gonna need a lot of big magnets.

This started on Saturday with a trip to the Harwell Campus, whose first open day in eight years provided a rare opportunity for us to get up close with cutting edge science (plus some very kid-friendly and accessible displays) as well as visit the synchrotron at Diamond Light Source.

Dan with a child in front of beamlines coming out of the Diamond Light Synchrotron ring.
It’s hard to convey the scale of the thing; turns out you need a big ol’ ring if you want to spin electrons fast enough to generate a meaningful amount of magnetobremsstrahlung radiation.

The whole thing’s highly-recommended if you’re able to get to one of their open days in the future, give it a look. I was particularly pleased to see how enthused about science it made the kids, and what clever questions they asked.

For example: the 7-year-old spent a long time cracking a variety of ciphers in the computing tent (and even spotted a flaw in one of the challenge questions that the exhibitors then had to hand-correct on all their handouts!); the 10-year-old enjoyed quizzing a researcher who’d been using x-ray crystallography of proteins.

Medicine

And then on Sunday I finally got a long-overdue visit to my nearest spirometry specialist for a suite of experiments to try to work out what exactly is wrong with my lungs, which continue to be a minor medical mystery.

Dan holds a piece of medical apparatus to his mouth.
“Once you’ve got your breath back, let’s fill you with drugs and do those experiments again…”

It was… surprisingly knackering. Though perhaps that’s mostly because once I was full of drugs I felt briefly superpowered and went running around the grounds of the wonderfully-named Brill Hill Windmill with the dog until was panting in pretty much the way that I might normally have been, absent an unusually-high dose of medication.

Computer screen graphs showing peak respiratory flow under a series of different experiments.
It’s got a graph; that makes it science, right? (I’m ignoring those party political histograms that outright lie about how narrow the margins are…)

For amusement purposes alone, I’d be more-likely to recommend the first day’s science activities than the second, but I can’t deny that it’s cool to collect a load of data about your own body and how it works in a monitorable, replicable way. And maybe, just maybe, start to get to the bottom of why my breathing’s getting so much worse these last few years!

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