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Bez: Generating a browser engine from specs and tests

79 points • by nerdypepper • today at 6:08 PM • 25 comments • view on HN

Comments

Alacart • today at 7:41 PM

This makes a ton of sense to me with the huge corpus of web standards that exist. In theory we should be able to generate a browser from those specs, it just took a massive amount of effort before. Maybe if things like this get some traction, some of the human time spent implementing the spec could be spent on creating more/better specs, allowing for even better generation too.

Edit: replies are making good points about AI capabilities and where the effort really goes. Let’s just say that I meant this in an aspirational sense, rather than where the rubber actually meets the road today.

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esprehn • today at 10:28 PM

Very cool idea, though I think we're a long way away from this. Hopefully they file bugs on the specs when they find ambiguities.

Also the specs are written to define observable behavior, and there's a fair bit of ambiguity that's UA defined, but to be actually compatible with the Web requires doing what Chrome does.

The good news is that you can look at the source of the 3 major engines (and Ladybird!) and your AI agent can do comparisons to figure out optimizations.

fouc • today at 7:16 PM

I'm looking forward to the day when we have fully functioning web browsers that we have full programmatic control over in all aspects.

With luck all chromium/blink-based browsers will go the way of the dodo bird.

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helpprotactiniu • today at 7:50 PM

Is this named like Jev intentionally? Or is this just a new naming convention that I haven't been watching?

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amelius • today at 10:19 PM

Ok, but will you be able to understand the code?

mircerlancerous • today at 7:42 PM

This is a neat idea. It opens up a whole new way to make a web app into a native app, while also adding native features not available in web views

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amelius • today at 10:20 PM

Can we do the same for MacOS, iOS? I want to run them inside Linux.

trencedamp • today at 8:16 PM

But can it dance

cryptolobster • today at 9:15 PM

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