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Building a Better Web Browser - James Mickens - Harvard CS Colloquium 2015
Paul Irish
11K subscribers • 5 videos on Hallway
- Recommended by 5 people: 4 on Hacker News and 1 on Lobsters.
- A classic. People kept recommending it from 2015 to 2020.
- Presented by James Mickens, Professor of Computer Science
- May be out of date. Uploaded 10 years ago, in an area where tools change fast.
- An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.
Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.
29K views10 years ago5 recommendations
Web developmentSystems programmingHow browsers workSoftware architectureWeb and application security
James Mickens critiques modern web browser bloat and security issues, proposing a cleaner, operating-system-like architecture called Atlantis.
2015-02-26. CS Colloquium at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Notes from this talk: * blog.rossry.net/notes-james-mickens/ Abstract Web browsers are defining increasingly rich APIs for networking, multimedia, and local storage. This is good in the sense that web applications can now approach the sophistication of traditional desktop applications. Unfortunately, in the race to add new browser features, discussions about clean interface design are often relegated to second-class status. The result is browsers that are difficult to make robust and secure. Browsers execute so many important applications, and expose so much complex functionality, that they should be treated as operating systems. I will discuss the implications of this claim, using case studies to motivate some core abstractions that browsers should export. I will also discuss some research challenges for building the next generation of browsers. Bio James Mickens is an associate professor of computer science at Harvard. Often described as The Hardest Working Man In Computer Science, his research spans genres, fields, and verb tenses. His seminal paper on byzantine fault tolerant proofreading has been mistakenly cited over 3000 times, and his 1987 paper “We Need More and Better Computers” provided the foundation for cloud computing, mobile computing, and any type of computing that benefits from more and/or better computers. More Mickens: * mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens * research.microsoft.com/apps/search/default.aspx?q=mickens&s=… * research.microsoft.com/pubs/251792/149-li.pdf Domino: Understanding Wide-Area, Asynchronous Event Causality in Web Applications * vimeo.com/95066828 so so goodWhy it's here
5 people recommend thisWhat people say. Engineers frequently recommend this talk for its humorous yet deeply insightful critique of modern web browser architecture.
VarFarYonderon Hacker News • Recommends
On “W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns”
James Mickens gave an interesting talk on what we could do to build a better browser: link to this video I'm hoping that WebAssembly might be a route towards allowing something like this to happen. If an alternative to HTML/CSS/JS could be developed in WebAssembly, then we could have a situation where HTML has competition, rather than being the only way to build a website. And browsers can become simpler as the rendering duties are moved out of the browser and to the website itself.
zeronameon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Show HN: Thi.ng/hdom – S-expression based, pure ES6 UI/VDOM components”
…lating everything from layout down to color blending, then leave it up to multiple vendors to implement all that stuff at great expense and with long delay. Worse, it's all shoehorned on top of some "document model" than was never designed with applications in mind. It's a waste. To see what a better platform could look like, consider this: link link to this video The key here is reducing surface area. It's entirely possible that WASM will bring us closer to that, but the web developers of today probably won't like that. > I regularly and seriously consider to leave software development because of this (as I'm really suffering) but then I remember how much power it gives me despite the horrible fault…
maxharrison Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ask HN: What will future browser be like?”
James Mickens at Microsoft Research presents Atlantis, which I definitely think this still the most forward-looking browser architecture out there: link to this video Ideas from this effort are going to be trickling into browsers for years to come. For example, if you squint a bit, you might see a conceptual resemblance between the Syphon interpreter in Atlantis and WASM in shipping browsers.
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On “Why is CSS the way it is?”
James Mickens has a talk about doing exactly this 1. It's a perfectly sensible proposal and the talk is well worth the time to listen to. He makes a solid argument for why this should be done. Problem: in reality, it is unworkable and will never happen, and even if it did the actual level of "development" that we actually see in the real world would end up in a situation just as bad as the situation we are in now. 1 link to this video
maxharrison Hacker News • Recommends
On “‘CSS X’”
…store, but one that offers apps that use basically the same APIs and technology that the native apps use. Last thing: I know Apple cripples browsers on their platforms. I've run into all those issues personally in my work! That still doesn't make the web the right thing. Here's James Mickens telling us how to fix the browser's busted architecture: link to this video…
oso2kon Hacker News • Mentions
On “We Must Revive Gopherspace (2017)”
I always like to refer to Ian Hickson's Requirements for Replacing the Web 0 when this topic comes up. They seems to encapsulate well the social, technological and economic dynamics required when discussing replacing the Web. However, few attempts (Crockford's Seif Project 2, MS's Project Atlantis and Project Gazelle 2345) seemed have to heed this wisdom. 0 link 1 link 2 link to this video 3 link 4 link 5 link
maxharrison Hacker News • Mentions
On “Ask HN: React Native or Flutter?”
…her thing I aim to solve is the issue of the browser and corresponding web standards being a monolith so large that only Google and Apple can afford to implement them. By wrestling back control over layout, I hope to show that a next-generation browser could be much more like what James Mickens laid out with the research he presented in this talk: link to this video I decided to prototype it in JavaScript, and right now it just renders into a canvas element. I love working on it, because all the unit tests run really fast. It can do that because there's no browser in the way - node-canvas is much lighter weight. Once the design is settled down, I'd like to rewrite it in Rust. The other advantage of thi…
ly3xqhl8g9on Hacker News • Mentions
On “Future CSS: State Container Queries”
…of the rules 2. In the same manner DNA encodes proteins with no mention of the underlying morphology, but once the RNA starts building the morphology arises. 1 Jim Keller talking about DNA Origami at 19:18, link 2 Not even such a new idea, "Building a Better Web Browser - James Mickens - Harvard CS Colloquium 2015", on rendering at 04:20, link to this video…
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link to this video
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/atlantis.pdf