Comment by cosmic_cheese
1 day ago
Lots of comments talking about how existing browsers can already do this, but the big benefit that current browsers can't give you is the sheer level of speed and efficiency that a highly restricted "lite web" browser could achieve, especially if the restrictions are made with efficiency in mind.
The embedded use case is obvious, but it'd also be excellent for things like documentation — with such a browser you could probably have a dozen+ doc pages open with resource usage below that of a single regular browser tab. Perfect for things that you have sitting open for long periods of time.
Is MQJS faster or lighter than other engines though? It says the engine itself takes very little memory, but that doesn't say how it performs running all that bloated JS out there. Well also has "quick" in the name.
How it performs with existing JS doesn’t really matter in the context of my post, though.
For a “lite web” browser that’s built for a thin, select slice of the web stack (HTML/CSS/JS), dragging around the heft of a full fat JS engine like V8 is extreme overkill, because it’s not going to be running things like React but instead enabling moderate use of light enhancing scripts — something like a circa-2002 website would skew toward the heavy side of what one might expect for a “lite web” site.
The JS engine for such a browser could be trimmed down and aggressively optimized, likely even beyond what has been achieved with MQJS and similar engines, especially if one is willing to toss out legacy compatibility and not keep themselves beholden to every design decision of standard JS.
That's it. Plus they would work neatly on old computers/phones.
someone should embed it into dillo!
Better not. It already exists former QuickJS and QuickJS-NG, and parsing JS is a no light task by any means. Even Edbrowse https://github.com/cmb/edbrowse can grind down to a halt an n270 netbook becaus of some sites with JS (both with qjs and qjs-ng). So Dillo would be no better.
Also, legacy machines couldn't run it as fast as they could.