Comment by afishhh
3 days ago
> The other is this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/Anthropic/comments/1q4xfm0/over_chr...
I took a 5-minute look at the layout crate here and... it doesn't look great:
1. Line height calculation is suspicious, the structure of the implementation also suggests inline spans aren't handled remotely correctly
2. Uhm... where is the bidi? Directionality has far reaching implications on an inline layout engine's design. This is not it.
3. It doesn't even consider itself a real engine:
// Estimate text width (rough approximation: 0.6 * font_size * char_count)
// In a real implementation, this would use font metrics
let char_count = text.chars().count() as f32;
let avg_char_width = font_size * 0.5; // Approximate average character width
let text_width = char_count * avg_char_width;
I won't even begin talking about how this particular aspect that it "approximates" also has far reaching implications on your design...
I could probably go on in perpetuity about the things wrong with this, even test it myself or something. But that's a waste of time I'm not undertaking.
Making a "browser" that renders a few particular web pages "correctly" is an order of magnitude easier than a browser that also actually cares about standards.
If this is how "A Browser for the modern age." looks then I want a time machine.
I saw a "web browser" that was AI generated in maybe 2k lines of python based on tkinter that tried to support CSS and probably was able to render some test cases but didn't at all have the shape of a real web browser.
It reminds of having AI write me an MUI component the other day that implemented the "sx" prop [1] with some code that handles all the individual properties that were used by the component in that particular application, it might have been correct, the component at all was successful and well coded... but MUI provides a styled() function and a <Box> component, either one of which could have been used to make this component handle all the properties that "sx" is supposed to handle with as little as one line of code. I asked the agent "how would I do this using the tools that MUI provides to support sx" and had a great conversation and got a complete and clear understanding about the right way to do it but on the first try it wrote something crazy overcomplicated to handle the specific case as opposed to a general-purpose solution that was radically simple. That "web browser" was all like that.
[1] you can write something like sx={width: 4} and MUI multiplies 4 by the application scale and puts on, say, a width: 20px style
Thank you for the detailed feedback, though we would prefer for you to comment on the announcement threads where you see it. We really appreciate the feedback.
You're referring to State of Utopia's[1] web browser, currently available here:
https://taonexus.com/publicfiles/jan2026/172toy-browser.py.t... (turn the volume down if you play the included easter egg mini-game as it's very loud.)
10-minute livestream demonstration:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xdIMmrLMLo&t=45s
That livestream demonstration is side-by-side with Chrome, rendering very simple pages.
It compiles, renders simple web pages and is able to post.
The differences between cursor's browser and our browser:
I'm submitting this using that browser. (I don't know if it will really post or not.)
We are taking feature requests!! Submit your requested feature here:
https://pollunit.com/polls/ahysed74t8gaktvqno100g
We are happy to put any feature you want into the web browser.
[1] will be available at https://stateofutopia.com or https://stofut.com for short (St. of Ut.)
Sure, but getting this far would be inconceivable just half a year ago. It will only get better as time passes