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Building a Better Web Browser - James Mickens - Harvard CS Colloquium 2015

Paul Irish · 29.3K views · 2015-12-11 · 1:07:46

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Overview

James Mickens's 2015 Harvard colloquium argues that browsers are bloated and insecure because feature races trump clean interface design. He presents a cleaner, more secure browser architecture (Atlantis) with a much smaller API surface.

On Hacker News

HN cites it whenever people discuss rebuilding the web platform or what a better browser architecture could look like.

Recommended by 4 HN people across 5 months · HN mentions 2017–2023

Topics

Web developmentSoftware architecture & designSecurity & hacking
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james mickensweb browsersatlantisweb securityapi designrendering

What people said

maxharris · 2020-08 · Recommendation

I used to get really angry at CSS because of all of the things that made it a bad fit with component-based systems like React. It made me so unhappy that I worked full-time for about nine months on this project, which was a React-like component system that rendered to canvas. [LINK] I got pretty far! But I gave up working on it when I realized that I was going to be pushing this boulder uphill for years. So what changed? I picked up Swift and SwiftUI, and it turns out that some of the ideas that I had were the same ones the SwiftUI folks went with! For all the web has given us, I think its APIs are holding us back now. I still think we need something open and decentralized that competes with the App store and Play 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: [VIDEO]

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foobiekr · 2020-07 · Recommendation

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] [VIDEO]

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maxharris · 2018-11 · Recommendation

James Mickens at Microsoft Research presents Atlantis, which I definitely think this still the most forward-looking browser architecture out there: [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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Sources

Video by Paul Irish, played through YouTube.

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