Search – A small, fast WebKit browser for macOS

Search – A small, fast WebKit browser for macOS github.com

A small, fast WebKit browser for macOS, by Office Commun. - driceroland/Search

67 points•metrofun•7 days ago•32 comments•

#browser #search #macos #webkit #webkit browser #fast webkit #fast webkit browser #office

32 comments

Looks cool, but the readme is AI-generated. Absent throwing my own Fable/Astra at this and hoping it finds any bugs, how does one decide whether to trust AI-assisted software these days?

selectodude6 days ago

You don’t. LLMs make vibe coding highly customized software that operates exactly as the user wants it super easy, which is awesome. However humans still haven’t caught up to the idea that it doesn’t need to go on GitHub because if it was useful to somebody, they’d have already vibe coded it themselves.

packetlost6 days ago

The only way to know if software does what is intended is to use it. IMO that's the real value of OSS: software that has been executed many times by many people in many different environments, which overall increases the trust in the correctness of the system(s).

trencedamp6 days ago

For every highly customized piece of software there are a thousand people who don't know they need it. This is the whole concept of software in the first place.

throwaway274486 days ago

That's silly. Why waste time remaking what someone already built? What a bleak future

tjpnz6 days ago

If you're not able to write your own fucking README (the title page if we're making book analogies) why would I bother with your project. Stop being lazy.

msephton6 days ago

How does one decide whether to trust any software? Not just the small things we do have the source code for, but big things that we don't have the source code for? I don't think this is a new problem.

bs72806 days ago

After a significant number of iterations of testing, and improving it. When we wrote code by hand, something like changing an api endpoint or a simple front end change would still involve dozens of "write code" then "retest manually". This would not only get the work item done, but you would often encounter edge cases or other issues you hadn't thought of when writing/reading the ticket.

When AI can one shot the implementation and testing, it likely only gets 1 round of human testing if you are lucky. Then scale this to an entire AI generated project, the ratio of features to manually run tests is astronomical. In the old days this ratio was inverted, and the tool has been battle tested before reaching any users.

cosmic_cheese6 days ago

Nothing is foolproof, but signals can go a long way. If an app's UI is poorly considered or comes across as careless for example there's a good chance that its other aspects are like that too.

SrslyJosh6 days ago

I looked at the list of contributors, saw claude at the top, and just closed the tab.

hyperhello6 days ago

We used to say, use an open source product and inspect and compile it yourself.

Now endless frameworks and everything make that impossible. So the next step is probably to describe the thing you want to your own AI, in plain English, and have it code it itself.

Of course that will only work until we start using frameworks and everything…sigh.

msephton6 days ago

FWIW, I checked and this app uses zero frameworks.

So it can be easily inspected, checked, verified.

muhammadusman6 days ago

For me, this is not gonna be a daily driver but more of the one off screenshot browser so that my screenshots look super minimal with no popular browser shell in them :)

krzs96 days ago

https://zen-browser.app/ - if you would like a super minimal daily driver

Alifatisk6 days ago

Best switch I ever did, truly an underrated non-chromium alternative.

GaryBluto5 days ago

Looks like a modern equivalent to all those early 2000s to early 2010s Internet Explorer shells that were everywhere.

SG-6 days ago

for me the one good thing about using Safari/Webkit is getting all the macOS integration with things like Passwords/touchID auth, Apple Pay, passkeys etc.

sadly none of that is in this so far.

also boasting about chrome extension support is nice, but at this time people probably want firefox extensions so that UBO can fully run.

HelloUsername6 days ago

Also a nice Webkit browser on macOS: https://duckduckgo.com/mac (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33246158)

polycancel6 days ago

Hmm why is it 186.1MB? Where Search is only 2MB? And blocks ads. Seems like much needed browser that is NOT Chromium based. Seems like DDG team can learn something from the way how Search is built.

frizlab6 days ago

Looking at it:

- Resources are 130MiB, including a phishing filter set json file of 18 MiB, phishing hash prefixes of 6 MiB, lots of images and other resources (js, etc.)

- The main binary is 87MiB

- Another binary of 32MiB for “private information removal”

- VPN proxy extension is 17MiB, the VPN binary is 21MiB + 10MiB in another file

- The network protection app extension is 25MiB + another 25 in another file

The rest is frameworks (mostly Lottie and GRDB, in terms of space).

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32 comments

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