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Re:Show HN: Turn public repos into works of art on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @08:18AM (#49991727)
I like how it shows it stepping through each commit as it generates the art, like an animation. I tried it and it made a picture that kind of looked like a top down view of a city.
BuildABrowser is a browser and its rendering engine, both written in Java (as well as the parsers and layout algorithms).

It is available for Linux and Windows, and also has an experimental Android Desktop port.

I've had a lot of previous browser attempts (dating back to 2018 - I can give the link to my first ever attempt if you want), but over time I've learned a lot, and my current attempt has been much easier to maintain and make progress on.

It implements layout algorithms (inline/block, flexbox, and grid (but not subgrid)) from scratch, and it passes Acid2.

It also supports positioning, floats, a number of pseudo-selectors (like :nth-child and :has), very simple media queries, and CSS layers.

It also has forms and cookies (but is not yet hardened for security) and also a tool for viewing the DOM and box tree.

On Linux, you can use -a11y accesskit to enable the experimental a11y layer that uses a fork of accesskit.

BuildABrowser only supports pages that don't require scripting at this time, and is very early stage, but I would say that quite a few pages do work well.

There is a demo Video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWF7YPIoks8, and downloads on the GH release tab or the website.

Show HN: BuildABrowser (Java) – Passes Acid2, Has CSS Grid and an Android port

https://buildabrowser.net/

BuildABrowser Browser is an open-source browser and its rendering engine.It runs on Linux, Windows, and (experimental) Android Desktop.The rendering engine is written in Java, and features parsers and layout algorithms written from scratch.It is also embeddable, with pre-made embedding layers for Swing and Android Jetpack Compose.Because the renderer is modular, though, it is also possible to...

( Read More... | no comments | 4 points | on HN )
I was wondering if you could add a Acid2 rendering screenshot to the site, please? It tests some different things than Acid3, so I'm curious how it fares.
Re:Show HN: Hallucinopedia on Wednesday May 06, 2026 @01:30PM (#48038955)
The page requires JS to load its content - user agents without JS support just get a blank page.

I'm not sure if the bots that scrape data to train LLMs are capable of loading that type of page, or if they only work on pages that have the content inside the HTML itself?

Re:Mouse Pointer as a Mere Mortal on Tuesday May 05, 2026 @11:19AM (#48023752)
There's a class in Java (Robot) that lets you move the mouse like this, I messed with that when I was younger.
Seems like a privacy concern that anti-cheat can see your browsing session details. I think I'd prefer for the browser not to expose that kind of stuff to random applications.
This is why we can't have nice things. I sure hope this doesn't result in GH disabling actions for everyone.

Also somebody should Ghidra the project, see if they can find malware. I'm not saying anyone has to, just a thought

What if somebody's phone is of an alternative type, like a flip phone, and they can't install the app needed to tap phones? Then how will they become friends with another
Re:Show HN: Linux Desktops in the Browser on Sunday April 26, 2026 @07:45PM (#47916078)
Well this seems like basically a VNC to your running VM, but it's not a unique instance per user. I saw there were already apps open, so I tried opening a new tab and typing something I would recognize on it from my desktop, then opened it on my phone, and sure enough, it was there.

So if you were doing something, and another user logged on, if they get the same session they could just check browser history and see everything you did...

This feels like Browserling (which spins up a remote VM every session) but less secure...

Re:Show HN: A game where you build a GPU on Saturday April 04, 2026 @11:10PM (#47645792)
This seems really cool, haven't played it yet but I took a glance at the first two levels and it looks similar to another game I've played - will definitely play through it when I get a chance. I wanna make a GPU but my board doesn't have nearly ennough dsp units, so a virtual one like in this game will have to suffice lol
Re:Show HN: Simulating 20M Particles in JavaScript on Friday July 12, 2024 @09:27PM (#40951025)
When I first opened this, I was stunned! It is really pretty, and I can't believe there are so many simulated particles in JS!
This looks really cool, especially in full-screen mode! In the settings screen, I think it would be useful if each option showed a "reset to default" button after you change it.