How I built my own browser
In this technical retrospective (2020), @skilled shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Pandemic Bubble (2020–2022)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 50 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 48 comments
"How I built my own browser, starting with nothing but a browser"
Next up: how I painted my own Impressionist masterpiece, starting with nothing but a high-resolution camera, access to a museum, and an inkjet printer; how I wrote my own operating system, starting with nothing but Linux (ahem, https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos doesn't have a kernel yet); how I built my own sports car, starting with nothing but a Lamborghini.
Claiming that you've written "a new web browser" because you've stuck your own URL bar and tabs on Blink is absurdity bordering on fraud, like claiming that Shiva Ayyuradai "invented email", that tempered glass ovenware is "pyrex", that physics and chemistry are "not philosophy", that submicron gold particles are "nanotechnology", or that Ayn Rand is "a philosopher". It's the kind of claim that can only survive by redefining a decades-old term to mean something much more trivial.
Ehn, it’s making a UI around a chrome web view (well, electron).
“Making a browser” like this dates back to the early days of internet explorer - windows provided an explorer view (I can’t recall the api name, and it was activex!). But it was fairly close to drag and drop browser creation.
There was an old demo for WebKit where you could make a browser literally with nothing but drag and drop (cocoa bindings made this possible).
The title is clearly a bit of marketing, but this is really a great piece nonetheless.
It's not actually about building a browser. What it is about is building an MVP (perhaps unwittingly), scratching your own itch, iterating based on feedback from early adopters, and discovering a niche where there's a lot of value waiting to be unlocked. If only everyone approached building products this way.
Another interesting related thing is Decaf https://github.com/timbaloney/decaf
It is a webkit fork (not electron) that allows you to run ruby in your browser. Hasn't been updated in a while but it used to work.
For those who criticize for not creating an own rendering engine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)#Browsers_based_on_Chromium