VGG browser is a web-compatible browser that is based on VGG specs and runtime, which renders everthing as vector graphics.
The modern web browser is not only a browser for hyper-linked documents, but also a foundation for GUI applications. Modern GUI applications are heavily relying on the web browser or its variants like WebView/CEF/Electron and so on.
However, the web browser itself is a HUGE project that is hardly possible to build from scratch, as there are many different specifications like HTML, CSS, SVG, and etc. Each specification at least requires a separate parser implementation and a render implementation, not even to mention that these specifications need to fit each other.
Luckily, VGG specs and runtime happen to provide an alternative way for building a web-compatible browser by converting any web codes into VGG's vector graphics as well as utilizing the power provided by VGG runtime. So why not just build it for fun?
This outlines how we might handle each web standards
| Web Standards | How to be compatible | Status |
|---|---|---|
| HTML/CSS | converted to VGG | Just staring |
| SVG | converted to VGG | Just staring |
| JS/WebAssembly | Use Nodejs | Already provided by VGG runtime |
| Network related | Use Nodejs | Already provided by VGG runtime |
| Canvas | Use Skia | Already provided by VGG runtime |
| Audio/Video/WebRTC | TBD | Will be provided by VGG runtime |
| WebGL/WebGPU | TBD | Will be provided by VGG runtime |
| WebAI (it's a joke) | TBD | No such a standard exists yet |
Please note that this outline is not a complete list of web techs. For starting, we will focus on the HTML/CSS/SVG conversion, which will takes a long time to be mature.
The benefits are mainly for modern GUI application developers.
- Design-as-Code Paradigm will help you accelerate your application building process. As you can do all the UI design stuff in tools like Figma/Sketch, then you program the logic into it, and the application is alive in VGG browser.
- A True Web Container. You do not have to reinvent fake web containers just to letting Nodejs application running in your browser, because we already embed a whole native Nodejs runtime in VGG browser to be used as the core executor engine!
- Embeddable & Modular & Hackable. Just like VGG runtime, VGG browser will be embeddable into any of your applications, which means it'll be an alternative to WebView/CEF/Electron. Furthermore, not only VGG browser will be designed to be modular for you to customize for your needs, but also it will provide internal APIs for hacking in a normal VGG application. This feature is heavily needed in some Web applications (like Figma) but is not provided in common web browsers.
MIT License