cwbrowser - A Zig-built browser engine passing Acid3 with 100/100
Show HN: I worked on a new browser for 2 years, today it passed Acid 3
cwbrowser is a groundbreaking web browser featuring a rendering engine written entirely from scratch in Zig, paired with Google's V8 for JavaScript execution. Developed over two years of solo engineering, this lightweight engine bypasses Chromium, WebKit, and Gecko to deliver performance roughly twice as fast as Chrome in early benchmarks. It achieves a perfect 100/100 score on the Acid3 conformance test, proving that a modern, standards-compliant browser can be rebuilt to be smaller, faster, and fully understandable by a single developer. A macOS preview for Apple Silicon is coming soon.
The result is a browser small enough to reason about end to end, and fast enough to beat the mainstream engines on the same hardware.
- timhigins
Acid3 is 100 tests but to have a browser that works on any real percentage of the internet you need to pass the over 52000 tests and nearly two million subtests [1] that make up the Web Platform Tests [2]
This is like the difference between a college degree and passing a spelling test.
1. https://servo.org/blog/2023/07/20/servo-web-platform-tests/
2. https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt
Not to mention this site is clearly vibe coded and has a vague call to action and no source code available thus indicating possible vaporware.
- flowofcontrol
Awesome work! Can't wait for it to land.
What license will you release under?
- anonymous_user9
If you're going to "Show HN" you should show something. This just a hastily-extruded [1] landing page with no details.
Also, using an agentic framework and writing code by hand "a lot of the time" does not count as "from scratch".
- Kon5ole
Faster than chrome and 100% clearance of acid3 is certainly interesting, and a great achievement for a solo dev, good job!
I’d love to see something entirely FOSS dethrone the big corp browsers, hope that’s the goal here.
- krackers
Modern browsers should no longer score 100 on Acid 3 though.
>By April 2017, the updated specifications had diverged from the test such that the latest versions of Google Chrome, Safari and Mozilla Firefox no longer pass the test as written