Repos / hi.imnhan.com / 77c20597ee
commit 77c20597ee011bce92e935fcf7e492cfea2f404c
Author: Bùi Thành Nhân <hi@imnhan.com>
Date: Fri May 29 12:54:21 2020 +0700
add mcross post
diff --git a/content/images/mcross_01_screenshot.png b/content/images/mcross_01_screenshot.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..309fc22
Binary files /dev/null and b/content/images/mcross_01_screenshot.png differ
diff --git a/content/images/mcross_02_castor.png b/content/images/mcross_02_castor.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..028cc0b
Binary files /dev/null and b/content/images/mcross_02_castor.png differ
diff --git a/content/posts/introducing-mcross.md b/content/posts/introducing-mcross.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2f54e13
--- /dev/null
+++ b/content/posts/introducing-mcross.md
@@ -0,0 +1,132 @@
+Title: Introducing McRoss - a minimal gemini browser
+Date: 2020-05-29 09:44
+Category: side projects
+
+
+The last couple of months saw the first "PR" wave of [the gemini protocol][1]
+on the usual online [tech][2][(bro)][3] forums. Its pitch is simple: the web
+has gone out of hand, gopher is too barebones and insecure by default, here's a
+new thing that sits in the middle.
+
+Personally I'm skeptical if this thing will take off any time soon (or ever).
+Sure I agree the web is [comically bloated][4], [openly user-hostile][5], and
+tech's knight in shining armor of yesteryear has somehow managed to become both
+a [creepy big brother][6] and a shameless [snake oil][7] peddler at the same
+time, so on and so forth... But the fact remains that the web is the most
+convenient thing there is, both from a user's and developer's perspective.
+Gemini is a fun experiment. It may even be a hit among <strike>nerds</strike>
+power users and the overly privacy-concious, but that's it.
+
+But then again, I consider myself among the "<strike>nerds</strike> power users
+and the overly privacy-concious" demographic, so I naturally want to see what
+cool stuff people on the gemini-verse are up to. Therefore, I need a gemini
+browser. _Naturally_, I [wrote one][12]:
+
+
+
+Or check out a [demo video](https://sr.ht/~nhanb/mcross/).
+
+At this stage it can browse plaintext and gemini content, but not binary yet.
+It also doesn't verify TLS certificates, because turns out [in the gemini
+world][11] it's preferable for browser to use self-signed certs and expect
+clients to trust on first use (TOFU), just like how basic SSH works. I haven't
+implemented TOFU yet so the browser trusts whatever and is vulnerable to MITM
+attacks for every request. It's highly unlikely that anyone would bother to,
+but take everything you read with a pinch of salt anyway.
+
+Why not use one of the existing browsers you ask? Sure enough there are a bunch
+of existing browsers, with [Castor][8] appearing to be the furthest along in
+development, but it didn't work _quite_ the way I would like. Moreover, I've
+always wanted an excuse to try GUI & socket programming in python. Anyway, the
+following are what I disagree with in the Castor browser:
+
+### Visual feedback:
+
+When I click a button, visit a link, or press Enter on the address bar, I
+expect some kind of visual feedback that tells me my input registered
+correctly, and the browser is working on my request, not hanging. This sounds
+ridiculously elementary considering that's how, say, all Windows 95 programs
+worked, but here we are two decades and a half later and the Castor browser
+just completely freezes the GUI during every network request.
+
+With McRoss I intentionally put the GUI and I/O event loops in their separate
+threads to make sure the program's always responsive. I also paid attention to
+small details like the loading cursor and real-time status bar. At no point
+should the program hang or crash without displaying a proper message.
+
+### Aesthetics:
+
+Call me picky but I don't like how links are presented as buttons and they
+don't even have breathing room between them:
+
+
+
+Another admittedly petty issue I have is that it's GTK, and I'm using KDE
+Plasma which although has a compatibility layer that tries to render GTK widget
+as close to KDE counterparts as possible, the result is still... subpar.
+
+McRoss on the other hand uses the tk gui toolkit, and as of tk 8.6, it
+automatically gives you the native look and feel on Windows and Mac OS (well,
+not automatically but it takes trivial work anyway). Linux however doesn't have
+such a thing, but the bundled `clam` theme looks pleasing enough for me. Yes, I
+do think a retro/classic looking theme fares better than the gtk-on-kde look,
+and its simple scrollbar looks and _works_ way better than those
+nigh-unclickable abominations that KDE and GTK call their "modern scrollbar",
+fight me.
+
+Another explicit design decision in McRoss is that while custom styling is
+applied to special lines (heading, list, code block...), their textual content
+is kept the same as source, with the special characters (`#`, `*`, etc.)
+intact. This way when someone has read a gemini page, they already know how to
+write one. I lifted this idea off of [imageboards][9] and [textboards][10].
+
+### Installation:
+
+Castor is written in Rust. One of Rust's strong points is the ability to
+compile to a single statically linked executable that users can just download
+and run. Unfortunately, Castor doesn't currently provide those compiled
+executables so users are supposed to install the Rust toolchain then build
+Castor themselves. Compiling a gtk-enabled Rust project is... not a quick
+affair.
+
+McRoss is currently packaged as a well-behaved PyPI package and can be
+installed with `pip3 install mcross`. Its only dependencies are the standard
+library and `curio` so installation should be super fast. I know I know,
+requiring python in the first place is its own can of worms. I do plan to
+improve the situation with "frozen" executables some time down the line.
+
+# Closing thoughts
+
+To me the whole gemini ecosystem represents the long-lost positive naivety, not
+necessarily of the early web, but of my younger self when I first hopped on the
+relatively early iteration of the web. It was not even as far as the "good old
+gopher/bbs days" those boomers keep ranting about - it was the days of early
+MMORPGs, of crappy Yahoo! 360 blogs riced up with copy-pasted html/css all over
+the place, of Vietnamese warez forums powered by pirated vBulletin running on
+shady free shared CPanel hosts, of monthly Drupal/Joomla SQL injection
+zero-days. It was truly the wild wild web, insanely accessible, insanely
+unsafe, and insanely fun. It was the web where a young clueless highschool me
+could find fun random stuff everyday, put fun random stuff out there for
+everyone to see, no matter how shitty and unsecure they are, because it didn't
+matter if I get pwn'd: my life back then wasn't that much dependent on the web.
+
+Can I get all that back? I think not. The web, or more broadly, the internet
+grew up, just like anything where there's enough profit to be made. I'm not
+saying it's a bad thing (hell, I make a living out of building webstuff), but
+it is undeniably a sad thing. Gemini may be a spark that begins a push back
+against unjustified complexity, or it may end up being just another niche tech
+curiosity. I'm leaning towards the latter but hey at least with McRoss it's a
+halfway usable tech curiosity.
+
+[1]: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
+[2]: https://lobste.rs/s/79pu7o/gemini_protocol_inbetween_gopher_web
+[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23042424
+[4]: https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
+[5]: https://neustadt.fr/essays/against-a-user-hostile-web/
+[6]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/20/20974832/facebook-google-surveillance-data-assault-privacy-amnesty-international
+[7]: https://developers.google.com/amp
+[8]: https://sr.ht/~julienxx/Castor/
+[9]: https://4chan.org/
+[10]: https://textboard.org/
+[11]: https://todo.sr.ht/~nhanb/mcross/1
+[12]: https://sr.ht/~nhanb/mcross/