this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
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https://geminiprotocol.net/
Woah cool.
Unironically installed Geopard on my laptop shortly after I saw this post. I've been curious about the Gemini protocol for a while.
Yay I'm glad you're giving it a spin!
Gemini may not be the answer per se, but I think it's not realistic for anyone to make a new web browser at this point. At least not without extremely deep pockets or being able to use somebody else's extremely deep pockets. Looking at you servo.
The the Web standard is just way too huge, and even servo's method of breaking the browser down into a bunch of libraries just spreads the massive complexity around, it doesn't really make it smaller.
The idea that somehow a sufficiently motivated open source community can just make a web browser is wishful thinking imo. Maybe Gemini is too limited, but it's an interesting experiment of a particular line that you could draw. And even at this minimal level of complexity, it's not trivial to write a Gemini browser. You can make really, really trivial clients, which is cool, but actually building up the whole browser interface is still a relatively challenging task.
I'm not too tech savvy so you'll have to excuse me, but something I've been thinking… The impossibility of making new web browsers from scratch that can follow the huuuuge Web standard is basically because people expect to be able to do "more or less everything" right in their browsers nowadays, right? So maybe the "solution" here is to have more of a culture around doing things offline, torrenting instead of streaming, and then when doing things over the Internet, just having more specialized programs (and protocols?) instead of having an Everything Program for the Everything Protocol.
Yes and no, but I do like your thinking here. Using more specialized apps is kinda moving the complexity around, but the way the browser standards work also makes the problem way worse.
There are other cross-platform toolkits that are waaaay cheaper to maintain. We are just stuck with the one that Google is using as a "moat" to keep other web platform competitors from cutting into their profits, while pretending to support an open platform. The standard grows so fast that not even Microsoft can stomach the cost of keeping up.
As always, the issue is capitalism. Like, you probably don't want to politically dictate technical standards, but we also don't have any democratic method for tech workers to build and implement a sustainable standard. People do try, but they're usually just trying to compete in the so-called marketplace of ideas and don't really have a political strategy for building a people's internet or whatever.
I feel very confused looking at the documents on how to access content. Can you give an example of what you would enter into Geopard to access one of its search engines or something like that? Your comment is the first I've heard of this and I'm interested.
After installing and launching Geopard, I just clicked on the address bar at the top of the window, typed in my search query, and hit enter, just like I would on Firefox or Chrome or any other modern browser. Geopard's default search engine is called TLGS ("Totally Legit" Gemini Search).
Oh shoot, I did that and was getting a socket connection error, so thought I was doing something wrong. Must be an issue on my end then.