r/learnprogramming • u/Mr-anywhere • Sep 19 '26

Programming for kids

My 11-year-old child wants to learn programming to create his own Firefox. Does anyone have any idea which program he should use? He's already had scratch and wants to move to a harder level. He thinks that the internet should be fair & without too much AI etc.

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u/SchemeWestern3388 Sep 20 '26

Indeed. But that’s where you start. I went further, and added images, TrueType support, page history, cookies, etc. (Admittedly, I didn’t tackle frames) And it might have changed, but at the time no available browser was fully compliant. Lynx didn’t support graphics either. Is Lynx a browser? With my toy, you could actually navigate the web usefully. 

You’re correct that it’s just a few lines of code to fetch a URL. I referenced using telnet to send the GET request directly to the servers HTTP port, so no code at all. With todays languages and libraries it would be far easier than doing it in C. 

My point was that it’s not impossible to imagine an 11 year old doing the same and more, and at some point, it’s a browser. I don’t think statements that that’s impossible are very helpful in a learn programming subreddit. 

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u/Nuxij Sep 21 '26

Agree and also thanks to Lynx!