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For the first time in years, someone is building a web browser from scratch:
For more than two decades, building a new web browser from scratch has been practically unheard of. But a small company called Ekioh has its reasons.
The Cambridge, U.K.-based company is developing a browser called Flow, and unlike the vast majority of browsers that have arrived in recent years, it's not based on Google's Chromium or Apple's WebKit open-source code. Instead, Flow is starting with a blank slate and building its own rendering engine. Its goal is to make web-based apps run smoothly even on cheap microcomputers such as the Raspberry Pi.
There's a reason companies don't do this anymore: Experts say building new browsers isn't worth the trouble when anyone can just modify the work that Apple and Google are doing. But if Flow succeeds, it could rethink the way we browse the web and open the door to cheaper gadgets. That at least seems like a goal worth pursuing.
"It's a huge task, but if you want something which is very small and very fast, you typically can't start with one of the other engines," says Stephen Reeder, Ekioh's commercial director.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 17 2021, @12:00PM (10 children)
Article said:
"It's a huge task, but if you want something which is very small and very fast, you typically can't start with one of the other engines," says Stephen Reeder, Ekioh's commercial director.
I think it's impossible for a browser to support ALL the Web and not end up slow and bloated. The standards are many and all interactivity is controlled by Javascript, an interpreted language. You are never going to get high performance from the Web -- not unless you go back to HTML 1.0
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 17 2021, @02:22PM (5 children)
w3 lists more than 1200 standards documents totaling over 140 million pages. and they keep adding standards. a standards compliant browser is *impossible* to build.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 17 2021, @03:21PM
Nor desirable. Why implement the "battery API" for example.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 17 2021, @04:34PM (3 children)
I've seen a coherent argument that the constant rapid growth of the standards is intentional by Google, because it makes it impossible to challenge the WebKit/Blink monopoly.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 17 2021, @06:12PM
I think it's largely unintentional. The constant focus on the latest new shiny while leaving last week's products to rot appears to be an endemic cultural problem at Google. The proliferation of web "living standards" and whatnot is just the natural result when you have this attitude.
"What do you mean someone is not be running the latest software just released 10 minutes ago? Acceptance testing? What's that? Why don't you just constantly rewrite all your critical infrastructure to use the latest and greatest features? That old stuff is no fun, new stuff is fun, you should be using new stuff, oh and BTW we're gonna disable the old API in 3 days because we came up with a new interface yesterday which changes one function name because we like how "fluffydog" sounds better than "fuzzycat" and it's too much effort to maintain both."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 17 2021, @11:32PM
plus many of those new "standards" are just extracted out of chrome and rubber-stamped with sometimes some community feedback taken
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 18 2021, @01:43AM
This is exactly correct. Microsoft started it when they took over the html5 standard committee but Google beat them to the punch with Chrome. Making the 'standard' impossible to follow is a highly effective way to enforce vendor lock-in and is why most of the smaller browsers are gone now. Heck, even Microsoft has been forced onto the Chromium bandwagon with Edge. If even they can't afford to support an independent browser then nobody can.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday March 17 2021, @06:18PM (3 children)
These days Javascript is compiled to byte code or native code. [1] [wikipedia.org] [2] [stackexchange.com]
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 18 2021, @01:48AM (2 children)
Once of the major complaints Debian has against Chromium (the supposedly open-source base version) is the inclusion of *pre-compiled* Javascript in the official repository. No source code. No explanation of where it came from or who wrote it. Not even a licence statement so it isn't actually legal to distribute it. But Chromium depends on it to work properly. Google's response? 'Javascript is interpreted so you don't need to see the source code.'
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday March 18 2021, @01:43PM (1 child)
That seems like a complaint about Chromium not a complaint about Javascript.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday March 18 2021, @01:43PM
It's like arguing against C++ because Microsoft delivers binaries without source code.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.