Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

For the First Time in Years, Someone is Building a Web Browser from Scratch

posted by martyb on Wednesday March 17 2021, @11:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the starting-over dept.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

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.

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
For the First Time in Years, Someone is Building a Web Browser from Scratch | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 93 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 17 2021, @02:24PM (2 children)

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Wednesday March 17 2021, @02:24PM (#1125362) Journal

    https://support.ekioh.com/download/ [ekioh.com]

    There's no menu bar, URL bar, or scroll bar.

    I navigated to CNN from a Wikipedia article, seems sluggish, probably because no uBlock.

    It has promise, but it seems that ad, script, and autoplay video blockers do just as much if not more than quadrupling the speed of the rendering.

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   2  

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 17 2021, @04:37PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 17 2021, @04:37PM (#1125398)

    CNN is jammed with bloatware, it's impressive if it can run at all on a Pi in any browser.

    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 17 2021, @04:52PM

      by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Wednesday March 17 2021, @04:52PM (#1125406) Journal

      https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/17/politics/ron-desantis-covid-florida/index.html [cnn.com]

      You're not wrong, but with scripts and autoplay video blocked, it loads pretty much instantly. No paywall or adblock whining like many other news sites these days.

      They will probably add these features or Firefox/Chrome addon compatibility at some point, so no big deal. Flow's main advantage seems to be in WebGL performance [cnx-software.com].

      The company told CNX Software that the main differences between Flow and other browsers are multithreaded layout and GPU rendering:

      The former is what makes Flow so much faster in the CraftyMind and UI Layers benchmarks which are layout dominated. On the Pi’s quad-core processor, Flow is able to layout 4 times as much text as a Chromium which has single-threaded layout.

      The latter (GPU rendering) accounts for Flow’s increased performance on the Particle Acceleration, Sinz Maze and MotionMark benchmarks.

      I have a feeling that Chromium will just copy this approach, and then the advantage will be gone.

      --
      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]