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

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.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Wednesday March 17 2021, @02:54PM (11 children)

    by tangomargarine (667) on Wednesday March 17 2021, @02:54PM (#1125376)

    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

    Doesn't Chrome/ium use WebKit as well? Was curious so I looked it up.

    The Blink browser engine (a fork of the WebKit engine[107][108]) was introduced on 4 April 2013 in Chromium 28.0.1463.0.[109]

    So it's kinda like saying, "this isn't based on WebKit or WebKit."

    Regardless, best of luck too them--now that Microsoft is killing off IE and switched Edge to a WebKit backend, and Mozilla has lost basically its entire userbase, we really need another real browser to diversify the monoculture.

    --
    "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 17 2021, @04:25PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 17 2021, @04:25PM (#1125392)

    I don't have high hopes.

    When applications ran directly on an OS, there needed to be a standard OS. That became Microsoft DOS at first, then Windows. Apple Macintosh was a tiny niche OS for certain apps only. Now that so many apps run on the browser, there needs to be a standard browser. Same result will occur. There is room for one very dominant standard, another also-ran, and NOTHING ELSE.

    • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday March 17 2021, @06:29PM (2 children)

      by tangomargarine (667) on Wednesday March 17 2021, @06:29PM (#1125439)

      Pragmatically, yeah. There are benefits to avoiding monoculture, but being able to be lazy/interoperate everywhere with minimal effort wins out in the end.

      See also MS Office vs Free/LibreOffice / ODF vs OOXML. MS using their dominance to smother the technically better competition (compare the length of the "standards" spec on ODF vs OOXML?).

      Or how it would be great if we had a *real* viable third party in politics, but the electoral college in the U.S. basically prevents that from ever happening. If either party dies a new one replaces it, or if a third party starts gaining too much traction one of the big two incorporate the 3p platform into their own (or at least pay lip service to it) before that can happen.

      --
      "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 18 2021, @02:04AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 18 2021, @02:04AM (#1125630)

        Blaming that mess on the Electoral College misses a much bigger problem. The USA has the same two parties at both federal and state level and the federal heads control everything. If state-level politics could be split off so that the federal parties weren't allowed to interfere with state elections and each state had to have its own parties, with separate leadership and finances for all, that would break things up enough to give local issues a real voice in the public square and give the states legitimate incentive to push back against federal overreach. The founders were big on separation of powers, but that was the biggest one they missed. Of course fixing it would take power away from some of the most powerful people in the world so there would be murder done to prevent such an idea from ever gaining traction.

  • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday March 17 2021, @04:40PM (6 children)

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 17 2021, @04:40PM (#1125401) Homepage Journal

    What part of a browser's work does Webkit do? I looked up Webkit's documentation a few years back and didn't manage to figure it out.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 17 2021, @04:43PM (5 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 17 2021, @04:43PM (#1125403)

      It manages the DOM tree, all elements on the page are a node, and the nodes have handles to interact with Javascript and the renderer.

      • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday March 17 2021, @05:58PM (4 children)

        by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 17 2021, @05:58PM (#1125426) Homepage Journal

        Thank you. It sounds useful.

        I wish the documentation I found had included this brief statement of function.
        Instead it contained excruciatingly technical details -- which would have been OK if they had provided this context.

        From your answer I suspect it does not:
        * actually parse or interpret the javascript.
        * actually access the web itself; it lets the caller do all the page fetching
        * render the text or other gadgets onto a screen.

        I could use this in a project I've imagined -- a fake browser for my email reader to use instead of a real browser. The fake browser would look for any actual displayable text on the page and display that, as well as reports on anything it finds suspicious. Then it would ask me whether to proceed. If I tell it not to, it will just return to the email reader, mission accomplished. If I tell it to proceed, it would pass the page to a real browser.

        I get a lot of html-only email from legitimate and illegitimate sources. Sometimes it's not obvious which is which. Used to be html-only was used only by spammers. Times have changed. Using something like this to screen html-only email would be useful. Often the only useful stuff in even legitimate html-only messages is the text itself, hidden within a thousand lines of unreadable html.

        -- hendrik

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 17 2021, @06:48PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 17 2021, @06:48PM (#1125446)

          Use Thunderbird and tell it to display in simple HTML but not to fetch remote resources. You can read the text easily, but most of the images will be blank squares.

        • (Score: 2) by Common Joe on Thursday March 18 2021, @10:40AM (2 children)

          by Common Joe (33) <{common.joe.0101} {at} {gmail.com}> on Thursday March 18 2021, @10:40AM (#1125719) Journal

          I wish the documentation I found had included this brief statement of function.

          A lot of modern documentation suffers from this malady.

          • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday March 19 2021, @01:48AM (1 child)

            by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 19 2021, @01:48AM (#1126109) Homepage Journal

            I know. I keep getting notices of a major new release of some package, but I have no idea what the package is supposed to do. I go to the package's website, and all I find about it it the changelog, in which they give five-word summaries of bugs they've fixed. still no idea what the package is actually for.

            For all I know, it might be just what I've been wanting to use for years, but I can't tell.

            And I'm *not* going to install it on my computer and perform experiments on it to try and figure out what it might do.

            -- hendrik

            • (Score: 2) by Common Joe on Friday March 19 2021, @08:19AM

              by Common Joe (33) <{common.joe.0101} {at} {gmail.com}> on Friday March 19 2021, @08:19AM (#1126155) Journal

              Hmph. I've seen a lot of crappy documentation, but I just discovered a new low in release notes this morning. Check out Slack's release notes [slack.com] for their Linux version for the past 9 months.

              Additionally, the release notes go back all the way to June 2017... so WTF is the Linux version still in beta?