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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: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday March 17 2021, @04:40PM (6 children)
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)
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)
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
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)
A lot of modern documentation suffers from this malady.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday March 19 2021, @01:48AM (1 child)
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
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?