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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: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday March 17 2021, @06:23PM (3 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 17 2021, @06:23PM (#1125436) Journal

    The history of browsers is like the history of the world:

    First comes the Navigator.

    Then comes the Explorer.

    Then comes the Konqueror.

    Eventually all browsers are based on some descendant of the original Konqueror code base (once FireFox dies and only WebKit remains).

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 17 2021, @06:49PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 17 2021, @06:49PM (#1125447)

    There's already talk of dumping the modern web for a simpler document format. WebKit will end up as a rendering engine for WASM runtimes.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 17 2021, @07:16PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 17 2021, @07:16PM (#1125458)

    What happened to Mosaic? Lynx? Multitude of other browsers that fell at the side due to the Explorer / Navigator war.

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by DannyB on Wednesday March 17 2021, @07:44PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 17 2021, @07:44PM (#1125478) Journal

      There is more to the Explorer vs everything else war.

      It was 1995. Macs had great TCP/IP network and dial up support at this time. Great GUI software for Telnet, FTP, Usenet and Email. Especially making Usenet binary multipart downloads almost magically easy. And Mosaic and Netscape.

      Microsoft suddenly realized the internet was happening. I also remember helping some friends because it was tricky at that time to set up a PC with Winsock and Netscape so that they too could browse this new web thingy.

      Suddenly, the very idea of web based cross platform applications was a major threat to Microsoft's desktop monopoly. So . . . they needed a browser for Windows that they could control, and they needed it now.

      So they found a company that already made a Windows browser, called Spyglass. Microsoft bought Spyglass for $100,000 up front plus a generous royalty percent of all sales. Microsoft renamed it to Internet Explorer and guess how many copies they ever sold? Zero. But it wasn't because Microsoft was cheap, no, it was simply because they were evil. You see, Microsoft then proceeded to invest years and $150 million into IE development to create a great browser with amazing features for creating rich web applications -- on Windows ONLY.

      Later as web standards emerged, and they did, IE became the bane of web developers everywhere with its non standards compliance.

      --
      People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.