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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 18 2021, @02:16AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 18 2021, @02:16AM (#1125637)

    Unicode support is trivial if you leave out the emojii garbage. HTML and CSS if done sanely are both reasonably fast and efficient. A big part of the problem is that HTML5 has hundreds of partially defined tags and CSS attributes that almost-but-not-quite do something useful that have to be tied together and rigged with Javascript to actually get anything out of them. Then Javascript itself has some major design defects that have been compounded with massive poorly thought out libraries that consist largely of compatibility code to run on various non-standard browsers, most of which aren't used anymore. Then pile on loads of deliberately broken Javascript whose sole purpose is to thwart No-Script and ad-blockers and you get the mess we have today. A powerful system doesn't need to be over-complicated or inefficient, but we have entrenched interests who depend on brokenness to maintain their positions.