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: 3, Insightful) by Pino P on Thursday March 18 2021, @12:39PM (1 child)
How would the functionality of, say, a chat site like Slack or Discord or Teams be present without script? Would the user need to click a button every 30 seconds to refresh the list of messages? Or would these become native applications, having read-write access to your entire home directory provided they are even compatible with your device's operating system?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 19 2021, @12:58AM
The way we used to do it, framesets/iframes, chunked transfer encoding, and other tricks.