Flow Browser Preview on the Raspberry Pi 400
ekioh.com
ekioh.com
I think the general idea that "writing an engine for the web is impossible in 2020" is dangerous. It can only ever lead to less diversity: that idea is a sure road to a chrome-only-web, which is far worse than the dark-IE6-ages.
I truly hope Flow finds its niche or sweet spot. Maybe embedded is that, maybe micro-computers. I truly hope a big name gets behind it, though. Maybe a game console or other OEM that needs a built-in browser. Maybe the Chino-West-economic war will force a large asian phone os to build their own browser. We'll see.
But there really is need for another browser engine. If alone to prove that writing a new one from scratch is possible in 2020.
Sounds a bit like what Mozilla had in mind with their mobile OS back in the days.
They merged in the CSS work (stylo) a while back and Webrender is now the default 2d engine.
I don't think I have the energy to do the entire DOM myself, and implement a JS engine, and CSS, and so on... Plus all the nuance of image rendering (even if you use third party libraries for this, you gotta figure out which ones to use and ensure you're doing so correctly and securely).
Set a lower standard though? HN is arguably a good website with just enough of each tech and high signal to noise ratio. How difficult to make it work in a new browser? Who cares if it renders the Facebook wall misaligned.
I'm not sure what you mean by this sentence. Are you saying it would be dangerous if writing a new engine in 2020 were impossible (agree) or are you saying that making such a statement is dangerous (hard disagree).
Making a new engine in 2020 is hard. Making a new engine that becomes a sustainable, maintainable project in the medium term MAY BE impossible (Flow looks amazing but I imagine funding and maintaining it long-term will be an immense challenge). Discussing this fact, and the reasons that it is so challenging is important if we hope to avoid the dangers of a monoculture.
Just because Microsoft has a ton of money it doesn't mean that every project they work on and every team in the company have unlimited budget.
And even if that was the case for their browser engine team, the project might stop for other reasons too - e.g. internal politics, changes in focus/goals, etc.
It isn't like Microsoft (or any big company really) doesn't drop projects that people wouldn't expect them to drop.
They aren't interested in keeping up because they don't gain anything from it and they don't loose a lot by lagging behind.
Apple is more than capable to implement stuff like push notifications but that would compete with the app store where they make money and by disallowing others from bringing a browser to iOS they don't need to.
Is this really just for money? On Android I found it insufferable that websites in tabs I had closed could still pop something up on my lock screen.
As a user I want them in sites like Slack so I never need to install the Slack app.
Same here for Twitter, Mastodon, the local news (push), weather (push and geo), public transport (push, geo and backround-service) and so on.
There are apps for all of them, but especially the apps in the long tail (local news, local public transport) are bad (as in: it is clear they are budget-restrained). I don't want to fill my phone with hardly-used, crappy apps, when a link to a website will suffice perfectly.
I use web-apps for anything possible. Via https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.tobykurien.webapps/ and https://progressiveapp.store/pwas
Dear god no. These should never have been a thing in fact. Especially for untrusted websites. I should make a website that abuses them just to make my point. Their only value is getting an eyeball back on to the ads. This is one thing Apple did right.
Web push notifications does not mean any random site can spam you just because you visited it once. You have to explicitly accept it.
I don't see how you could "make a website that abuses them just to make [your] point." No one would bother enabling notifications for your abusive website, and even if you managed to convince them to do it, they'd just turn them off for your abusive website as soon as you started spamming them.
Ironically, I use that feature for installed apps most (you're a banking app, stop bugging me with unrelated news!) and hardly ever to turn off a accidentally allowed web-notification.
But that is not the same as saying that making a new browser engine being impossible in 2020.
Not as big a company as MS/Apple, but certainly more established than Ekioh sofar.
I really hope Ekioh can succeed here long-term where others haven't.
Raise of cheap full featured ARM CPUs made it obsolete.
Opera's Presto engine was mainly used in their desktop and smartphone browsers. It was not used directly in Opera mini on feature phones.
> Raise of cheap full featured ARM CPUs made it obsolete.
Not sure what this means. How would ARM make a browser obsolete?
Honestly, i do not believe that Flow has much of a future as a proprietary product for providing a browser engine no matter how good it supposedly is - even Sciter presents itself as a UI engine, not a browser engine.
However that doesn't mean writing a new browser engine is impossible, it only means that it doesn't make much economic sense for a company to do so. Those two are not the same thing.
From what I can tell, Ekioh appear to be doing the same[0]
> that doesn't mean writing a new browser engine is impossible, it only means that it doesn't make much economic sense for a company to do so. Those two are not the same thing.
This is basically what I said in my first comment above: it's always technically possible, but is it practically possible. One needs a certain small amount of economic support to continue any project (no matter how small) these days. Whether it's feasible via donations/etc. or whether some kind of commercial setup is required isn't really super-relevant. The only question here is: if it's the former, can the income support employing devs to work on it, or can voluntary developer contributions maintain the project long term (for which you typically need a large community, with which you typically get further scaling & cost concerns).
It's notable also that Flow is not open source, so Opera is actually a very good comparison here (and much of the above donation/volunteer-based thoughts are not options here).
We have been developing one here [1]. It's a long way to go, but hey, it's open source!
And we had found it working fine on a RaPi 2 couple of years back.
Rendering of HTML and CSS is a tough task, but can be very performant and doable without any APIs and JS/ECMA.
Thanks for the work. Interesting project!
I had no idea this was a thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Cryptography_API
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Crypto_...
I cut out the juciest bit from the middle:
> The answer is almost certainly it cannot succeed as a general-purpose browser. Indeed, they've said themselves (emphasis mine) ...
Lots and lots of insightful commentary cut out, really do read it!
> When I have spoken to them, their approach has been significant: they've chosen what features to prioritize based on a chosen major website, and then attempted a complete implementation of those features. An example of this is that they only implemented HTMLTableElement in the recent past, despite having supported much of the HTML DOM for a lot longer.
> Historically, many attempts at new browser engines have started by trying to systematically implement features per specification, only to find that no interesting site is yet functional even when the majority is done. By being vastly more selective and only implementing features when needed, they are undoubtedly cutting out many obscure legacy features unlikely to be used on any major site today.
I like them already. Imagine if any of the crashy FOSS video editors had taken this route.
This (provided the Raspberry Pi's poularity, affordability and power - surely it would be of no use without these) actually is an extremely cool feature. You can engineer OSes and entire solutions without caring about compatibility issues now. Like in the good old days when people would invent entire HW+OS platforms like NeXT and Amiga, but now you have the HW part done for you.
I wonder if they've pushed any fixes or bug reports upstream.
So it won't be for me but nevertheless more competition in the rendering engine area is welcome.
Whether this is a good or a bad thing depends on how it plays out. If software like Flow conforms to standards and offers a better experience, battery life, privacy, etc then it might work out well. An open infrastructure with a marketplace to pay for desired features will benefit us all.
The bad scenario is that the web continues to fracture into proprietary components. While a web not dominated by Chrome seems almost unimaginable today, it wasn't that long ago that sites that only worked in Internet Explorer were commonplace. If Flow actually becomes the dominant web browser and Flow-only websites ever become the norm, we'll all be worse off for it. That really is a far off scenario, so for now, having Flow as an extra player on the web is probably a good thing.
So presumably one would license the engine to use in their device or game and integrate that cost on the end product, rather than a user explicitly paying $X to Ekioh.
Needs: FOSS reasonable rendering, runs on Linux (Gentoo), no-bs. It's mostly FF - but they still pack in BS. And I want things like uBO to work.
I keep experiment with Servo and trying to build apps to embed other renderers so already spend time-cash trying to solve "user agent" problem
E.g.: Apple and Google always tout how safari and chrome are fast, and maybe they are, but the truth is that the upstream from most websites is really slow, so the actual rendering speed does not matter.
Basically they admitted they can't make a decent browser that people want, then they re-skin someone else's work and suddenly expect us to want it more than the one they copied? How does that even make sense. Who would pick a mod kit over a real Ferrari.
Apart from people not caring about the engine, Microsoft has a very bad history in the browsing arena which is why I (and many others) don't trust them anymore. I don't want them to become big again in the browser market. We already know what happens then: years of stagnation, platform lock-in, no interest in security. And no, they haven't changed their tune, the same is still happening with MS Office where they still own a de facto monopoly.
Of course what plays into this for me as well is that I don't like Chrome either so I stay with Firefox anyway. But the pressure Microsoft are exerting at work to move everything to Edge is annoying.
I always use Firefox and even though it's not perfect I've never seen it break a site unless it's done on purpose by the site itself (like Apple's business portal that refuses to support Firefox).
Perhaps it's just my particular love of weird and new (and old) platforms, but my greatest fear isn't so much being stuck with a single engine as being struck on a small set of mainstream platforms in order to use the engine. I don't think it's a coincidence that the Switch and PlayStation 5 lack a user-exposed web browser; sure it would be a nice feature, but it's not worthwhile for Sony and Nintendo to keep up to date.
If we'd had today's web browsers in 2007, and Apple didn't already lead the Webkit project, would Steve Jobs have been able to create the iPhone, with a first-class web browser as a key selling point? A web browser is the single most essential application for modern life. What future innovations are we missing out on?
Clearly, Nintendo doesn't consider it good enough for general use. And having played with it, I very much agree—it doesn't work on lots of sites and likes to crash a lot. I assume the PS5's browser is the same.
Perhaps a browser such as Flow built for embedded hardware could address that.
-bash: ./flow: No such file or directory