Microsoft, with the almost unlimited $$ they have, decided against their own browser engine. That made quite a statement.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Web push notifications does not mean any random site can spam you just because you visited it once. You have to explicitly accept it.
But that is not the same as saying that making a new browser engine being impossible in 2020.