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shadowmint

Its not a new javascript engine.

Its not a new rendering engine.

So basically its just a different UI skin on chrome. That's cute, but its not a new browser.

It's the same browser with a slightly new UI.

Count me as skeptical and unexcited.

I am similarly unexcited by the 'it's browser' webkits views in android and ios, for exactly the same reason; they're dime a dozen, and lack any compelling reason to switch or use.

(Servo, by comparison, is a new rendering engine, with new features that make it extremely interesting)

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I'll voice a dissenting opinion.

Doing HTML and JavaScript are commodities. Given the existence of standards, there's not a lot of room for innovative behavior. Any developments (faster, new HTML standards, etc) won't impact the market unless they're in one of the major browsers. Competition is good, but there's only room in the market for a handful of rendering engines. Maybe 3-5, tops.

Conversely, UI and human interaction with the browser is a place where there's room for an unbounded number of players. This is where the competition can actually be happening. And it's where I think the competition should be happening.

The idea of a browser as something that just renders HTML and executes JavaScript is kinda lame. I use Opera because I think it's also the browser's responsibility to include tab organization and search functionality and mouse gestures and flipping CSS in and out and synchronization. (And I like my mail integrated, but that's a personal thing.) And I want it to Just Work, instead of having to manage a half-dozen extensions.

I am guardedly optimistic about Vivaldi, because it's what I actually out of a browser. (Specifically, an updated version of Opera 12, which Opera 15+ is not.)

  > Given the existence of standards, there's not a lot of 
  > room for innovative behavior.

This is incorrect. Servo, with its goal of being fanatically concurrent, is forging new ground in discovering exactly where the HTML specs both admit concurrency and where they unintentionally demand serial behavior. Browsers of its ilk, regardless of adoption, will be instrumental in informing future standards such that they are not accidentally hostile to concurrency and parallelism, thereby clearing the way for widely-adopted engines to implement such optimizations at their leisure.

> unless they're in one of the major browsers

Servo is a research project for a future version of Firefox. That's the definition of a major browser. No web developers want a new browser with incompatible features to test or build against, but Mozilla/Google/Microsoft experimenting for future versions is expected.

The original point is that independent browsers using established libraries and adding new UI concepts is great for users and doesn't make extra work for web developers. I'm looking forward to what they make of it!

> there's not a lot of room for innovative behavior

Then why have I begun to see "This website only works in Google Chrome, upgrade today!" messages all over the web?

We must surf different webs. I rarely see messages like this these days.

If you go to the Google homepage in a browser that isn't Chrome it shows up.

Funny, i just went to Google.com with Firefox. I see no messages. I also went to Google.com with Safari, and saw a message that said "A faster way to browse the web! Install Google Chrome"

I suspect a "This site only works with chrome!" message only applies to older versions of Internet Explorer.

Crying wolf is so boring these days.

edit: Also i find it hilarious that you think Google would risk rejecting all users who aren't using Chrome. Talk about a great way to give your Search competition a legitimate case.

edit2: The downvoting is cute, and i hope it's because of my tone and not me calling out lies. "Anything but Chrome!" he says - absurd. By all means, downvote my tone, but i should hope outright lying gets similar treatment.

> Funny, i just went to Google.com with Firefox.

It shows on old Opera (Presto), new Opera (Blink) and IE 11, so it's not just old versions of IE.

> Funny, i just went to Google.com with Firefox. I see no messages.

I see it often on Firefox, I have the latest Firefox on linux (35.0.1). It's a blue bar along the top of many Google properties that are decently cross browser. Go to Inbox without chrome and you'll see the "only works with chrome" crap.

The biggest difference is probably NaCl in Chrome right now.

Inbox (by Google) has that.

Whatsapp Web shows that too. https://web.whatsapp.com

That's just horrible. I don't get why they would want to do this. Doesn't Facebook own Whatsapp now? Why would they want to send business to Google?

Because they are using some proprietary technology that is only available in Google Chrome. It will probably take time for Mozilla to adapt this... When Google announced Inbox, they said it would be later adapted to work with other browsers. I guess it is not on the top of their agenda.

i am getting "WhatsApp Web only works in Google Chrome." and i'm using latest chromium :/

Ha ha ... That's interesting :).

It shows that message to Firefox, but not Vivaldi. Must be looking at engine features, not a specific browser.

Google Hangouts: https://www.google.com/hangouts/

There is a lot of room for innovative algorithms for providing those standards. And innovation of that type is exactly what is needed to take the web to the next step - so I applaud any team who tries to build new browsers!

Thank you. As long as it works, I don't care which rendering engine my browser uses, just as I don't care which libc implementation it uses. The browser is the UI, not the libraries it links to.

As a user, a different UI is a more compelling reason to switch than a new engine, as long as the "old, boring" engine performs well enough. I miss the Opera UI of the olden days, but Chrome's engine works just fine for me (memory usage is a bit annoying, but tolerable)

(Not saying that it isn't important that people work on new, different engines as well in the long run)

I think both UI/UX and engines are both valid to work on. Since the work on this one example is done on UI, I'd feel better if I knew how the UI looks like (without having to install it).

I suppose you think every video game made using the Unreal Engine is basically the same game too, right? I can understand the disappointment that they're not creating a new JS or rendering engine, especially from a community like HN that is so technical, but it's absurd to state that this thing is not a new browser simply because it uses these existing technologies. How much end-user functionality really comes from a JS or rendering engine when it's adhering to the same standards that every other competing engine is?

I was likewise hoping that if this new browser used Servo. When I got to the part that said it would be fast, and efficient, and run on old hardware, I thought that Servo would do a good job of that—it has none of the cruft that <WebKit|Gecko|Blink> has.

But then I saw the part that said the browser's UI was Built on Web Technology, and then I read your comment, and my dreams were crushed forever.

Disappointing.

Seriously, I can't understand how they expect this to be any faster when everything on the homepage (which is still mostly content-free) says otherwise.

Servo is for research. It's not production-ready and might never be. It's explicitly not intended to replace Gecko.

<WebKit|Gecko|Blink> has cruft? That seems to be a very relativistic statement.

In ten years, people will be looking at the next next big thing because it has none of the cruft that <Servo> has.

Netcaptor that invented tabbed browsing didn't have a custom new rendering engine either.

It looks like this browser is a continuation of classic Opera, which pioneered a lot of stuff we take for granted today:

- Speed Dial — the start page you get in every browser these days

- mail client with filtered views, later known as "folders like in GMail"

- page modifications with user-supplied JS and CSS (later known as Greasemonkey and basis for browser extensions, which ironically Opera didn't have for a long time)

- address bar history based on full-text search of visited pages

- bookmark sync across devices

- pages rendered by a proxy server (like Amazon Silk browser)

And they've tried plenty of things that didn't catch on: built-in Torrent client, built-in web server (like node.js) and Widgets.

There's plenty of UI R&D to be done.

To each their own, but I couldn't care less about the engine to be honest.

I have like 20 reasons why I miss the old Opera and I currently don't have any browser I feel comfortable with. All of them have to do with the UI. None has to do with the engine.

And super fast, apparently:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgzNDA

A re-made Firefox in Rust could be not just much faster but also much more secure, even than Chrome, if combining Rust's safety features with Electrosis/a similar sandbox and multiprocess system.

A skin is a set of images.

This new browser isn't just replacing Chrome's images with its own. It has new UI code, apparently using web standards. In other words, it's about as far from a skin as you can get.

When you replace images it's a skin. When you write code it isn't - it's a new UI.

You sir, do not build things for browsers. It made me so incredibly happy that their goal was to innovate more for the experience of the every day end-user rather than toss yet another set of vendor prefixes.

Anyway, I think the TL;DR here is, "A new browser for our friends". To me, this implies they're building a new browser for the everyman, not a bunch of curmudgeon-y developers on HackerNews.

People outside of HN couldn't care less about new JS / rendering engines. They want to Google things, check their email / InstaTwitterVineBooks and generally just kinda meander around the web. To that person, new interface features is really the only thing they see. Honestly this is kinda refreshing to see in a weird way.

I think it is the good part.

As a developer, I don't have to think about browser specific coding.

As an user, I can use same technology with favourite UI skin and additional features.

Not disagreeing with you, but some browsers on iOS do add useful features even while being webkit skins, for example Mercury Browser on iOS supports adblock lists, which Safari doesn't.

Looks like it's likely based on node-webkit / nwjs / atom - dead give away is rounded bottom corners and sharp top corners, a long standing issue for that project.

Yeah, BTW I am also super curious how they merged the tabs UI with the top window bar. That also seems to be a pending issue in atom. I have a feeling it may just be nwjs.

Chrome with OldOpera features? Sounds great!

LOL I started reading this thinking that Is the advertisement haha.

I was actually struck by its honest at first and wanted to try it.

Personally, I don't care about new engines as much as I care about having a good browser that is not controlled by Google. We need more competitors in this space.

I dunno — to a fair extent Blink is still controlled by Google. Yes, Opera are now doing a fair bit of work, but if Google walked away there would no longer be nearly enough the resources to keep up the pace of development.

A good blink/webkit-browser with the ability to self host sync services for it would go a long way. I think the new opera has that, but it's bad for other reasons..

You say that, but look what Google has stumbled onto trying this path on iOS.

Chrome on iOS is rubbish.

...because the Chrome guys are daft? Nope. ...because it's Apple's playground, and they don't want to play, so they've deliberately ('not deliberately') made it so anyone using their engine is a 2nd class citizen, and can only build a poor user experience.

(https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=423444 for the meta bug if you're interested)

Just one more reason to upgrade from iOS to Android. We have real Firefox and real Chrome over here... and have had them for yeaaaars now.

How have they made it so anyone using their engine is a 2nd class citizen? Does the engine perform differently outside Safari?

Last I checked, iOS's third-party app policies forbid the implementation of anything akin to a JIT compiler, and even third-party usage of the standard WebView component disables the Nitro JIT. I'm not an iOS dev though, I have no idea if there's been any progress in this space recently.

Yeah, it's seemingly changed since you last checked. Now they allow you to use the Nitroj JIT. I'm not an iOS developer as well, just heard it.

Its changed now with IOS 8, JIT is enabled for WKWebkit

To be precise, it's not that JIT is now allowed in iOS; that would be a security issue because it would basically allow sandboxed apps to create executable memory area, which is considered very bad. On the contrary, what just happens is that WKWebView is piggy-backing on the new extension system to run in a different process, with a different relaxed sandbox, and communicates to the host app with an IPC channel (similar to eg. Chrome extensions). It looks like there are not enough features exposed over this IPC channel to make a fully featured browser, yet.

Essentially, yes. To elaborate on the linked bug a bit:

You can use UIWebView, the older interface. The biggest problem is that its JavaScript engine is slower than Safari's, and does not JIT compile code (according to Apple, this is for security reasons). I've also seen complaints about scrolling performance.

You can use WKWebView, the newer interface. Its JavaScript engine does JIT, and it boasts 60fps scrolling. Unfortunately, it's missing several features detailed in the bug, including a way to clear and manage cookies, custom URL handlers, POST request bodies missing in certain cases, etc.

One would hope that the WkWebView bugs and omissions will be addressed in future iOS versions, but today is not possible to make an iOS browser that works as well as Safari.

> Chrome on iOS is rubbish.

What makes it rubbish? I remember using it when it was released and I switched to it as my main browser instantly. At the time I felt it was better than Safari, if not only for the top bar being smaller and/or hidden, something Safari did not do at the time. It also had the "request desktop" which is invaluable at times.

Currently I use Safari but it's because I haven't bothered since I use the iPhone browser for almost nothing.

Because it's basically Safari with a Chrome skin.

its much much slower. scrolling down a page often chokes. changing tabs can take 5 or 6 seconds to re-render. I might have low disk space issues on my iPad, but Safari performs flawlessly.

and its not Chrome's fault. Apple do not allow any other web browser on iOS, so Chrome is just WebKit except you don't get the same javascript engine as Safari does.

I stubbornly continue to use it because I want my history and bookmarks to match my desktop.

iOS has recently opened it's advanced javascript engine to developers which should put App web page rendering speed on par with Safari.

I believe because of other limitations Chrome can't use it anyway and it might take a couple of iOS versions before everything will be solved. For details see https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=423444

If they opened their platform up properly, then Chrome could simply use the advanced javascript engine it already has.

I had none of those issues.

I also use my devices jailbroken, and there are fixes for the Javascript engine. That being said, I mostly used it without them, and even when I did I noticed no difference. Again, probably because I use the iOS browsers very little.

>>> .because it's Apple's playground, and they don't want to play

This is very similar to what Windows Phone is doing as well. You can't download FF or Chrome on their phones, just other poor IE clones. Granted, IE has come a long way and is pretty decent on Windows Phone, but if I could use one browser across all my devices, I'd be a bit happier.

Is that something Windows Phone is doing, or are Mozilla and Google not making their browsers run on a device with a low market share?

After some more looking around, it seems it was a mutal decision.

Windows started the war when they locked out native third-party code development on the Windows Phone 7 platform. Then in subsequent findings, Chrome lamented they can't get enough privileges with Metro app development to make it work and Mozilla knows MS doesn't want to further their platform - so a sort of stalemate at this point, and a loss to Windows Phone users.

Sources:

Mozilla: No plans to release Firefox for Windows Phone 7 (March 2010)

http://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-no-plans-to-release-fir...!

Google Has ‘No Current Plans’ to Bring Chrome to Windows Phone (August 2014)

http://www.omgchrome.com/no-current-plans-to-bring-google-ch...

Sounds like an Apple problem. My current solution to that is to ignore iOS completely. If I really wanted/needed to use iOS, I'd suck it up and use a slightly less performant browser or just use the default browser.

I disagree. We have plenty of competitors in web browsing area: Chrome, Comodo, Epic, Epiphany, Firefox, IE, K-Meleon, Konqueror, Maxthon, Midori, Otter, QupZilla, Sleipnir, SeaMonkey, and now Spartan and Vivaldi. Why don't they contribute to any established open source project rather than create yet another closed source web browser?

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