
Flow Browser – A parallel, multithreaded HTML browser - robin_reala
https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/
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kick
This is almost certainly going to be proprietary, so it's nothing to hold your
breath over.

Ekioh makes enterprise software for set-top boxes. They do know their browser
rendering, though: they stripped Webkit down to have a 24mb memory footprint.

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bugmen0t
So this is a closed-source webkit fork? Nothing to see here, moving on then :)

Webkit a comparably easy target to strip down and embed elsewhere. See Apple
watch.

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rkangel
> developed a clean room browser architecture

Implies that this _isn 't_ a webkit fork, they started from scratch.

See also:
[https://twitter.com/FlowBrowser/status/1200098712816631809](https://twitter.com/FlowBrowser/status/1200098712816631809)

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glandium
[https://twitter.com/_Piers_/status/991328398910816256](https://twitter.com/_Piers_/status/991328398910816256)
says it's actually more than a year old. There is no download link on the OP,
so I guess it's safe to assume it's only available to people who pay for their
enterprise needs.

So, sounds interesting, but not for the public masses.

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robin_reala
New rendering engine, new layout engine, and Spidermonkey for JS:
[https://twitter.com/FlowBrowser/status/1200098712816631809](https://twitter.com/FlowBrowser/status/1200098712816631809)

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lucb1e
I was indeed wondering the same: a new render engine seems like a huge and
risky investment (even Microsoft gave up on the existing one they have, that
says something). If it really is from scratch, it probably just supports only
the most popular features, which would cut complexity and give a large
performance boost by itself.

Alternatively: Chrome 1.0 was also super fast compared to the competition. And
I remember switching from a full browser on Android to my custom browser that
was like 10 lines of code around a webview element, which was really an order
of magnitude faster. If they modified an existing render engine and wrote
their own browser UI, that could also deliver this speed boost.

So this seems relatively doable to me, but you get fewer features.

Let's see if they make this available for a broad audience and if, in five
years when they accumulated all the features, it's still faster.

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whelming_wave
I wonder how this compares to Servo[0] - on admittedly not very close
inspection it seems like they have a lot of the same ideas.

[0]: [https://servo.org/](https://servo.org/)

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PudgePacket
Servo team started doing VR stuff maybe a year ago and since then haven't
heard anything new about Servo .. I'm hoping that something comes of it

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nwah1
The Mozilla Gfx blog regularly posts updates. They have been porting
subsystems from servo to firefox, and making substantial progress on a regular
basis.

[https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com](https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com)

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denkmoon
Well it doesn't appear to be publicly available yet, so we'll have to wait to
find out if this is real or just smoke and mirrors.

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_bxg1
Pretty interesting. Conventional wisdom is that the web standards have become
so complicated that it's prohibitively difficult to introduce a _totally_ new
browser that fully supports modern CSS and JS. Sounds like this one does.

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anonytrary
Naming could be better or more differentiated -- "Flow" is already used in the
closely related space of front-end development and javascript (flow typing).

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gridlockd
It doesn't matter. There's thousands of basic words occupied by some more or
less relevant Javascript tool or framework. Don't let that get in the way of
naming your products.

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Epskampie
Agreed. Also flow has been utterly demolished by typescript and is on the way
out, so it will be even less of a problem in the future.

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zamadatix
Interesting claims, any 3rd party testing?

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aitchnyu
Will it have its lunch eaten by tools and techniques for lightweight web apps
on Webkit/Quantum? Svelte made a headstart making 200k laggy Webkit devices
snappy again while these guys will be selling proprietary licenses.

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csande17
Frameworks like Svelte focus on reducing the time spent running JavaScript.
This project focuses on reducing the time spent on layout and rendering.

Theoretically they'd complement each other, but in practice I imagine UIs for
super-resource-constrained set-top boxes are already written in pretty
efficient JavaScript.

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Manishearth
These things are actually pretty related: JS isn't particularly slow as a
language; it only gets slow on the web because every time JS code touches the
DOM/CSS a part of layout and style needs to be recomputed.

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vijaybritto
No video comparisons, nothing? Also why dont they release this for mobile?

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touchpadder
I don't think there's that much to improve with current browsers anymore. 8
years ago maybe. Now you have web workers with shared memory, typed arrays,
GPU acceleration for canvas and CSS, web assembly with SIMD. It's already
possible to utilise all the cores and GPU in 2D. Not even mentioning 3D WebGL
and incoming WebGPU. Websites are fast enough already(with ad blocker).

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The_rationalist
I believe that document.write prevent a lot of parallelism. Also as always,
SIMD are underutilized. There is also transactional memory, heterogeneous
computing, SYCL, etc...

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touchpadder
what do you mean document.write prevents parallelism? Who's using
document.write for anything these days?

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The_rationalist
"Who's using document.write for anything these days?" It doesn't matter if
anybody use it, someone could use it, as such browser must adapt to this
possibility and be performance constrained.

"what do you mean document.write prevents parallelism?" I don't remember the
details but it force some critical browser operations to be sequential.

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1pavanb
Is this released? Where does this thing download??

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janpot
what do they mean by "full page animation" and why is that suddenly the
benchmark for fast rendering?

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shotashotshota
How does it compare to servo?

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sahin-boydas
Link to download?

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ashishb
I think it is not a freeware. They are probably planning to sell it to other
distributors.

