Flow browser passes the Acid tests
This actually looks pretty interesting.
They started out as an SVG engine for set-top boxes (embedded devices running on TV's) since browsers at the time weren't fast/light enough for the underpowered chips in set-top boxes. Then when the devices got better chips, they realized perf still wasn't good enough for big 4k screens – and that multicore rendering could help.
So they've implemented a full HTML/CSS/JS browser from scratch, all to take advantage of a multicore architecture (today's browsers all render on a single thread) which has enabled (they claim) greater than 4x better framerate during web animations than the stable channels of Chrome/Blink and Safari/Webkit. Oh, and 60% faster layout on a quad-core machine.
They also claim "extremely low memory consumption", which would be quite appealing to many HN'ers I think, though that may only be true of their HTML engine and not of the full browser (eg; when using multiple tabs and hungry JS apps).
It also supports full Google Mail [1]. While I don’t think it will ever be competitive to Chrome or Firefox, it’s super cool to see it’s actually possible to start a new web browser project and get it to this point.
[1] https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/full-google-mail-in-a-clean-ro...
The author's blog site seems to be down; here's an archive.org link:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200613124642/https://www.ekioh...
Congratulations to the Flow team! Very nice work.
The world needs more browser engines (dang it Microsoft!), so seeing this development makes me really happy.
I've just started working on ACID2 compliance in my own engine a few days ago, and passing all three tests is no small feat :)
> a new, clean-sheet browser
I don't think that's entirely true. It may have its own HTML/CSS rendering engine, but apparently [0] it uses SpiderMonkey for JavaScript. Still very impressive, of course.
[0] https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2020/01/new_browser...
Amusingly, I went to http://acid3.acidtests.org/ and was surprised to find that the latest Chrome 83.0.4103.97 (Official Build) (64-bit) on MacOS 10.13.6 apparently doesn't pass the acid3 test!
https://i.imgur.com/ZW4BYH2.png
Now I'm curious to know which 3 features can be ignored by the dominant browser...
EDIT: Oh my, I suspected it was one of my extensions. Nope. Now I'm getting a "You should not see this at all" in a fresh Chrome guest: https://imgur.com/CrAYhpI
I burst out laughing because it was so unexpected. I wonder what's going on.
The web (html/css/javascript) standards have become so wide and complex that it's very hard to build a browser from scratch. It gets worse by the day, as more features get added to those standards.
This makes me wonder if you could define a subset of those standards that would support 90%+ of the use cases, would be simple and efficient to implement and would be supported by existing browsers. You could then push this light version of the web as a new base for a future standard.
The problem would of course be that you would have to keep around a different browser to render old sites. Could still be worth thinking about. Doesn't seem feasible as a long term strategy to have browsers support thousands of apis and increasing.
From the QuirksMode article linked elsewhere here:
Is Flow open source?
It’s not. There’s no current plan for that as we don’t have a large corporation backing our development.
This doesn't make much sense... why not simply say then "because we don't want to"?
The website seems to be down (the downsides of HN notoriety!) but any browser nowadays that's not a skin over a chromium base I support.
Is ACID3 the most relevant test? It was released in 2008 and had some updates in 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3, https://www.webstandards.org/action/acid3/
Does it check flexbox and grid support for example?
No downloadable builds? The desktop builds doesn't seem to be available for general public.
Site seems to be down. I’m glad to see someone working on a new browser. They’re such huge apps though, I wonder if the Edge/Brave strategy is better if you’re trying to get compatibility and performance as fast as possible... it is unfortunate that Chromium is influenced by decision makers at Google. It would be great if they could spin that off into another company but there’s no way they ever would. At least with MS there is a potential to fork and have some accountability, at least on issues that are not mutually beneficial. See the Microsoft and Google feud where Google withheld all their apps from the windows phone for evidence of the animosity possible between these 2 companies.
Needs ublock origin and a cookie auto-delete feature and I will gladly switch.
Used to be that developers would decide between different browsers (or any other software really) and the rest would follow. Chrome/Edge/Safari bring built in to devices and being super hard to remove has changed that. All while not offering a better experience at all.
Big tech needs a couple anti-trust passes real bad.
Since JS contributes the most to browsers’ memory usage, and a lot of people are compiling to JS from a typed language these days, it would be great to have a browser that makes a clean break and implements, say, a sandboxed version of Swift.
You could even have Swift DSLs for type-safe markup and styles (I’ve actually been experimenting with building a Swift -> CSS DSL using simple protocols, enums, and structs) and, while we’re at it, introduce more sane defaults and cut some of the cruft that has accumulated over the years (do we really need HTML colspan attributes and CSS float when we can use a flexbox model?)
A lot to learn from the Acid tests. I made a clean room animated PNG implementation today. It would have been a lot easier if I had had a piece of audited software that parsed my output and rated how close it was to the spec, and on what aspects it deviated. It took an unreasonable amount of time to notice that the sequence numbers of fcTL and fdAT should increase together as a series. Something I feel and Acis Test would have been much faster at noticing.
Since the website is down, I'll just answer the important question for you: no, it is not open source.
I get the following: 403 Forbidden Access to this resource on the server is denied!
I was under the impression that ACID3 no longer represented the web standards as documented by W3C, and a fully compliant browser should in fact fail ACID3?
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Amusingly, Chrome doesn't pass ACID3 these days.
It took me a few second to look up that (｀ﾟдﾟ ) test in my brain...man it’s been a long time
How does it deal with DRM? I've read that this is the biggest problem for browser adoption, that DRM is effectively locked in with Firefox and Chromium and there won't be licenses issued to other browsers.
I am out of the loop when it comes to Flow, but don't other browsers, especially the new Firefox, do multi-threaded style/layout/paint/composite and smartly use GPU acceleration?
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Except there are many many websites that it just can't load properly.
I think that since web browsers have become operating systems it's just not feasible to implement a new compatible browser. ACID3 would just be the beginning, except now it's totally outdated.
That intractability of creating a new browser is why I proposed that we start over with something much simpler to implement that can actually perform.
First of all, to get to information quickly, the main browsing experience is markdown.
There is no more JavaScript.
Then media such as images and video are handled separately.
And finally, add some kind of simple Canvas-like or Framebuffer API to web assembly and have that available for applications.
Set limits on the amount of data per page. Maybe build in some p2p content distribution.
Something like the above could actually be feasibly implemented by multiple groups and would solve performance issues.
Linked website just failed to pass "HN effect".[0]
> 503
> Service Unavailable
> The server is temporarily busy, try again later!
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21658935 from 6 months ago.
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This should be perfect browser for KaiOS, considering low amount of RAM in their devices.
Does it implement adblocking, or support for external plugins?
As a feature might not be of technical interest, but today's web is absolutely atrocious to surf without a good set of ad blockers and privacy enhancement plugins, so that's a feature one day every browser is deemed to implement to attract users.
How does it compare to Servo?
How does one download the flow browser ?
I would totally pay for a web browser
I get a page with a HUGE 503.
This is very impressive
Is it available?
for those who are interested:
It's nice that company replies to download requests (which they got in very large numbers - no doubt!)
I'll cite from email reply:
> "Due to the very large number of download requests we have received over the last few months, we are currently working on a plan to add a download page to our website which will contain more user friendly versions of the binary builds. Our current focus is however on the core layout and rendering elements of the browser, so it may take us a little time before we can have the download page ready"
so it probably will be available to general public in some time
But it's a commercial product, so it's not that interesting.
Also, any modern web browser should be written in Rust, not C or C++.
the blog is getting hugged to death
> ACID3
Too bad, there are no ACID4, 5, 6...
The web specs were broken for years since ACID3 managed to somehow stabilize them.
