There's some terminology I don't understand here. Multithreaded I'm at least familiar with, but what is a "clean room" browser?
When you ask what are my thoughts about another browser entering the browser ecosystem, I assume you mean a cooked-from-scratch new layout engine, as "new browsers" spawned off the usual engines are something of a cottage industry.
My answer would be that a new open source browser would be a godsend, as Mozilla basically caved on the EME issues and a few other things, and is becoming less hacker-friendly in other ways (such as discontinuing what was their vastly superior add-on architecture). It's telling that forked browsers differ from (usually) Firefox more by deletion of anti-features than addition of new features.
I fear it's unlikely/unrealistic that there will ever be a noncommercial implementation of something as necessarily large and complicated as a standards-approximating browser, nearly-fully implementing HTML, CSS and [Javascript?] without cribbing massive amounts of existing code. It probably doesn't matter since the very idea of (even a little) noncommercial content on the web seems to have given up on itself.
As for the Flow Browser, I came across what I can only assume is its official page and I get mixed signals. The word "license" doesn't appear anywhere on the page. That their target audience seems to be the cool kids with the latest hardware is also not encouraging.
I'm a fan of Open Source and have a growing interest in serverless and edge computing. I'm not a big fan of spiders, but they're doing good work eating bugs. I also stream on Twitch.
If it wasn't clear to others, here is the official page for the Flow browser.
Just going to drop the EME repository link here as I did not know what EME was. For those like me who did not know what EME stood for, it's Encrypted Media Extensions.
Yeah, clean room browser is a bit of a weird term. I think they mean building the layout engine from scratch? Not sure. The only thing they appear to be using, from what I read was the Spidermonkey JavaScript runtime from Mozilla.
When you mean cool kids hardware, I'm assuming you're talking about the "Layout performance that scales with the processor’s available cores" and "100% rendering on the GPU"?
I must admit it seems like an enormous feat to create a new browser given that Brendan Eich (JS Inventor/Netscape and Mozilla) opted for Chromium when his team created Brave.
Point taken, I also assumed too much audience terminology familiarity. A mistake that's way too easy all around.
EME concerns me because I miss the hacker ethos and find the *YPM (* you, pay me) ethos that has displaced it to be, while laudably pro-labor, ridiculously mercenary. To say it has resulted in the proliferation of comically brazen acts of value subtraction (i.e. monetization) would be an understatement.
Clean room I guess is still a mystery to both of us. It's a term I associate with hardware, so perhaps it's a statement. The web standards have become so complex a document that implementing it is the logistical and even technological equivalent of a fab lab. Give it a few years to acquire more cruft and I suppose it will be out of reach of all but state-level actors. Standards complexity creep is one of the many ways the web has been taken out of the hands of noncommercial users. Much as the web per se replaced Gopher with something much more sophisticated, perhaps what's needed now is something to similarly replace the web with something much (technically, but also of course end-user) simpler, with by-laws in place to hopefully keep it that way permanently.
Yes, my idea of cool kids' hardware is late-model, but even moreso high-graphic. It's no coincidence that graphics cards and sound cards are the hardest peripherals to configure in an open source operating system. Those two peripherals are the interface between the world of computing and the world of showbiz (i.e. DRM). I assume it would be uncontroversial to state all two of the manufacturers of video cards actively thwart the development of open-source drivers.
My take on Eich's current quest is that it's one of reinventing monetization rather than reinventing the browser. I'm mostly unimpressed, in large part because he seems to be trying to package deal it with cryptocurrency adoption. It seems that with Eich there's always some kind of political statement. He does seem genuinely interested in reducing the sensory overload in web advertising; perhaps that is his penance for foisting Javascript on web users. I'm old enough to remember when Javascript scripts could and would resize your browser window to many times your screen size for no reason other than to annoy the * out of you (and of course monetize websites).
I'm a fan of Open Source and have a growing interest in serverless and edge computing. I'm not a big fan of spiders, but they're doing good work eating bugs. I also stream on Twitch.
Yeah, I remember when you could resize the windows to nothing as well. I think the lowest you can go these days is 100px x 100px. As well, good old ActiveX z-index issues, IE conditional comments, IE behaviours (the original web component?), MSXMLHTTP, XUL etc.
Good times. 😉 You'd probably enjoy this tweet thread.
OK, so who's responsible for the capitalization of XMLHttpRequest?
04:58 AM - 04 Oct 2017
41
198
Long live <framesets /> and <marquee />! 😆
Yeah, for Brave, I'm not really interested in the crypto/better adds/monetization part, but I do enjoy the better security aspect of it though. Who knows where it will go. Edge is doing similar things now that they are Chromium, but I do not see them pushing monetization apart from getting some credits if you use the Bing search engine.
My guess for Edge is that migrating to Chromium will hopefully kill all the splintering of IE/older Edge. They even apparently guarantee to help you if your site worked in IE11 and has issues with the newest edge.
Microsoft Edge Dev
@msedgedev
#ICYMI: If your site works in IE 11, Chrome or the current Edge, it'll work in the new Microsoft Edge. If not, our App Assure support program has your back, for free. ✔️
16:24 PM - 26 Nov 2019
21
75
I can only imagine how difficult it is to build a browser from the ground up. Kudos to anyone that can.
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.
There's some terminology I don't understand here. Multithreaded I'm at least familiar with, but what is a "clean room" browser?
When you ask what are my thoughts about another browser entering the browser ecosystem, I assume you mean a cooked-from-scratch new layout engine, as "new browsers" spawned off the usual engines are something of a cottage industry.
My answer would be that a new open source browser would be a godsend, as Mozilla basically caved on the EME issues and a few other things, and is becoming less hacker-friendly in other ways (such as discontinuing what was their vastly superior add-on architecture). It's telling that forked browsers differ from (usually) Firefox more by deletion of anti-features than addition of new features.
I fear it's unlikely/unrealistic that there will ever be a noncommercial implementation of something as necessarily large and complicated as a standards-approximating browser, nearly-fully implementing HTML, CSS and [Javascript?] without cribbing massive amounts of existing code. It probably doesn't matter since the very idea of (even a little) noncommercial content on the web seems to have given up on itself.
As for the Flow Browser, I came across what I can only assume is its official page and I get mixed signals. The word "license" doesn't appear anywhere on the page. That their target audience seems to be the cool kids with the latest hardware is also not encouraging.
If it wasn't clear to others, here is the official page for the Flow browser.
Just going to drop the EME repository link here as I did not know what EME was. For those like me who did not know what EME stood for, it's Encrypted Media Extensions.
Yeah, clean room browser is a bit of a weird term. I think they mean building the layout engine from scratch? Not sure. The only thing they appear to be using, from what I read was the Spidermonkey JavaScript runtime from Mozilla.
When you mean cool kids hardware, I'm assuming you're talking about the "Layout performance that scales with the processor’s available cores" and "100% rendering on the GPU"?
I must admit it seems like an enormous feat to create a new browser given that Brendan Eich (JS Inventor/Netscape and Mozilla) opted for Chromium when his team created Brave.
Point taken, I also assumed too much audience terminology familiarity. A mistake that's way too easy all around.
EME concerns me because I miss the hacker ethos and find the *YPM (* you, pay me) ethos that has displaced it to be, while laudably pro-labor, ridiculously mercenary. To say it has resulted in the proliferation of comically brazen acts of value subtraction (i.e. monetization) would be an understatement.
Clean room I guess is still a mystery to both of us. It's a term I associate with hardware, so perhaps it's a statement. The web standards have become so complex a document that implementing it is the logistical and even technological equivalent of a fab lab. Give it a few years to acquire more cruft and I suppose it will be out of reach of all but state-level actors. Standards complexity creep is one of the many ways the web has been taken out of the hands of noncommercial users. Much as the web per se replaced Gopher with something much more sophisticated, perhaps what's needed now is something to similarly replace the web with something much (technically, but also of course end-user) simpler, with by-laws in place to hopefully keep it that way permanently.
Yes, my idea of cool kids' hardware is late-model, but even moreso high-graphic. It's no coincidence that graphics cards and sound cards are the hardest peripherals to configure in an open source operating system. Those two peripherals are the interface between the world of computing and the world of showbiz (i.e. DRM). I assume it would be uncontroversial to state all two of the manufacturers of video cards actively thwart the development of open-source drivers.
My take on Eich's current quest is that it's one of reinventing monetization rather than reinventing the browser. I'm mostly unimpressed, in large part because he seems to be trying to package deal it with cryptocurrency adoption. It seems that with Eich there's always some kind of political statement. He does seem genuinely interested in reducing the sensory overload in web advertising; perhaps that is his penance for foisting Javascript on web users. I'm old enough to remember when Javascript scripts could and would resize your browser window to many times your screen size for no reason other than to annoy the * out of you (and of course monetize websites).
Yeah, I remember when you could resize the windows to nothing as well. I think the lowest you can go these days is 100px x 100px. As well, good old ActiveX z-index issues, IE conditional comments, IE behaviours (the original web component?), MSXMLHTTP, XUL etc.
Good times. 😉 You'd probably enjoy this tweet thread.
Long live
<framesets />and<marquee />! 😆Yeah, for Brave, I'm not really interested in the crypto/better adds/monetization part, but I do enjoy the better security aspect of it though. Who knows where it will go. Edge is doing similar things now that they are Chromium, but I do not see them pushing monetization apart from getting some credits if you use the Bing search engine.
My guess for Edge is that migrating to Chromium will hopefully kill all the splintering of IE/older Edge. They even apparently guarantee to help you if your site worked in IE11 and has issues with the newest edge.
I can only imagine how difficult it is to build a browser from the ground up. Kudos to anyone that can.