5 ms·

Flow Browser – A parallel, multithreaded HTML browser

123 points by robin_reala 7y ago

robin_reala 7y ago
New rendering engine, new layout engine, and Spidermonkey for JS: https://twitter.com/FlowBrowser/status/1200098712816631809 https://twitter.com/FlowBrowser/status/1200098712816631809
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- lucb1e 7y ago
  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.
zamadatix 7y ago
Interesting claims, any 3rd party testing?
denkmoon 7y ago
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.
kick 7y ago
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.
- qwerty456127 7y ago
  Nevertheless perhaps it has a chance to conquer the market if it's so good otherwise. I love free software but have to admit a browser (or whatever an app) doesn't have to be open-source for this.
  - masukomi 7y ago
    and then it takes over, does whatever it wants, and now you've got IE6 again. open source is our insurance policy against the next IE6. One may come again, but we can head it off at the pass before it dominates the market.
    - big_chungus 7y ago
      People can run legacy open-source code, too. I fail to see how open-sourcing IE would have solved the old versions. For a better example, look at python 2.7. Open-source legacy code every one's stuck with, drawn-out deprecation dates, etc. Old Java versions are the same thing.
    - tomcooks 7y ago
      While I agree with you, open source chrome didn't really help push for anything good. Thanks to chrome we now have AMP and basically total web domination by the GOOG company.
      - jefftk 7y ago
        > Thanks to chrome we now have AMP How does Chrome enable AMP? (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
whelming_wave 7y ago
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/
- PudgePacket 7y ago
  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
  - nwah1 7y ago
    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
  - Manishearth 7y ago
    VR is only part of the focus, we're still working towards a general purpose browser, it's just a slow and long process. Webrender is being actively worked on and is in the final stages of integration into Firefox (I believe it's enabled by default for some combinations of GPU and OS already). Servo's experimenting with a new layout system written from-scratch to be modular as well, and that's making good progress. (We're rewriting the layout system because the original one, while it proved that parallel layout was doable, wasn't very maintainable/extensible given that it was written through experimentation while the language itself was changing a lot. We now know how to do parallel layout, and writing a clean, modular, maintainable system will enable us to fill in all the missing features)
- palashkaria 7y ago
  I was curious, did some research. They do mention Servo in some places[0][1]. They also have their own white papers[2][3], & blog posts outlining their approach, things like how to make borders with triangles[4]. Fun stuff! Quote: Back in 2012, Mozilla’s Servo project had started hitting headlines about multithreaded, parallel algorithms, and we decided to see if we could do similar, initially targeting our historic market of STBs[0] Quote: Some of our early thinking was shaped by the parallel web page layout research done by Meyerovich & Bodík. That research also influenced the Servo project which was started by the Mozilla foundation around the same time that we started developing our multithreaded browser.[1] [0]: https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/svg-browser-to-html-browser/ https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/svg-browser-to-html-browser/ [1]: https://www.ekioh.com/blog/developing-a-faster-browser-engine/ https://www.ekioh.com/blog/developing-a-faster-browser-engin... [2]: https://www.ekioh.com/wp-content/uploads/Designing-a-Browser-to-Benefit-from-Multi-core-Silicon.pdf https://www.ekioh.com/wp-content/uploads/Designing-a-Browser... [3]: https://www.ekioh.com/wp-content/uploads/An-Optimal-Browser-Design-for-GPU-Utilisation.pdf https://www.ekioh.com/wp-content/uploads/An-Optimal-Browser-... [4]: https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/gpu-rendering/ https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/gpu-rendering/
sahin-boydas 7y ago
Link to download?
- ashishb 7y ago
  I think it is not a freeware. They are probably planning to sell it to other distributors.
_bxg1 7y ago
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.
glandium 7y ago
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.
anonytrary 7y ago
Naming could be better or more differentiated -- "Flow" is already used in the closely related space of front-end development and javascript (flow typing).
- gridlockd 7y ago
  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.
  - Epskampie 7y ago
    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.
- Chanderton 7y ago
  As well as a FTP app for macOS, Sharing service for the Opera browser, Microsoft Flow, Samsung Flow and so on. While it's a word used all over the place, i would try to name it to something more ”unique”.
aitchnyu 7y ago
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.
- csande17 7y ago
  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.
  - Manishearth 7y ago
    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.
vijaybritto 7y ago
No video comparisons, nothing? Also why dont they release this for mobile?
touchpadder 7y ago
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).
- The_rationalist 7y ago
  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...
  - touchpadder 7y ago
    what do you mean document.write prevents parallelism? Who's using document.write for anything these days?
    - The_rationalist 7y ago
      "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.
shotashotshota 7y ago
How does it compare to servo?
janpot 7y ago
what do they mean by "full page animation" and why is that suddenly the benchmark for fast rendering?
1pavanb 7y ago
Is this released? Where does this thing download??

123 points by robin_reala 7y ago

New rendering engine, new layout engine, and Spidermonkey for JS: https://twitter.com/FlowBrowser/status/1200098712816631809 https://twitter.com/FlowBrowser/status/1200098712816631809

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
lucb1e 7y ago
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.

zamadatix 7y ago

Interesting claims, any 3rd party testing?

denkmoon 7y ago

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.

kick 7y ago

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.

qwerty456127 7y ago
Nevertheless perhaps it has a chance to conquer the market if it's so good otherwise. I love free software but have to admit a browser (or whatever an app) doesn't have to be open-source for this.
- masukomi 7y ago
  and then it takes over, does whatever it wants, and now you've got IE6 again. open source is our insurance policy against the next IE6. One may come again, but we can head it off at the pass before it dominates the market.
  - big_chungus 7y ago
    People can run legacy open-source code, too. I fail to see how open-sourcing IE would have solved the old versions. For a better example, look at python 2.7. Open-source legacy code every one's stuck with, drawn-out deprecation dates, etc. Old Java versions are the same thing.
  - tomcooks 7y ago
    While I agree with you, open source chrome didn't really help push for anything good. Thanks to chrome we now have AMP and basically total web domination by the GOOG company.
    - jefftk 7y ago
      > Thanks to chrome we now have AMP How does Chrome enable AMP? (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

whelming_wave 7y ago

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/

PudgePacket 7y ago
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
- nwah1 7y ago
  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
- Manishearth 7y ago
  VR is only part of the focus, we're still working towards a general purpose browser, it's just a slow and long process. Webrender is being actively worked on and is in the final stages of integration into Firefox (I believe it's enabled by default for some combinations of GPU and OS already). Servo's experimenting with a new layout system written from-scratch to be modular as well, and that's making good progress. (We're rewriting the layout system because the original one, while it proved that parallel layout was doable, wasn't very maintainable/extensible given that it was written through experimentation while the language itself was changing a lot. We now know how to do parallel layout, and writing a clean, modular, maintainable system will enable us to fill in all the missing features)
palashkaria 7y ago
I was curious, did some research. They do mention Servo in some places[0][1]. They also have their own white papers[2][3], & blog posts outlining their approach, things like how to make borders with triangles[4]. Fun stuff! Quote: Back in 2012, Mozilla’s Servo project had started hitting headlines about multithreaded, parallel algorithms, and we decided to see if we could do similar, initially targeting our historic market of STBs[0] Quote: Some of our early thinking was shaped by the parallel web page layout research done by Meyerovich & Bodík. That research also influenced the Servo project which was started by the Mozilla foundation around the same time that we started developing our multithreaded browser.[1] [0]: https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/svg-browser-to-html-browser/ https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/svg-browser-to-html-browser/ [1]: https://www.ekioh.com/blog/developing-a-faster-browser-engine/ https://www.ekioh.com/blog/developing-a-faster-browser-engin... [2]: https://www.ekioh.com/wp-content/uploads/Designing-a-Browser-to-Benefit-from-Multi-core-Silicon.pdf https://www.ekioh.com/wp-content/uploads/Designing-a-Browser... [3]: https://www.ekioh.com/wp-content/uploads/An-Optimal-Browser-Design-for-GPU-Utilisation.pdf https://www.ekioh.com/wp-content/uploads/An-Optimal-Browser-... [4]: https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/gpu-rendering/ https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/gpu-rendering/

sahin-boydas 7y ago

Link to download?

ashishb 7y ago
I think it is not a freeware. They are probably planning to sell it to other distributors.

_bxg1 7y ago

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.

glandium 7y ago

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.

anonytrary 7y ago

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

gridlockd 7y ago
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.
- Epskampie 7y ago
  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.
Chanderton 7y ago
As well as a FTP app for macOS, Sharing service for the Opera browser, Microsoft Flow, Samsung Flow and so on. While it's a word used all over the place, i would try to name it to something more ”unique”.

aitchnyu 7y ago

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.

csande17 7y ago
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.
- Manishearth 7y ago
  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.

vijaybritto 7y ago

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

touchpadder 7y ago

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).

The_rationalist 7y ago
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...
- touchpadder 7y ago
  what do you mean document.write prevents parallelism? Who's using document.write for anything these days?
  - The_rationalist 7y ago
    "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.

shotashotshota 7y ago

How does it compare to servo?

janpot 7y ago

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

1pavanb 7y ago

Is this released? Where does this thing download??