26 ms·

Flow browser passes the Acid tests

525 points by methyl 6y ago

methyl 6y ago
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-room-browser/ https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/full-google-mail-in-a-clean-ro...
- iforgotpassword 6y ago
  Yes, this is really surprising. Browsers have in many ways gotten more complex than operating systems, so creating a new one from scratch seemed off the table for now. A big player like Microsoft scrapping Edge certainly helped to strengthen that impression. It's certainly not as compatible with the modern web as chrome and Firefox but hey, it's doing much more than I'd have expected.
  - cmroanirgo 6y ago
    I like the author's writing style too... This seems to be as much an exploration as anything: >I’ll be the first to admit it’s not perfect yet – some vertical alignment is wrong in a few places, Hangouts doesn’t work, and our ‘contenteditable’ support is minimal. But I don’t think these detract from the achievement – as far as I’m aware, no browser engine other than Webkit, Blink and Gecko can run full Google Mail, and these have all had over twenty years of development work on them.
- fireattack 6y ago
  Why does he call it "Google Mail"? Isn't "Gmail" the official name (and the mostly widely used one)?
  - Macha 6y ago
    In many countries such as the UK (where the author is from) and Germany it was called Google Mail due to trademark disputes with local companies that had the Gmail name first. I think they've sorted most of these with licensing agreements or just buying the rights for the name, but a lot of UK people still have @googlemail addresses even.
    - fireattack 6y ago
      That's an interesting trivia, thanks!
akling 6y ago
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 :)
ddevault 6y ago
Since the website is down, I'll just answer the important question for you: no, it is not open source.
- elric 6y ago
  Who knows, maybe a bit of HN notoriety can persuade them to change their mind?
  - Narretz 6y ago
    This isn't the first time the Flow browser is brought up. It's good to see they are still developing it, but it looks like their stance on source availability is pretty rigid.
    - gsnedders 6y ago
      Practically, my reading would be they're not opposed to it if the business case can be made, within acceptable levels of risk.
caiobegotti 6y ago
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"?
- saagarjha 6y ago
  It gives a reason why they can't run it as a loss leader.
  - VoxPelli 6y ago
    Agree. They could though do a classic dual license with an open version being some kind of AGPL or similar a strict copyleft license and the closed proprietary version be one without copyleft restrictions.
- globular-toast 6y ago
  Oh. Not interested then.
  - yoz-y 6y ago
    While I usually don't dismiss closed source software, for a browser this is quite a hard pass. There are just too many ways one could be exploited for it to be using security through obscurity. Especially since they are not a large company.
butz 6y ago
This should be perfect browser for KaiOS, considering low amount of RAM in their devices.
loeg 6y ago
Amusingly, Chrome doesn't pass ACID3 these days.
- fouc 6y ago
  Apparently 97/100 is a perfect score these days due to some changes made.
Ericson2314 6y ago
How does it compare to Servo?
- gsnedders 6y ago
  Servo fails a bunch of the Acid3 subtests: https://wpt.fyi/results/acid/acid3/numbered-tests.html?label=master&product=servo https://wpt.fyi/results/acid/acid3/numbered-tests.html?label...
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
> 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_on.html https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2020/01/new_browser...
- fl0wenol 6y ago
  I think it's reasonable to not roll your own JS engine when Spidermonkey and V8 are intended to be integrated in other projects.
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    Of course.
seanwilson 6y ago
Is ACID3 the most relevant test? It was released in 2008 and had some updates in 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3, https://www.webstandards.org/action/acid3/ https://www.webstandards.org/action/acid3/ Does it check flexbox and grid support for example?
- eternalny1 6y ago
  The author's post has comments about this, apparently the best score on ACID3 is now 97/100 due to spec changes, but there is an updated version of the test. https://web.archive.org/web/20200613124642/https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/acid/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200613124642/https://www.ekioh...
- gsnedders 6y ago
  Flexbox, yes. Grid, last I knew no, but also totally plausible it's changed.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sillysaurusx 6y ago
Amusingly, I went to http://acid3.acidtests.org/ 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 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 https://imgur.com/CrAYhpI I burst out laughing because it was so unexpected. I wonder what's going on.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  The web evolves, and some features are deliberately changed in backwards incompatible ways - eg. third party cookies, cross site resources, no audio before user interaction, removal of cross-thread arraybuffers, etc. Browser makers seem to have this idea that if a feature is rarely used, it's fine to redefine or break it in the name of simplicity...
  - WiseWeasel 6y ago
    Browsers are user agents; the changes you mention all seem to the benefit of user experience and security. Standards are codification of things browsers have already done, or have attempted to do.
- sp332 6y ago
  "Acid3, in particular, contains some controversial tests and no longer reflects the consensus of the Web standards it purports to test, especially when it comes to issues affecting mobile browsers. The tests remain available for historical purposes and for use by browser vendors. It would be inappropriate, however, to use them as part of a certification process, especially for mobile browsers." Wikipedia gives this as an example of a standard that changed: https://github.com/whatwg/dom/issues/319 https://github.com/whatwg/dom/issues/319 Edit: there's an updated version at http://wpt.live/acid/acid3/test.html http://wpt.live/acid/acid3/test.html
  - 6y ago
barbarbar 6y ago
I get a page with a HUGE 503.
- donpdonp 6y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20200613124642/https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/acid/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200613124642/https://www.ekioh...
lukevp 6y ago
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.
- tannhaeuser 6y ago
  > I wonder if the Edge/Brave strategy is better if you’re trying to get compatibility and performance as fast as possible Of course it's faster than developing a browser from scratch, or working with a browser startup on integration etc. but that isn't the question. The question is whether it's even feasible to develop a browser with publicly available information (HTML 5 specs including SVG and MathML, but which one/version? tens of CSS specs and growing as we speak [1], hefty ECMAScript specs, http2+http3/quic, A/V codecs, multiple font formats, etc. etc.). As a glimpse into browser development, yesterday we learned [2] that even a RegExp engine for JavaScript poses a challenge, with specs being "fitted to match reality" eg Chrome behaviour. Honestly, with these results of creating almost a browser monopoly and driving browser development out of existence (Opera, MS), and now even Moz beginning to integrate Chrome code, I don't understand why the clowns at WHATWG and W3C even bother writing specs; they just can't stop it seems. Never has a standardization effort failed so miserably and went so totally out of control, and it'll be a huge problem for generations to come. Talking about almost all human communications (in law, education, politics, medicine, science, culture, personal docs) being held hostage by an ad company; even stone age humans had more liberties in cultural expression. [1]: https://webplatform.news/issues/2020-06-04 https://webplatform.news/issues/2020-06-04 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23487960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23487960 Edit: big congrats to the Flow developers!
  - Santosh83 6y ago
rattray 6y ago
The author's blog site seems to be down; here's an archive.org link: https://web.archive.org/web/20200613124642/https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/acid/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200613124642/https://www.ekioh...
- rattray 6y ago
  And this is the project's homepage: https://web.archive.org/web/20190623202921/https://www.ekioh.com/flow/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190623202921/https://www.ekioh... A quirksmode post about the project: https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2020/01/new_browser_on.html https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2020/01/new_browser... And the project's twitter handle: https://twitter.com/flowbrowser https://twitter.com/flowbrowser
  - burky 6y ago
    Thanks for the links. I was looking everywhere for the information that ended up being in the "quirksmode" post. So far that post has had the most value in answering questions.
  - giancarlostoro 6y ago
    I wonder if they'll ever open source it, sounds interesting enough.
    - rattray 6y ago
      In the quirksmode interview they say they will not open source it, since they are a small company and don't have the resources.
  - cmroanirgo 6y ago
    From https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2020/01/new_browser_on.html https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2020/01/new_browser... >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.
numpad0 6y ago
It took me a few second to look up that (｀ﾟдﾟ ) test in my brain...man it’s been a long time
- amelius 6y ago
  ACID, that's Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability, right? :)
  - ivthreadp110 6y ago
    Abysmal exception handling, Character encoding issues, Incongruity code style, Delusional developers. (I'm in that last category for sure)... but hmmm... probably should check myself at that statement.
    - dirtnugget 6y ago
      This just made my day
rattray 6y ago
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).
- emerongi 6y ago
  Are we stuck with HTML/CSS/JS forever? For today's interactive applications, those 3 are clearly insufficient. Can't the standards commitees come up with a new "web language" that actually satisfies the needs of 2020? Or is the goal to just have everything run on WebAssembly? Kudos to the author.. but I was hoping it would be a "for real new" browser.
  - rcarmo 6y ago
    They already did. You probably don't want to go through the SMIL spec on an empty stomach, though.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    Will the current web stack be the preferred language of applications that run in a browser forever? Maybe not. Having the browser just be a WASM target with (potentially) more than one rendering and layout engine doesn’t seem that far fetched. However, I think the need to support the current web stack will continue for the foreseeable future since it would be a terrible waste to simply abandon a platform that so many applications are written for.
    - 6y ago
p0llard 6y ago
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?
- Semaphor 6y ago
  > A quick note about the score: Acid3 dates back to 2008 and the web platform specs have changed over time so a perfect score, using the version hosted on acidtests.org, is now only 97/100. The version hosted on the web platform tests site has been updated to match the specs and so, using that, browsers should score 100/100. From the archived blog post
  - p0llard 6y ago
    Ah thanks, the page wasn't loading for me when I wrote this.
- aeosynth 6y ago
  From the article: > Acid3 dates back to 2008 and the web platform specs have changed over time so a perfect score, using the version hosted on acidtests.org, is now only 97/100. The version hosted on the web platform tests site has been updated to match the specs and so, using that, browsers should score 100/100
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    They should release an up-to-date version of the test then, Maybe call it Acid3.11 for Workgroups, or something.
- detaro 6y ago
  Technically yes, but only some niche parts of the original test do not apply anymore. Firefox and Chrome "fail" the test with a score of 97/100, a large part of it is still useful.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
thePunisher 6y ago
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++.
wantguns 6y ago
the blog is getting hugged to death
OptionX 6y ago
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.
baybal2 6y ago
> ACID3 Too bad, there are no ACID4, 5, 6... The web specs were broken for years since ACID3 managed to somehow stabilize them.
- rebelwebmaster 6y ago
  Web platform tests have overtaken them at this point.
kekeblom 6y ago
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.
- moron4hire 6y ago
  The problem is that every site needs a different 90% of the spec.
  - kekeblom 6y ago
    Right, but there's still a lot of overlap between features. Take layout for example. If you wanted to arrange boxes using html and css, you have quite a few choices. You could use at least: tables, floats, flexbox or css grid. Imagine if there was only one of those that would cover all possible layouts.
    - c-smile 6y ago
      > Only one of those that would cover all possible layouts. In fact 10 years ago it was such an idea at w3c-styles: https://terrainformatica.com/2018/12/11/10-years-of-flexboxing/ https://terrainformatica.com/2018/12/11/10-years-of-flexboxi... Single CSS property `flow` that defines layout manager in classic Java AWT terms: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/layout/visual.html https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/layout/visua...
- tannhaeuser 6y ago
  Here's hoping though that the sites you actually want to visit, such as HN, don't need all that crap. As such, web bloat can serve as a negative marker of sorts ;)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
app4soft 6y ago
Linked website just failed to pass "HN effect".[0] > 503 > Service Unavailable > The server is temporarily busy, try again later! [0] http://archive.is/DU69F http://archive.is/DU69F
cercatrova 6y ago
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.
- gsnedders 6y ago
  > How does it deal with DRM? AFAIK, it doesn't try, because their customers don't care. > there won't be licenses issued to other browsers That's… not really true. Google certainly are sometimes slow at dealing with Widevine licensing, but as far as I'm aware that's not a problem unique to the browser space.
sub7 6y ago
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.
ilaksh 6y ago
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. https://github.com/runvnc/noscriptweb https://github.com/runvnc/noscriptweb
mxschmitt 6y ago
I get the following: 403 Forbidden Access to this resource on the server is denied!
asdfasdfeee 6y ago
This is very impressive
pbreit 6y ago
Is it available?
neurostimulant 6y ago
No downloadable builds? The desktop builds doesn't seem to be available for general public. https://www.ekioh.com/support/ https://www.ekioh.com/support/
- ssss11 6y ago
  This is what i noticed. Why do i have to contact them to download it? What licence is it?
dang 6y ago
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21658935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21658935 from 6 months ago.
gorgoiler 6y ago
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.
XCSme 6y ago
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?
- VoxPelli 6y ago
  The Servo project is the only one built from scratch to do this a d some of its parts has been retrofitted to Firefox to enhance some parts there, but to fully move to multi-threadedness would mean that Firefox would have to do a complete switch to Servo and I don’t think Servo is ready for that.
ralmidani 6y ago
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?)
squarefoot 6y ago
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.
- pmarin 6y ago
  I don't use adblocking. Disabling javascript solve all those problems.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nojvek 6y ago
How does one download the flow browser ?
warpech 6y ago
I would totally pay for a web browser
r618 6y ago
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

525 points by methyl 6y ago

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-room-browser/ https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/full-google-mail-in-a-clean-ro...

iforgotpassword 6y ago
Yes, this is really surprising. Browsers have in many ways gotten more complex than operating systems, so creating a new one from scratch seemed off the table for now. A big player like Microsoft scrapping Edge certainly helped to strengthen that impression. It's certainly not as compatible with the modern web as chrome and Firefox but hey, it's doing much more than I'd have expected.
- cmroanirgo 6y ago
  I like the author's writing style too... This seems to be as much an exploration as anything: >I’ll be the first to admit it’s not perfect yet – some vertical alignment is wrong in a few places, Hangouts doesn’t work, and our ‘contenteditable’ support is minimal. But I don’t think these detract from the achievement – as far as I’m aware, no browser engine other than Webkit, Blink and Gecko can run full Google Mail, and these have all had over twenty years of development work on them.
fireattack 6y ago
Why does he call it "Google Mail"? Isn't "Gmail" the official name (and the mostly widely used one)?
- Macha 6y ago
  In many countries such as the UK (where the author is from) and Germany it was called Google Mail due to trademark disputes with local companies that had the Gmail name first. I think they've sorted most of these with licensing agreements or just buying the rights for the name, but a lot of UK people still have @googlemail addresses even.
  - fireattack 6y ago
    That's an interesting trivia, thanks!

akling 6y ago

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 :)

ddevault 6y ago

Since the website is down, I'll just answer the important question for you: no, it is not open source.

elric 6y ago
Who knows, maybe a bit of HN notoriety can persuade them to change their mind?
- Narretz 6y ago
  This isn't the first time the Flow browser is brought up. It's good to see they are still developing it, but it looks like their stance on source availability is pretty rigid.
  - gsnedders 6y ago
    Practically, my reading would be they're not opposed to it if the business case can be made, within acceptable levels of risk.

caiobegotti 6y ago

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"?

saagarjha 6y ago
It gives a reason why they can't run it as a loss leader.
- VoxPelli 6y ago
  Agree. They could though do a classic dual license with an open version being some kind of AGPL or similar a strict copyleft license and the closed proprietary version be one without copyleft restrictions.
globular-toast 6y ago
Oh. Not interested then.
- yoz-y 6y ago
  While I usually don't dismiss closed source software, for a browser this is quite a hard pass. There are just too many ways one could be exploited for it to be using security through obscurity. Especially since they are not a large company.

butz 6y ago

This should be perfect browser for KaiOS, considering low amount of RAM in their devices.

loeg 6y ago

Amusingly, Chrome doesn't pass ACID3 these days.

fouc 6y ago
Apparently 97/100 is a perfect score these days due to some changes made.

Ericson2314 6y ago

How does it compare to Servo?

gsnedders 6y ago
Servo fails a bunch of the Acid3 subtests: https://wpt.fyi/results/acid/acid3/numbered-tests.html?label=master&product=servo https://wpt.fyi/results/acid/acid3/numbered-tests.html?label...

MaxBarraclough 6y ago

> 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_on.html https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2020/01/new_browser...

fl0wenol 6y ago
I think it's reasonable to not roll your own JS engine when Spidermonkey and V8 are intended to be integrated in other projects.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  Of course.

seanwilson 6y ago

Is ACID3 the most relevant test? It was released in 2008 and had some updates in 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3, https://www.webstandards.org/action/acid3/ https://www.webstandards.org/action/acid3/ Does it check flexbox and grid support for example?

eternalny1 6y ago
The author's post has comments about this, apparently the best score on ACID3 is now 97/100 due to spec changes, but there is an updated version of the test. https://web.archive.org/web/20200613124642/https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/acid/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200613124642/https://www.ekioh...
gsnedders 6y ago
Flexbox, yes. Grid, last I knew no, but also totally plausible it's changed.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

sillysaurusx 6y ago

Amusingly, I went to http://acid3.acidtests.org/ 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 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 https://imgur.com/CrAYhpI I burst out laughing because it was so unexpected. I wonder what's going on.

londons_explore 6y ago
The web evolves, and some features are deliberately changed in backwards incompatible ways - eg. third party cookies, cross site resources, no audio before user interaction, removal of cross-thread arraybuffers, etc. Browser makers seem to have this idea that if a feature is rarely used, it's fine to redefine or break it in the name of simplicity...
- WiseWeasel 6y ago
  Browsers are user agents; the changes you mention all seem to the benefit of user experience and security. Standards are codification of things browsers have already done, or have attempted to do.
sp332 6y ago
"Acid3, in particular, contains some controversial tests and no longer reflects the consensus of the Web standards it purports to test, especially when it comes to issues affecting mobile browsers. The tests remain available for historical purposes and for use by browser vendors. It would be inappropriate, however, to use them as part of a certification process, especially for mobile browsers." Wikipedia gives this as an example of a standard that changed: https://github.com/whatwg/dom/issues/319 https://github.com/whatwg/dom/issues/319 Edit: there's an updated version at http://wpt.live/acid/acid3/test.html http://wpt.live/acid/acid3/test.html
- 6y ago

barbarbar 6y ago

I get a page with a HUGE 503.

donpdonp 6y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20200613124642/https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/acid/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200613124642/https://www.ekioh...

lukevp 6y ago

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.

tannhaeuser 6y ago
> I wonder if the Edge/Brave strategy is better if you’re trying to get compatibility and performance as fast as possible Of course it's faster than developing a browser from scratch, or working with a browser startup on integration etc. but that isn't the question. The question is whether it's even feasible to develop a browser with publicly available information (HTML 5 specs including SVG and MathML, but which one/version? tens of CSS specs and growing as we speak [1], hefty ECMAScript specs, http2+http3/quic, A/V codecs, multiple font formats, etc. etc.). As a glimpse into browser development, yesterday we learned [2] that even a RegExp engine for JavaScript poses a challenge, with specs being "fitted to match reality" eg Chrome behaviour. Honestly, with these results of creating almost a browser monopoly and driving browser development out of existence (Opera, MS), and now even Moz beginning to integrate Chrome code, I don't understand why the clowns at WHATWG and W3C even bother writing specs; they just can't stop it seems. Never has a standardization effort failed so miserably and went so totally out of control, and it'll be a huge problem for generations to come. Talking about almost all human communications (in law, education, politics, medicine, science, culture, personal docs) being held hostage by an ad company; even stone age humans had more liberties in cultural expression. [1]: https://webplatform.news/issues/2020-06-04 https://webplatform.news/issues/2020-06-04 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23487960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23487960 Edit: big congrats to the Flow developers!
- Santosh83 6y ago

rattray 6y ago

The author's blog site seems to be down; here's an archive.org link: https://web.archive.org/web/20200613124642/https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/acid/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200613124642/https://www.ekioh...

rattray 6y ago
And this is the project's homepage: https://web.archive.org/web/20190623202921/https://www.ekioh.com/flow/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190623202921/https://www.ekioh... A quirksmode post about the project: https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2020/01/new_browser_on.html https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2020/01/new_browser... And the project's twitter handle: https://twitter.com/flowbrowser https://twitter.com/flowbrowser
- burky 6y ago
  Thanks for the links. I was looking everywhere for the information that ended up being in the "quirksmode" post. So far that post has had the most value in answering questions.
- giancarlostoro 6y ago
  I wonder if they'll ever open source it, sounds interesting enough.
  - rattray 6y ago
    In the quirksmode interview they say they will not open source it, since they are a small company and don't have the resources.
- cmroanirgo 6y ago
  From https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2020/01/new_browser_on.html https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2020/01/new_browser... >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.

numpad0 6y ago

It took me a few second to look up that (｀ﾟдﾟ ) test in my brain...man it’s been a long time

amelius 6y ago
ACID, that's Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability, right? :)
- ivthreadp110 6y ago
  Abysmal exception handling, Character encoding issues, Incongruity code style, Delusional developers. (I'm in that last category for sure)... but hmmm... probably should check myself at that statement.
  - dirtnugget 6y ago
    This just made my day

rattray 6y ago

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).

emerongi 6y ago
Are we stuck with HTML/CSS/JS forever? For today's interactive applications, those 3 are clearly insufficient. Can't the standards commitees come up with a new "web language" that actually satisfies the needs of 2020? Or is the goal to just have everything run on WebAssembly? Kudos to the author.. but I was hoping it would be a "for real new" browser.
- rcarmo 6y ago
  They already did. You probably don't want to go through the SMIL spec on an empty stomach, though.
- Spivak 6y ago
  Will the current web stack be the preferred language of applications that run in a browser forever? Maybe not. Having the browser just be a WASM target with (potentially) more than one rendering and layout engine doesn’t seem that far fetched. However, I think the need to support the current web stack will continue for the foreseeable future since it would be a terrible waste to simply abandon a platform that so many applications are written for.
  - 6y ago

p0llard 6y ago

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?

Semaphor 6y ago
> A quick note about the score: Acid3 dates back to 2008 and the web platform specs have changed over time so a perfect score, using the version hosted on acidtests.org, is now only 97/100. The version hosted on the web platform tests site has been updated to match the specs and so, using that, browsers should score 100/100. From the archived blog post
- p0llard 6y ago
  Ah thanks, the page wasn't loading for me when I wrote this.
aeosynth 6y ago
From the article: > Acid3 dates back to 2008 and the web platform specs have changed over time so a perfect score, using the version hosted on acidtests.org, is now only 97/100. The version hosted on the web platform tests site has been updated to match the specs and so, using that, browsers should score 100/100
- zozbot234 6y ago
  They should release an up-to-date version of the test then, Maybe call it Acid3.11 for Workgroups, or something.
detaro 6y ago
Technically yes, but only some niche parts of the original test do not apply anymore. Firefox and Chrome "fail" the test with a score of 97/100, a large part of it is still useful.
deleted 6y ago
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thePunisher 6y ago

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++.

wantguns 6y ago

the blog is getting hugged to death

OptionX 6y ago

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.

baybal2 6y ago

> ACID3 Too bad, there are no ACID4, 5, 6... The web specs were broken for years since ACID3 managed to somehow stabilize them.

rebelwebmaster 6y ago
Web platform tests have overtaken them at this point.

kekeblom 6y ago

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.

moron4hire 6y ago
The problem is that every site needs a different 90% of the spec.
- kekeblom 6y ago
  Right, but there's still a lot of overlap between features. Take layout for example. If you wanted to arrange boxes using html and css, you have quite a few choices. You could use at least: tables, floats, flexbox or css grid. Imagine if there was only one of those that would cover all possible layouts.
  - c-smile 6y ago
    > Only one of those that would cover all possible layouts. In fact 10 years ago it was such an idea at w3c-styles: https://terrainformatica.com/2018/12/11/10-years-of-flexboxing/ https://terrainformatica.com/2018/12/11/10-years-of-flexboxi... Single CSS property `flow` that defines layout manager in classic Java AWT terms: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/layout/visual.html https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/layout/visua...
tannhaeuser 6y ago
Here's hoping though that the sites you actually want to visit, such as HN, don't need all that crap. As such, web bloat can serve as a negative marker of sorts ;)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

app4soft 6y ago

Linked website just failed to pass "HN effect".[0] > 503 > Service Unavailable > The server is temporarily busy, try again later! [0] http://archive.is/DU69F http://archive.is/DU69F

cercatrova 6y ago

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.

gsnedders 6y ago
> How does it deal with DRM? AFAIK, it doesn't try, because their customers don't care. > there won't be licenses issued to other browsers That's… not really true. Google certainly are sometimes slow at dealing with Widevine licensing, but as far as I'm aware that's not a problem unique to the browser space.

sub7 6y ago

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.

ilaksh 6y ago

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. https://github.com/runvnc/noscriptweb https://github.com/runvnc/noscriptweb

mxschmitt 6y ago

I get the following: 403 Forbidden Access to this resource on the server is denied!

asdfasdfeee 6y ago

This is very impressive

pbreit 6y ago

Is it available?

neurostimulant 6y ago

No downloadable builds? The desktop builds doesn't seem to be available for general public. https://www.ekioh.com/support/ https://www.ekioh.com/support/

ssss11 6y ago
This is what i noticed. Why do i have to contact them to download it? What licence is it?

dang 6y ago

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21658935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21658935 from 6 months ago.

gorgoiler 6y ago

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.

XCSme 6y ago

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?

VoxPelli 6y ago
The Servo project is the only one built from scratch to do this a d some of its parts has been retrofitted to Firefox to enhance some parts there, but to fully move to multi-threadedness would mean that Firefox would have to do a complete switch to Servo and I don’t think Servo is ready for that.

ralmidani 6y ago

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?)

squarefoot 6y ago

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.

pmarin 6y ago
I don't use adblocking. Disabling javascript solve all those problems.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

nojvek 6y ago

How does one download the flow browser ?

warpech 6y ago

I would totally pay for a web browser

r618 6y ago

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