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How about Opera, a company who's main product is a browser, who had expertise in building fast, featureful, innovative and compliant browser engines since befor

How about Opera, a company who's main product is a browser, who had expertise in building fast, featureful, innovative and compliant browser engines since before Internet Explorer 1.0 came out, opted to abandon the project and adopt Blink stating the maintenance complexity as their reasoning. Not as big a company as MS/Apple, but certainly more established than Ekioh sofar. I really hope Ekioh can succeed here long-term where others haven't.

jankotek 6y ago
Main selling point of Presto Opera engine was it could run on any CPU. Often on poor feature phones, without MMU, floating point arithmetic... Raise of cheap full featured ARM CPUs made it obsolete.
- lucideer 6y ago
  I think you're thinking of Opera Mini, which was a (set of?) thin client(s) that ran on feature phones and rendered a proprietary lightweight binary transport (OBML) that those phones could handled. OBML was generated on a proxy server running a fully featured web rendering engine (which may have been Presto). Opera's Presto engine was mainly used in their desktop and smartphone browsers. It was not used directly in Opera mini on feature phones. > Raise of cheap full featured ARM CPUs made it obsolete. Not sure what this means. How would ARM make a browser obsolete?
  - tinus_hn 6y ago
    ARM Made opera mini obsolete because there were no more users. The people that have a phone it runs on don’t want a browser or they’d get a smartphone, the people with a smartphone don’t want it because they can use a real browser
badsectoracula 6y ago
Opera was trying to make money in a commoditized environment. Honestly, i do not believe that Flow has much of a future as a proprietary product for providing a browser engine no matter how good it supposedly is - even Sciter presents itself as a UI engine, not a browser engine. However that doesn't mean writing a new browser engine is impossible, it only means that it doesn't make much economic sense for a company to do so. Those two are not the same thing.
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  Can we agree it's impractical, even if technically possible?
- lucideer 6y ago
  > Opera was trying to make money in a commoditized environment. From what I can tell, Ekioh appear to be doing the same[0] > that doesn't mean writing a new browser engine is impossible, it only means that it doesn't make much economic sense for a company to do so. Those two are not the same thing. This is basically what I said in my first comment above: it's always technically possible, but is it practically possible. One needs a certain small amount of economic support to continue any project (no matter how small) these days. Whether it's feasible via donations/etc. or whether some kind of commercial setup is required isn't really super-relevant. The only question here is: if it's the former, can the income support employing devs to work on it, or can voluntary developer contributions maintain the project long term (for which you typically need a large community, with which you typically get further scaling & cost concerns). It's notable also that Flow is not open source, so Opera is actually a very good comparison here (and much of the above donation/volunteer-based thoughts are not options here). [0] https://www.ekioh.com/company/#partners https://www.ekioh.com/company/#partners
  - gsnedders 6y ago
    Ekioh is essentially a competitor of Vewd, the former TV/devices part of Opera.

jankotek 6y ago

Main selling point of Presto Opera engine was it could run on any CPU. Often on poor feature phones, without MMU, floating point arithmetic... Raise of cheap full featured ARM CPUs made it obsolete.

lucideer 6y ago
I think you're thinking of Opera Mini, which was a (set of?) thin client(s) that ran on feature phones and rendered a proprietary lightweight binary transport (OBML) that those phones could handled. OBML was generated on a proxy server running a fully featured web rendering engine (which may have been Presto). Opera's Presto engine was mainly used in their desktop and smartphone browsers. It was not used directly in Opera mini on feature phones. > Raise of cheap full featured ARM CPUs made it obsolete. Not sure what this means. How would ARM make a browser obsolete?
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  ARM Made opera mini obsolete because there were no more users. The people that have a phone it runs on don’t want a browser or they’d get a smartphone, the people with a smartphone don’t want it because they can use a real browser

badsectoracula 6y ago

Opera was trying to make money in a commoditized environment. Honestly, i do not believe that Flow has much of a future as a proprietary product for providing a browser engine no matter how good it supposedly is - even Sciter presents itself as a UI engine, not a browser engine. However that doesn't mean writing a new browser engine is impossible, it only means that it doesn't make much economic sense for a company to do so. Those two are not the same thing.

paulryanrogers 6y ago
Can we agree it's impractical, even if technically possible?
lucideer 6y ago
> Opera was trying to make money in a commoditized environment. From what I can tell, Ekioh appear to be doing the same[0] > that doesn't mean writing a new browser engine is impossible, it only means that it doesn't make much economic sense for a company to do so. Those two are not the same thing. This is basically what I said in my first comment above: it's always technically possible, but is it practically possible. One needs a certain small amount of economic support to continue any project (no matter how small) these days. Whether it's feasible via donations/etc. or whether some kind of commercial setup is required isn't really super-relevant. The only question here is: if it's the former, can the income support employing devs to work on it, or can voluntary developer contributions maintain the project long term (for which you typically need a large community, with which you typically get further scaling & cost concerns). It's notable also that Flow is not open source, so Opera is actually a very good comparison here (and much of the above donation/volunteer-based thoughts are not options here). [0] https://www.ekioh.com/company/#partners https://www.ekioh.com/company/#partners
- gsnedders 6y ago
  Ekioh is essentially a competitor of Vewd, the former TV/devices part of Opera.