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Seeing as the article is almost 100% focused on UX, the browser is almost certainly Chromium-based. In which case it'll be joining the club alongside Brave, Viv

Seeing as the article is almost 100% focused on UX, the browser is almost certainly Chromium-based. In which case it'll be joining the club alongside Brave, Vivaldi, Silk, and many other browsers aiming to "reinvent what it means to browse the web". There's nothing wrong with that (though I'm personally a little weary of the song and dance), but it isn't a shot across the bow of web-monopolists like some here might be hoping.

akdor1154 6y ago
An old Techcrunch article says they are using WebKit and focusing on a Mac app.
- brundolf 6y ago
  Hum, interesting. So still not a whole new browser engine, but could conceivably help balance things out a little bit one day.
- SahAssar 6y ago
  So like a GNOME Web for mac but backed with VC money?
  - Yaggo 6y ago
    I don't think there's any mention of the new browser being open source? Not sure why you used GNOME Web as an example. Safari is based on webkit and actually webkit is originating from Safari (forked from khtml ages ago).
    - emayljames 6y ago
      I assume is used as an example as it is OSS, and lays bare the ridiculous nature of pouring money into something that could conceivably be gotten for free.
  - akdor1154 6y ago
    and duct-taped to Anki.
bastawhiz 6y ago
FWIW, this is partially Mozilla's fault. About a decade ago they made the call to make it more difficult to embed Gecko outside of Firefox. Dead links abound: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embedding_Mozilla https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embed... Scary warnings: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embedding_Mozilla/FAQ/Embedding_Gecko https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embed... This choice (under Gary Kovacs, IIRC) has effectively made it a poor choice for _anyone_ to build on top of Mozilla's browser engine without forking the entirety of the mozilla tree. You'd need to have a very good business justification for attempting it. Since Chrome is essentially a superset of Chromium, it's been obvious how to build your own equivalent of Chrome (and first-party supported!). There is no "Firefoxium" version of Firefox, and I'd expect developers would need to go to great lengths to keep their code up-to-date on top of mozilla-central.
- fabrice_d 6y ago
  Building a new gecko-based browser is not the same thing as "embedding gecko", at least on desktop platforms. Creating a new gecko-based product is not very hard, even if you will hit some cases of the platform depending on firefox that you'll have to workaround or borrow. Creating a full new blink-based product is as difficult actually. Most chromium derivatives take the simpler road of forking chromium, not building a new blink-based browser (eg. Brave maintains a pile of patches). I don't understand why you would expect a "firefoxium": there is no such thing because there is no proprietary version of the open source Firefox. If you fork Firefox, you're in the same boat as people forking chromium in terms of complexity.
  - t0astbread 6y ago
    What do you mean by "Creating a new gecko-based product"? I might have overlooked something but last time I checked, there was no way to use a current version of Gecko outside of Firefox, except for GeckoView on Android.
    - fabrice_d 6y ago
wayneftw 6y ago
You don't need to reinvent car engines to innovate in the automotive industry. The same can certainly apply to web browsers and their engines. Heck, Apple's car will be a Kia.
adamredwoods 6y ago
I wonder if their killer feature could just be a Chrome extension?
- onion2k 6y ago
  This business is probably spending $0.5m on engineering effort to build a customised version of Chromium, and $9m on marketing in order to get people to use it. The question is why. The feature they highlight in their marketing could be a plugin, but VCs aren't stupid. They're not giving someone $9.5m to spend making a browser if the same business goal could be achieved with something far simpler. That money is mostly going on a plan to take a little sliver of browser market share with some other end goal that they're not talking about.
chaostheory 6y ago
imo the bigger issue is that there's only so much you can do with a pancake display. The future browser needs to take advantage of AR and VR.

akdor1154 6y ago

An old Techcrunch article says they are using WebKit and focusing on a Mac app.

brundolf 6y ago
Hum, interesting. So still not a whole new browser engine, but could conceivably help balance things out a little bit one day.
SahAssar 6y ago
So like a GNOME Web for mac but backed with VC money?
- Yaggo 6y ago
  I don't think there's any mention of the new browser being open source? Not sure why you used GNOME Web as an example. Safari is based on webkit and actually webkit is originating from Safari (forked from khtml ages ago).
  - emayljames 6y ago
    I assume is used as an example as it is OSS, and lays bare the ridiculous nature of pouring money into something that could conceivably be gotten for free.
- akdor1154 6y ago
  and duct-taped to Anki.

bastawhiz 6y ago

FWIW, this is partially Mozilla's fault. About a decade ago they made the call to make it more difficult to embed Gecko outside of Firefox. Dead links abound: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embedding_Mozilla https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embed... Scary warnings: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embedding_Mozilla/FAQ/Embedding_Gecko https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embed... This choice (under Gary Kovacs, IIRC) has effectively made it a poor choice for _anyone_ to build on top of Mozilla's browser engine without forking the entirety of the mozilla tree. You'd need to have a very good business justification for attempting it. Since Chrome is essentially a superset of Chromium, it's been obvious how to build your own equivalent of Chrome (and first-party supported!). There is no "Firefoxium" version of Firefox, and I'd expect developers would need to go to great lengths to keep their code up-to-date on top of mozilla-central.

fabrice_d 6y ago
Building a new gecko-based browser is not the same thing as "embedding gecko", at least on desktop platforms. Creating a new gecko-based product is not very hard, even if you will hit some cases of the platform depending on firefox that you'll have to workaround or borrow. Creating a full new blink-based product is as difficult actually. Most chromium derivatives take the simpler road of forking chromium, not building a new blink-based browser (eg. Brave maintains a pile of patches). I don't understand why you would expect a "firefoxium": there is no such thing because there is no proprietary version of the open source Firefox. If you fork Firefox, you're in the same boat as people forking chromium in terms of complexity.
- t0astbread 6y ago
  What do you mean by "Creating a new gecko-based product"? I might have overlooked something but last time I checked, there was no way to use a current version of Gecko outside of Firefox, except for GeckoView on Android.
  - fabrice_d 6y ago

wayneftw 6y ago

You don't need to reinvent car engines to innovate in the automotive industry. The same can certainly apply to web browsers and their engines. Heck, Apple's car will be a Kia.

adamredwoods 6y ago

I wonder if their killer feature could just be a Chrome extension?

onion2k 6y ago
This business is probably spending $0.5m on engineering effort to build a customised version of Chromium, and $9m on marketing in order to get people to use it. The question is why. The feature they highlight in their marketing could be a plugin, but VCs aren't stupid. They're not giving someone $9.5m to spend making a browser if the same business goal could be achieved with something far simpler. That money is mostly going on a plan to take a little sliver of browser market share with some other end goal that they're not talking about.

chaostheory 6y ago

imo the bigger issue is that there's only so much you can do with a pancake display. The future browser needs to take advantage of AR and VR.