12 ms·

Google Docs in a clean-room browser

414 points by sohkamyung 5y ago

devwastaken 5y ago
*Closed source browser. Flow is yet another project pulling on open source resources, and the browser market created from open browsers, and trying to privatize it. Imagine if google could just make whatever internal changes to chromium and nobody knew about it.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > yet another project pulling on open source resources And? It's a product people find useful enough to pay for. Open source is by default provided to the world freely. If someone is opposed to it being use freely, in any way the person on the other side chooses, including commercially, there are licenses that can proscribe that.
- breakfastduck 5y ago
  > "yet another project pulling on open source resources" Erm, yeah. Isn't that the point of making something open source with a permissive license? So that other people are able to use it in their own projects?
  - ronsor 5y ago
    I feel like a lot of people choose permissive licenses due to inertia while not really understanding them.
    - jamesfinlayson 5y ago
      Agreed - I feel like 15 or 20 years ago, GPL was a well-known license so that's just what people went with, without understanding all of the implications.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    Legally for sure. But from an ecosystem perspective, it's reasonable to be concerned about people whose relationships to a commons is essentially extractive. When I use open source in commercial offerings, I see it as both morally appropriate and good business to contribute back in one way or another.
    - maccolgan 5y ago
      Why not use GPL/AGPL/LGPL as it's clearly more appropriate in this case?
      - wpietri 5y ago
        From my perspective as an open-source consumer, that doesn't matter much. The license tells me what I can legally get away with. But what I care about pragmatically is whether that project will keep existing and improving such that it will meet my needs down the road. And what I care about morally is maintaining positive-sum relationships with my community and society.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- SahAssar 5y ago
  > Imagine if google could just make whatever internal changes to chromium and nobody knew about it. If you use chrome, they do. Chrome has a lot of changes and additions that are not in the open-source chromium codebase.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  > Imagine if google could just make whatever internal changes to chromium and nobody knew about it. Chromium is BSD licensed so Google absolutely can just make it closed source.
  - est31 5y ago
    The BSD license only applies to some code from what I can tell. Other code is still under LGPL. At least this is what this file tells me: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/main/third_party/blink/LICENSE_FOR_ABOUT_CREDITS https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/...
    - empyrical 5y ago
      Yes, there's code in Chromium going back to the KDE/ Konqueror and WebKit days that's LGPL licensed. Mostly in the Blink rendering engine like you linked.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - chubot 5y ago
    Just to clarify the relevant thing is whether Google owns the copyright to Chromium source, and it does for a huge part. It can license that code however it wants, including open source, or no license at all. Chrome/Chromium also uses a ton of open source libraries for which Google does NOT hold the copyright, but all of them, per their license, can be linked with closed source code and distributed (i.e. they are not GPL/copyleft).
  - seba_dos1 5y ago
    ...and they do, calling it Google Chrome.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- kiryin 5y ago
  Imagine the irony of fate if they not only did that, but also had the audacity to call the resultant browser "Chrome." Makes me shudder.
  - cxr 5y ago
    One side effect, intentional or not, that came from Google naming their browser "Chrome" was that Gecko development become more difficult. It became too hard to get search engines (you know the one) to understand that you weren't looking for Google blog posts and press releases, but instead developer documentation for Mozilla internals, which you could have pretty reliably found previously by including "chrome" as a useful search term.
timw4mail 5y ago
I would be a lot more impressed with this browser engine if I could actually see it working.
- timw4mail 5y ago
  Apparently there's a preview for Raspbian: https://support.ekioh.com/download/ https://support.ekioh.com/download/
  - youngtaff 5y ago
    It's been available for a while… I download and try it every couple of months to see what their progress is like
blagie 5y ago
Technically, color me impressed. Business-wise, I'm skeptical: - Alternative browser engines have always fallen behind, eventually. - Open-source is a huge win for most embedded applications. - Having a big company backing something is a huge win too, since something like Webkit ain't going away. I think one possible outcome here might be an acquisition. Microsoft was forced to eat crow with Edge adopting Google's engine. This would be an opportunity for Apple, Microsoft, or Amazon to leapfrog Google. A GPU or multicore-accelerated browser could make the iPhone/Macbook/etc. much more responsive than Chrome. Another might be some open-source strategy, but I don't quite know what it might be.
- ReactiveJelly 5y ago
  Doesn't WebKit already have a lot of GPU and multi-thread / multi-process acceleration? Even Gecko does now.
  - sroussey 5y ago
    Blink and V8 also use GPU and multiple threads.
  - chrismorgan 5y ago
    > Even Gecko does now. In matters of GPU and multithreading, it’s not a case of “even Gecko”—in these fields, Firefox is leading the pack among desktop browsers by a very considerable margin. Firefox is the only one with actual GPU rendering (via WebRender), and I haven’t heard of any competitors even starting on doing the same, which will take them years. As for advantageous use of multithreading, Firefox has led the way here with other parts of the Quantum project (again driven by stuff that was incubated in Servo), though I have a feeling Chromium has also been steadily doing more too; I think parts of LayoutNG might be multithreaded?
- ajb 5y ago
  They aren't huge, but there is a market for these embedded browsers. Ekioh has been around for 15 years.
EamonnMR 5y ago
I'm refreshed that Flow does not have its implementation language on the front page.
- Y_Y 5y ago
  As much as I'm irked by language partisanism, that's typically justified on the basis of ease of installation or attracting developers. Since this otherwise great looking product is a closed source binary then it would be hard to justify. (Although I bet it's not in Rust, because then they'd surely say it anyway.)
  - gsnedders 5y ago
    (It's C++)
    - SilverRed 5y ago
      So expect to see a billion trivial security flaws that give RCE access to your computer.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
evmar 5y ago
> seems to compare the Firefox version number with 65 ... I’ve no idea what the purpose of this is I previously worked on JS infra at Google. Google uses a lot of shared JS libraries that date back over a decade, and those libraries have accumulated lots of workarounds for browsers that nobody cares about anymore. (One especially crazy seeming one from today's perspective is that there's a separate implementation of event propagation, I believe because because it dates back to browsers that only implemented one half of event bubbling/capture!) It's very difficult to remove an old workaround because 1. it's hard to be completely sure nobody actually depends on the workaround (especially given the wide variety of apps and environments Google supports -- Firefox aside, Google JS runs on a lot of abandonware TVs), and 2. it's hard to prioritize doing such work, because it's low value (a few less bytes of JS) and nonzero risk (see point 1) without meaningfully moving any metrics you care about. In all, how to eliminate accumulated cruft like is a fascinating problem to me in that I can't see how it ever gets done. And it's not a Google thing. Even the newer cooler startup I now work at has similar "work around old Safari bug, not sure if it's safe to remove" codepaths that I can imagine will stick around forever, for similar reasons.
- joe-collins 5y ago
  For letters "p" and "z", this strikes me as likely related to print and undo functions.
  - jrochkind1 5y ago
    all the letters between p and z. pqrstuvxwyz
- inetknght 5y ago
  > not sure if it's safe to remove That's a symptom of companies spending all their money on building new features without also spending money on regression testing. If you build a feature to work around a third party then surely you have that third party on-hand to build automated tests against and ensure that something didn't break and/or is still needed? If not then you're not writing new features; you're writing hacks. And you are perpetuating the same problem on other people.
sharmin123 5y ago
Let’s Secure WiFi Network and Prevent WiFi Hacking: https://www.hackerslist.co/lets-secure-wifi-network-and-prevent-wifi-hacking/ https://www.hackerslist.co/lets-secure-wifi-network-and-prev...
gadders 5y ago
Very offtopic, but the name of the author - Piers Wombwell - would make a great name for an Ob/Gyn.
kiryin 5y ago
Words can not express the relief it is to see a completely new web browser rendering engine being developed. It's heartbreaking that it's proprietary, my initial wish was that they'd open up after it matured a bit. Still hopeful though, the browser landscape needs diversity and preferably in the form of something that isn't carrying 3 decades worth of baggage.
- freediver 5y ago
  It is quite reasonable for it to be proprietary as developed by a small team that still needs to see return on its investment. Last thing they need is someone with a pile of cash and/or reach taking their engine and launching a new browser with it, stealing their thunder. Monetizing a browser is not easy if you are not in the data-monetization game.
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    > Monetizing a browser is not easy if you are not in the data-monetization game. How do we know that they aren't? It's like free money for a tech company. There's little or no disincentive, and they don't have to do a lot of extra work - the data is already sitting around waiting to be collected.
vxNsr 5y ago
I'm curious as this is a closed source project, who does it exist? what market are they trying to serve?
- jitl 5y ago
  Anyone who wants to run a high performance browser on minimal hardware. Eg browser on TV set top box, embedded point of sale device, etc.
- ybot2 5y ago
  I used to develop Set Top Box user interfaces that used the Ekioh browser. We'd use SVG, JavaScript and CSS to get native UI performance in a browser that was running in 256MB ram. Their later versions enabled us to use HTML5 and CSS3. I enjoyed the challenges of balancing UI animation against capturing keypresses and other events as well as executing JavaScript fetched via AJAX. Due to the memory constraints we couldn't use any JavaScript frameworks and wrote everything in vanilla JS. Our C and C++ developers would expose the native hardware functionality up into the JavaScript Ekioh engine so that we could access and control features like scanning cable TV frequencies and recording to disk. The cable and satellite TV networks would end up paying a licence per instance of the browser running on each of their customers set top boxes.
- freediver 5y ago
  Curious what does your question imply? DuckDuckGo, Google, Safari, Instagram are all examples of closed source software and have no problems reaching users/customers.
  - no_time 5y ago
    All the examples you gave are end user applications. Closed source software meant for developers/professionals has a risk ranging from mild inconvinience like not being able to customize something to severe problems like not being able to get any work done today because the license servers are down.
    - freediver 5y ago
sysadm1n 5y ago
Yes but what's a 'clean-room browser'? The article doesn't explain what that term means.
- kilovoltaire 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
mdoms 5y ago
Ok I'll ask seeing as it's never defined in the article: what is Flow and why should I care?
- banana_giraffe 5y ago
  As I understand the sales pitch for Flow, it's a browser that can run on low power devices and remain responsive and useful. Never used it myself, it was one of the possibilities we looked into recently for a set-top-box thing that would render most UI with a browser.
z3t4 5y ago
How can I test this browser to make sure my web sites works on it !?
marcodiego 5y ago
Web does not want another closed browser.
jakecopp 5y ago
> As with Gmail, I believe Flow is the only browser engine written after Google Docs that can run Google Docs This is depressing.

414 points by sohkamyung 5y ago

*Closed source browser. Flow is yet another project pulling on open source resources, and the browser market created from open browsers, and trying to privatize it. Imagine if google could just make whatever internal changes to chromium and nobody knew about it.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> yet another project pulling on open source resources And? It's a product people find useful enough to pay for. Open source is by default provided to the world freely. If someone is opposed to it being use freely, in any way the person on the other side chooses, including commercially, there are licenses that can proscribe that.
breakfastduck 5y ago
> "yet another project pulling on open source resources" Erm, yeah. Isn't that the point of making something open source with a permissive license? So that other people are able to use it in their own projects?
- ronsor 5y ago
  I feel like a lot of people choose permissive licenses due to inertia while not really understanding them.
  - jamesfinlayson 5y ago
    Agreed - I feel like 15 or 20 years ago, GPL was a well-known license so that's just what people went with, without understanding all of the implications.
- wpietri 5y ago
  Legally for sure. But from an ecosystem perspective, it's reasonable to be concerned about people whose relationships to a commons is essentially extractive. When I use open source in commercial offerings, I see it as both morally appropriate and good business to contribute back in one way or another.
  - maccolgan 5y ago
    Why not use GPL/AGPL/LGPL as it's clearly more appropriate in this case?
    - wpietri 5y ago
      From my perspective as an open-source consumer, that doesn't matter much. The license tells me what I can legally get away with. But what I care about pragmatically is whether that project will keep existing and improving such that it will meet my needs down the road. And what I care about morally is maintaining positive-sum relationships with my community and society.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
SahAssar 5y ago
> Imagine if google could just make whatever internal changes to chromium and nobody knew about it. If you use chrome, they do. Chrome has a lot of changes and additions that are not in the open-source chromium codebase.
formerly_proven 5y ago
> Imagine if google could just make whatever internal changes to chromium and nobody knew about it. Chromium is BSD licensed so Google absolutely can just make it closed source.
- est31 5y ago
  The BSD license only applies to some code from what I can tell. Other code is still under LGPL. At least this is what this file tells me: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/main/third_party/blink/LICENSE_FOR_ABOUT_CREDITS https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/...
  - empyrical 5y ago
    Yes, there's code in Chromium going back to the KDE/ Konqueror and WebKit days that's LGPL licensed. Mostly in the Blink rendering engine like you linked.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- chubot 5y ago
  Just to clarify the relevant thing is whether Google owns the copyright to Chromium source, and it does for a huge part. It can license that code however it wants, including open source, or no license at all. Chrome/Chromium also uses a ton of open source libraries for which Google does NOT hold the copyright, but all of them, per their license, can be linked with closed source code and distributed (i.e. they are not GPL/copyleft).
- seba_dos1 5y ago
  ...and they do, calling it Google Chrome.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kiryin 5y ago
Imagine the irony of fate if they not only did that, but also had the audacity to call the resultant browser "Chrome." Makes me shudder.
- cxr 5y ago
  One side effect, intentional or not, that came from Google naming their browser "Chrome" was that Gecko development become more difficult. It became too hard to get search engines (you know the one) to understand that you weren't looking for Google blog posts and press releases, but instead developer documentation for Mozilla internals, which you could have pretty reliably found previously by including "chrome" as a useful search term.

timw4mail 5y ago

I would be a lot more impressed with this browser engine if I could actually see it working.

timw4mail 5y ago
Apparently there's a preview for Raspbian: https://support.ekioh.com/download/ https://support.ekioh.com/download/
- youngtaff 5y ago
  It's been available for a while… I download and try it every couple of months to see what their progress is like

blagie 5y ago

Technically, color me impressed. Business-wise, I'm skeptical: - Alternative browser engines have always fallen behind, eventually. - Open-source is a huge win for most embedded applications. - Having a big company backing something is a huge win too, since something like Webkit ain't going away. I think one possible outcome here might be an acquisition. Microsoft was forced to eat crow with Edge adopting Google's engine. This would be an opportunity for Apple, Microsoft, or Amazon to leapfrog Google. A GPU or multicore-accelerated browser could make the iPhone/Macbook/etc. much more responsive than Chrome. Another might be some open-source strategy, but I don't quite know what it might be.

ReactiveJelly 5y ago
Doesn't WebKit already have a lot of GPU and multi-thread / multi-process acceleration? Even Gecko does now.
- sroussey 5y ago
  Blink and V8 also use GPU and multiple threads.
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  > Even Gecko does now. In matters of GPU and multithreading, it’s not a case of “even Gecko”—in these fields, Firefox is leading the pack among desktop browsers by a very considerable margin. Firefox is the only one with actual GPU rendering (via WebRender), and I haven’t heard of any competitors even starting on doing the same, which will take them years. As for advantageous use of multithreading, Firefox has led the way here with other parts of the Quantum project (again driven by stuff that was incubated in Servo), though I have a feeling Chromium has also been steadily doing more too; I think parts of LayoutNG might be multithreaded?
ajb 5y ago
They aren't huge, but there is a market for these embedded browsers. Ekioh has been around for 15 years.

EamonnMR 5y ago

I'm refreshed that Flow does not have its implementation language on the front page.

Y_Y 5y ago
As much as I'm irked by language partisanism, that's typically justified on the basis of ease of installation or attracting developers. Since this otherwise great looking product is a closed source binary then it would be hard to justify. (Although I bet it's not in Rust, because then they'd surely say it anyway.)
- gsnedders 5y ago
  (It's C++)
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    So expect to see a billion trivial security flaws that give RCE access to your computer.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

evmar 5y ago

> seems to compare the Firefox version number with 65 ... I’ve no idea what the purpose of this is I previously worked on JS infra at Google. Google uses a lot of shared JS libraries that date back over a decade, and those libraries have accumulated lots of workarounds for browsers that nobody cares about anymore. (One especially crazy seeming one from today's perspective is that there's a separate implementation of event propagation, I believe because because it dates back to browsers that only implemented one half of event bubbling/capture!) It's very difficult to remove an old workaround because 1. it's hard to be completely sure nobody actually depends on the workaround (especially given the wide variety of apps and environments Google supports -- Firefox aside, Google JS runs on a lot of abandonware TVs), and 2. it's hard to prioritize doing such work, because it's low value (a few less bytes of JS) and nonzero risk (see point 1) without meaningfully moving any metrics you care about. In all, how to eliminate accumulated cruft like is a fascinating problem to me in that I can't see how it ever gets done. And it's not a Google thing. Even the newer cooler startup I now work at has similar "work around old Safari bug, not sure if it's safe to remove" codepaths that I can imagine will stick around forever, for similar reasons.

joe-collins 5y ago
For letters "p" and "z", this strikes me as likely related to print and undo functions.
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  all the letters between p and z. pqrstuvxwyz
inetknght 5y ago
> not sure if it's safe to remove That's a symptom of companies spending all their money on building new features without also spending money on regression testing. If you build a feature to work around a third party then surely you have that third party on-hand to build automated tests against and ensure that something didn't break and/or is still needed? If not then you're not writing new features; you're writing hacks. And you are perpetuating the same problem on other people.

sharmin123 5y ago

Let’s Secure WiFi Network and Prevent WiFi Hacking: https://www.hackerslist.co/lets-secure-wifi-network-and-prevent-wifi-hacking/ https://www.hackerslist.co/lets-secure-wifi-network-and-prev...

gadders 5y ago

Very offtopic, but the name of the author - Piers Wombwell - would make a great name for an Ob/Gyn.

kiryin 5y ago

Words can not express the relief it is to see a completely new web browser rendering engine being developed. It's heartbreaking that it's proprietary, my initial wish was that they'd open up after it matured a bit. Still hopeful though, the browser landscape needs diversity and preferably in the form of something that isn't carrying 3 decades worth of baggage.

freediver 5y ago
It is quite reasonable for it to be proprietary as developed by a small team that still needs to see return on its investment. Last thing they need is someone with a pile of cash and/or reach taking their engine and launching a new browser with it, stealing their thunder. Monetizing a browser is not easy if you are not in the data-monetization game.
- nerdponx 5y ago
  > Monetizing a browser is not easy if you are not in the data-monetization game. How do we know that they aren't? It's like free money for a tech company. There's little or no disincentive, and they don't have to do a lot of extra work - the data is already sitting around waiting to be collected.

vxNsr 5y ago

I'm curious as this is a closed source project, who does it exist? what market are they trying to serve?

jitl 5y ago
Anyone who wants to run a high performance browser on minimal hardware. Eg browser on TV set top box, embedded point of sale device, etc.
ybot2 5y ago
I used to develop Set Top Box user interfaces that used the Ekioh browser. We'd use SVG, JavaScript and CSS to get native UI performance in a browser that was running in 256MB ram. Their later versions enabled us to use HTML5 and CSS3. I enjoyed the challenges of balancing UI animation against capturing keypresses and other events as well as executing JavaScript fetched via AJAX. Due to the memory constraints we couldn't use any JavaScript frameworks and wrote everything in vanilla JS. Our C and C++ developers would expose the native hardware functionality up into the JavaScript Ekioh engine so that we could access and control features like scanning cable TV frequencies and recording to disk. The cable and satellite TV networks would end up paying a licence per instance of the browser running on each of their customers set top boxes.
freediver 5y ago
Curious what does your question imply? DuckDuckGo, Google, Safari, Instagram are all examples of closed source software and have no problems reaching users/customers.
- no_time 5y ago
  All the examples you gave are end user applications. Closed source software meant for developers/professionals has a risk ranging from mild inconvinience like not being able to customize something to severe problems like not being able to get any work done today because the license servers are down.
  - freediver 5y ago

sysadm1n 5y ago

Yes but what's a 'clean-room browser'? The article doesn't explain what that term means.

kilovoltaire 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

mdoms 5y ago

Ok I'll ask seeing as it's never defined in the article: what is Flow and why should I care?

banana_giraffe 5y ago
As I understand the sales pitch for Flow, it's a browser that can run on low power devices and remain responsive and useful. Never used it myself, it was one of the possibilities we looked into recently for a set-top-box thing that would render most UI with a browser.

z3t4 5y ago

How can I test this browser to make sure my web sites works on it !?

marcodiego 5y ago

Web does not want another closed browser.

jakecopp 5y ago

> As with Gmail, I believe Flow is the only browser engine written after Google Docs that can run Google Docs This is depressing.