7 ms·

Technically, color me impressed. Business-wise, I'm skeptical: - Alternative browser engines have always fallen behind, eventually. - Open-source is a huge w

by 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.
- gsnedders 5y ago
  And they haven't undergone huge growth to make Flow possible, so I don't think there's any reason to believe they'll be less viable now than they have historically been.
derefr 5y ago
"Adopting Google's engine" is an interesting turn of phrase. There's still more Apple-contributed code at the core of Blink than Google code. It's not like Google did a full rewrite when they forked Webkit to create Blink. When you think about it, at this point the Chromium project (including the Blink engine) has "contributions" in some sense or another from Microsoft, Google, Apple, and KDE. Certainly, it's a project mostly run and stewarded by Google employees in their off-hours; but there are actually a lot of interests involved! (Especially now; I expect Microsoft has likely switched their Edge browser engineering team to to writing PRs for Chromium.)
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  >in their off-hours Is that really the case, I always imagined they had a full time team on it.
  - gsnedders 5y ago
    They've the largest browser team, by a decent margin.
  - zaphar 5y ago
    They do. Google employs a lot of engineers on fully open source work including but not limited to Chromium.
  - crakenzak 5y ago
    That's not true, there's plenty of people working full time on Blink. Source: I work at Google on the Chrome team.
  - derefr 5y ago
    To be clear, what I meant is that projects with open stewardship (which I believe the Chromium Project is? unclear from the project website) don't tend to want employees of companies, in their capacity as employees-of-companies to be directors/core maintainers for the project. Which is different from being regular developers on those projects. Open-stewardship projects tend to be happy to accept contributions from companies; and they tend to be happy to accept the stewardship of individuals who happen to work at companies; but they don't want to be beholden to the interests of those companies in their direction, so projects with community/foundation stewardship don't usually allow companies to pay their employees for their time spent sitting on that foundation's board. (I.e. they let companies pay employees to write code, but they won't allow companies to pay employees to do the work of deciding whether that code belongs upstream.) Instead, the software foundations that manage FOSS projects usually legally restrict corporations or their representatives from participating in their capacity as representatives of corporations in directorship/steering committees/etc. for the foundation. Instead, they expect/require each person with decision-making authority in the foundation to have their own individual voice—to not be just a sock-puppet of a company, saying whatever the company wants you to say. When you vote for things in the foundation, you have to be able to vote for the interests of the project itself, even if those interests are against the interests of the company you work for—without that endangering your job. Which usually means that employees of such companies must do their foundation maintainership "off the books" of the company they work for, e.g. at non-work hours using non-work equipment. Just as if they were trying to avoid IP cross-pollution. Source: worked at a company with an "open core" product, where the core was an Apache Software Foundation project, and most of the ASF project's maintainers happened to be employees of the company. Those people could push a PR to the ASF upstream for consideration from their work account, as a representative of the company; but they then had to don their personal-gmail-account, separate-profile, no-corporate-affiliation hat to handle the PR and discuss it with the other maintainers.
rahimnathwani 5y ago
There are bunch of use cases listed here: https://www.ekioh.com/solutions/ https://www.ekioh.com/solutions/
javajosh 5y ago
Acquisition seems natural, because this would be a great component in a Pi-focused set-top box experience, competing with RokuOS.
Y_Y 5y ago
Maybe someone benevolent could buy it. Probably not Mozilla, but what about a big FOSS outfit like GNU or Apache or Raspberry Pi. I think I'd even be willing to break my embargo on crowdfunding to promote such a crucial bit of the web. Firefox is great, but I don't want to put all my chickens in that basket. WebKit is alright but has many drawbacks documented elsewhere. Any other engines are too broken on the "modern web" that society demands we use. A healthier ecosystem will less dependence on Google would be good for just about everyone.
- pas 5y ago
  None of those (GNU, Apache, rPi) ever bought anything, they get projects donated to them, but even then they lack any real resources to invest into such huge projects.
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    And for a while Apache was where projects went to die. Thankfully, there are more active and growing projects now.

by blagie 5y ago

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.

gsnedders 5y ago
And they haven't undergone huge growth to make Flow possible, so I don't think there's any reason to believe they'll be less viable now than they have historically been.

derefr 5y ago

"Adopting Google's engine" is an interesting turn of phrase. There's still more Apple-contributed code at the core of Blink than Google code. It's not like Google did a full rewrite when they forked Webkit to create Blink. When you think about it, at this point the Chromium project (including the Blink engine) has "contributions" in some sense or another from Microsoft, Google, Apple, and KDE. Certainly, it's a project mostly run and stewarded by Google employees in their off-hours; but there are actually a lot of interests involved! (Especially now; I expect Microsoft has likely switched their Edge browser engineering team to to writing PRs for Chromium.)

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
>in their off-hours Is that really the case, I always imagined they had a full time team on it.
- gsnedders 5y ago
  They've the largest browser team, by a decent margin.
- zaphar 5y ago
  They do. Google employs a lot of engineers on fully open source work including but not limited to Chromium.
- crakenzak 5y ago
  That's not true, there's plenty of people working full time on Blink. Source: I work at Google on the Chrome team.
- derefr 5y ago
  To be clear, what I meant is that projects with open stewardship (which I believe the Chromium Project is? unclear from the project website) don't tend to want employees of companies, in their capacity as employees-of-companies to be directors/core maintainers for the project. Which is different from being regular developers on those projects. Open-stewardship projects tend to be happy to accept contributions from companies; and they tend to be happy to accept the stewardship of individuals who happen to work at companies; but they don't want to be beholden to the interests of those companies in their direction, so projects with community/foundation stewardship don't usually allow companies to pay their employees for their time spent sitting on that foundation's board. (I.e. they let companies pay employees to write code, but they won't allow companies to pay employees to do the work of deciding whether that code belongs upstream.) Instead, the software foundations that manage FOSS projects usually legally restrict corporations or their representatives from participating in their capacity as representatives of corporations in directorship/steering committees/etc. for the foundation. Instead, they expect/require each person with decision-making authority in the foundation to have their own individual voice—to not be just a sock-puppet of a company, saying whatever the company wants you to say. When you vote for things in the foundation, you have to be able to vote for the interests of the project itself, even if those interests are against the interests of the company you work for—without that endangering your job. Which usually means that employees of such companies must do their foundation maintainership "off the books" of the company they work for, e.g. at non-work hours using non-work equipment. Just as if they were trying to avoid IP cross-pollution. Source: worked at a company with an "open core" product, where the core was an Apache Software Foundation project, and most of the ASF project's maintainers happened to be employees of the company. Those people could push a PR to the ASF upstream for consideration from their work account, as a representative of the company; but they then had to don their personal-gmail-account, separate-profile, no-corporate-affiliation hat to handle the PR and discuss it with the other maintainers.

rahimnathwani 5y ago

There are bunch of use cases listed here: https://www.ekioh.com/solutions/ https://www.ekioh.com/solutions/

javajosh 5y ago

Acquisition seems natural, because this would be a great component in a Pi-focused set-top box experience, competing with RokuOS.

Y_Y 5y ago

Maybe someone benevolent could buy it. Probably not Mozilla, but what about a big FOSS outfit like GNU or Apache or Raspberry Pi. I think I'd even be willing to break my embargo on crowdfunding to promote such a crucial bit of the web. Firefox is great, but I don't want to put all my chickens in that basket. WebKit is alright but has many drawbacks documented elsewhere. Any other engines are too broken on the "modern web" that society demands we use. A healthier ecosystem will less dependence on Google would be good for just about everyone.

pas 5y ago
None of those (GNU, Apache, rPi) ever bought anything, they get projects donated to them, but even then they lack any real resources to invest into such huge projects.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  And for a while Apache was where projects went to die. Thankfully, there are more active and growing projects now.