Flow Browser Preview on the Raspberry Pi 400

https://www.ekioh.com/blog/flow-raspberry-pi/

by hotpoodle • 6 years ago

160 73 6 years ago

berkes7• 6 years ago

I'm excited about there being another browser engine.

I think the general idea that "writing an engine for the web is impossible in 2020" is dangerous. It can only ever lead to less diversity: that idea is a sure road to a chrome-only-web, which is far worse than the dark-IE6-ages.

I truly hope Flow finds its niche or sweet spot. Maybe embedded is that, maybe micro-computers. I truly hope a big name gets behind it, though. Maybe a game console or other OEM that needs a built-in browser. Maybe the Chino-West-economic war will force a large asian phone os to build their own browser. We'll see.

But there really is need for another browser engine. If alone to prove that writing a new one from scratch is possible in 2020.

HeckFeck3• 6 years ago

I'm also holding hopes that something will rise from the ashes of the Servo codebase. It's hateful to see something with promise go to waste.

bobthebuilders• 6 years ago

Iirc the Linux Foundation picked it up.

sam_bristow• 6 years ago

A decent amount of the servo work ended up Firefox proper already.

They merged in the CSS work (stylo) a while back and Webrender is now the default 2d engine.

giancarlostoro3• 6 years ago

I don't think it's impossible, I think it's a lot of work though. Especially for one person, it would take the right person. I could see someone like Walter Bright doing it (he created D originally by himself and other compilers).

I don't think I have the energy to do the entire DOM myself, and implement a JS engine, and CSS, and so on... Plus all the nuance of image rendering (even if you use third party libraries for this, you gotta figure out which ones to use and ensure you're doing so correctly and securely).

adrianN• 6 years ago

I think web standards evolve faster than a single person can implement them.

marmaduke2• 6 years ago

the energy to do the entire

Set a lower standard though? HN is arguably a good website with just enough of each tech and high signal to noise ratio. How difficult to make it work in a new browser? Who cares if it renders the Facebook wall misaligned.

lucideer4• 6 years ago

I think the general idea that "writing an engine for the web is impossible in 2020" is dangerous.

I'm not sure what you mean by this sentence. Are you saying it would be dangerous if writing a new engine in 2020 were impossible (agree) or are you saying that making such a statement is dangerous (hard disagree).

Making a new engine in 2020 is hard. Making a new engine that becomes a sustainable, maintainable project in the medium term MAY BE impossible (Flow looks amazing but I imagine funding and maintaining it long-term will be an immense challenge). Discussing this fact, and the reasons that it is so challenging is important if we hope to avoid the dangers of a monoculture.

geogra42• 6 years ago

Microsoft, with the almost unlimited $$ they have, decided against their own browser engine. That made quite a statement.

berkes7• 6 years ago

I meant that 'writing a new engine is impossible in 2020' is dangerous. I fear it is true. But apparently flow is proving it wrong.

hrjet• 6 years ago

But there really is need for another browser engine. If alone to prove that writing a new one from scratch is possible in 2020.

We have been developing one here [1]. It's a long way to go, but hey, it's open source!

And we had found it working fine on a RaPi 2 couple of years back.

[1] https://gngr.info

berkes7• 6 years ago

I presume that when you keep focusing on HTML and CSS, it can find a good niche, while being a achievable target.

Rendering of HTML and CSS is a tough task, but can be very performant and doable without any APIs and JS/ECMA.

Thanks for the work. Interesting project!

geogra42• 6 years ago

Exciting to see another browser engine in the wild.

ape4• 6 years ago

I, for one, welcome our new browser overlords. Not really, but great to see a new viable browser engine.

jalfresi• 6 years ago

Is this closed or open source? I couldn’t find a public repo anywhere in the links

sanxiyn• 6 years ago

It is closed.

jancsika2• 6 years ago

The mention Spidermonkey and a Gstreamer integration on their product page.

I wonder if they've pushed any fixes or bug reports upstream.

GekkePrutser4• 6 years ago

Ah too bad, that breaks it for me. I aim to have the same browser on all my platforms, obviously they're not there yet as it runs only on the Pi 400 now, but I doubt they will ever support things like FreeBSD officially (even Firefox doesn't!)

So it won't be for me but nevertheless more competition in the rendering engine area is welcome.

loudmax• 6 years ago

We've been taking open source for granted for the past decade. As open source has proven difficult to monetize, we may be seeing a return to proprietary closed source software.

Whether this is a good or a bad thing depends on how it plays out. If software like Flow conforms to standards and offers a better experience, battery life, privacy, etc then it might work out well. An open infrastructure with a marketplace to pay for desired features will benefit us all.

The bad scenario is that the web continues to fracture into proprietary components. While a web not dominated by Chrome seems almost unimaginable today, it wasn't that long ago that sites that only worked in Internet Explorer were commonplace. If Flow actually becomes the dominant web browser and Flow-only websites ever become the norm, we'll all be worse off for it. That really is a far off scenario, so for now, having Flow as an extra player on the web is probably a good thing.

salusinarduis• 6 years ago

No one is paying for a web browser. It doesn't matter how fast it is.

fishyfinger• 6 years ago

Interesting. great to see a new challenger in the monoplolised browser industry. wonder if they will bring it to everyday computers...

jancsika2• 6 years ago

We have chosen to release on just one platform initially, and there are a couple of reasons why. The Raspberry Pi’s hardware is largely fixed – you can’t swap the CPU or GPU. Variations in hardware could cause us to get distracted by issues that really shouldn’t be a priority right now.

I like them already. Imagine if any of the crashy FOSS video editors had taken this route.

hojjat12000• 6 years ago

Are you suggesting that video editors only support Raspberry Pi? Or are you suggesting that they only support Intel Core 2 Duo + NVIDIA GT 640? I don't get what you're suggesting. A video editor needs good hardware, either you can go with mac, or PC. On PC, you can not really lock yourself into one model, even the developers are gonna have a variety of different hardware.

giancarlostoro3• 6 years ago

In the meantime, some previously working sites have stopped working due to improvements in their content, for instance, Amazon now requires Web Cryptography to log in. This is a feature currently in progress.

I had no idea this was a thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Cryptography_API

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Crypto_...

aitchnyu• 6 years ago

Could this vendor beat Firefox and Chromium by disregarding legacy and edge cases? Examples from thin air: parser can be far simpler if it fails on any syntax errors in HTML, CSS and JS; hrow a fit if certain layouts or JS are resource hungry, execute preshipped Spidermonkey bytecode directly instead of parsing JS.

eitland• 6 years ago

I'm hoping so much for something like that, personally I hope for a variation of the asm.js playbook: make sure code that follow the guidelines get huge rewards.

yoz-y• 6 years ago

Not really. People rarely if ever choose a browser because of their rendering engine these days. All current browsers seem to be limited by actual network speed than anything else.

E.g.: Apple and Google always tout how safari and chrome are fast, and maybe they are, but the truth is that the upstream from most websites is really slow, so the actual rendering speed does not matter.

berkes7• 6 years ago

Rendering speed matters on weak CPUs powered by batteries. I.e. every (previous generation) smartphone.

GekkePrutser4• 6 years ago

Yeah about this, I never 'got' why Microsoft expected people to jump on Edge all of a sudden when they rebased it on Chromium.

Basically they admitted they can't make a decent browser that people want, then they re-skin someone else's work and suddenly expect us to want it more than the one they copied? How does that even make sense. Who would pick a mod kit over a real Ferrari.

Apart from people not caring about the engine, Microsoft has a very bad history in the browsing arena which is why I (and many others) don't trust them anymore. I don't want them to become big again in the browser market. We already know what happens then: years of stagnation, platform lock-in, no interest in security. And no, they haven't changed their tune, the same is still happening with MS Office where they still own a de facto monopoly.

Of course what plays into this for me as well is that I don't like Chrome either so I stay with Firefox anyway. But the pressure Microsoft are exerting at work to move everything to Edge is annoying.

Abishek_Muthian• 6 years ago

Nice, IMO browsers have been the Achilles' heel in getting proper desktop experience out of RPi (not incl. 8GB variant) and other SBCs. I presume it has to with lack of optimizations in the browsers w.r.t to mainline Linux on ARM? As similar low spec (4GB) intel celeron fanless x86 Chromebook could offer much smoother browser experience.

Perhaps a browser such as Flow built for embedded hardware could address that.

razvvan• 6 years ago

:~/ekioh_5.11.4_raspberry-pi-flow_20201221_r33618$ ./flow

-bash: ./flow: No such file or directory

Wowfunhappy2• 6 years ago

I realized recently that what I really want, even more than a new browser engine, is a browser that's highly portable to new platforms. Something like ffmpeg, or maybe Retroarch, which can be compiled for freeDOS or a PowerMac or Haiku if you'd like—sometimes with different features enabled, but always with enough to be useful. If someone developed a brand new platform, these projects would be relatively easy to get running.

Perhaps it's just my particular love of weird and new (and old) platforms, but my greatest fear isn't so much being stuck with a single engine as being struck on a small set of mainstream platforms in order to use the engine. I don't think it's a coincidence that the Switch and PlayStation 5 lack a user-exposed web browser; sure it would be a nice feature, but it's not worthwhile for Sony and Nintendo to keep up to date.

If we'd had today's web browsers in 2007, and Apple didn't already lead the Webkit project, would Steve Jobs have been able to create the iPhone, with a first-class web browser as a key selling point? A web browser is the single most essential application for modern life. What future innovations are we missing out on?

j-james2• 6 years ago

The Switch does have a usable web browser, it's just difficult to access. The eShop and some online features run on it, but it can be accessed and used as a standalone browser.

https://switchbrew.org/wiki/Internet_Browser

Wowfunhappy2• 6 years ago

Sorry, I should have said user-exposed/user-visible (and I've edited). It's the same situation with the PS5.

Clearly, Nintendo doesn't consider it good enough for general use. And having played with it, I very much agree—it doesn't work on lots of sites and likes to crash a lot. I assume the PS5's browser is the same.

GekkePrutser4• 6 years ago

Quite daring to start a brand new browser with its own engine. I wish them the best! I'll try it out when I can.

tpmx• 6 years ago

Here's an analysis of the Flow Browser: https://thereshouldbenored.com/posts/flow-new-engine/ by browser standards/testing veteran gsnedders here on HN, from June.

I cut out the juciest bit from the middle:

The answer is almost certainly it cannot succeed as a general-purpose browser. Indeed, they've said themselves (emphasis mine) ...

Lots and lots of insightful commentary cut out, really do read it!

faitswulff• 6 years ago

I thought these paragraphs were particularly interesting:

When I have spoken to them, their approach has been significant: they've chosen what features to prioritize based on a chosen major website, and then attempted a complete implementation of those features. An example of this is that they only implemented HTMLTableElement in the recent past, despite having supported much of the HTML DOM for a lot longer.
Historically, many attempts at new browser engines have started by trying to systematically implement features per specification, only to find that no interesting site is yet functional even when the majority is done. By being vastly more selective and only implementing features when needed, they are undoubtedly cutting out many obscure legacy features unlikely to be used on any major site today.

gsnedders2• 6 years ago

Oh. Hi. :)

ipodopt• 6 years ago

If hardware variance is a distraction in a software project. As indicated by this project. Would a VM work as well or would there be shortfalls?

qwerty456127• 6 years ago

We have chosen to release on just one platform initially, and there are a couple of reasons why. The Raspberry Pi’s hardware is largely fixed – you can’t swap the CPU or GPU. Variations in hardware could cause us to get distracted by issues that really shouldn’t be a priority right now.

This (provided the Raspberry Pi's poularity, affordability and power - surely it would be of no use without these) actually is an extremely cool feature. You can engineer OSes and entire solutions without caring about compatibility issues now. Like in the good old days when people would invent entire HW+OS platforms like NeXT and Amiga, but now you have the HW part done for you.

Flow Browser Preview on the Raspberry Pi 400

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