URL: https://pcper.com/2020/12/work-in-progress-check-out-the-flow-browser-engine/

Work In Progress; Check Out The Flow Browser Engine

Posted by Jeremy Hellstrom | Dec 30, 2020 | General Tech | 3

Source: The Register 👁 Work In Progress; Check Out The Flow Browser Engine

From Set Top Boxes To Your PC

Ekioh is not a company you’ve likely heard of but you have likely used their scalable vector graphic browser and not known it, as it powers many TVs and set top boxes. It was designed to be very lightweight and inexpensive to run, just needing a fairly simple GPU to power it but the company is now looking at expanding their market to PCs now that HTML support has been developed for it.

It has evolved from a simple SVG browser cheap enough to license and deploy on millions of cable boxes and similar devices to an HTML5 compatible browser capable of taking advantage of multithreading and GPU acceleration. It won’t require such hardware to run, but if available it can now take advantage of it. The Register had a chance to try out the current development build and while it is not yet ready for prime time it does definitely work.

The installer is a mere 34MB and doesn’t come with any of the various additional system detritus which other browsers now dump on your computer when you install them. It runs quickly and was fairly compatible with all the sites that they tested, with Netflix and online Microsoft Office apps being exceptions. It will handle JavaScript, 3D CSS and a large variety of other new browser technologies and you can check out the current preview here.

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👁 Jeremy Hellstrom

3 Comments

👁 collie man

collie man on December 30, 2020 at 1:31 pm

Perhaps I’m being facetious, but is there a better senario for them OTHER than what happened to Chrome, super lightweight, become super popular, vunaribilities are found, patched, slowly becomes the most resource hungry option available that we all stick with because, “Meh, I got resources to spare and it’s cross platform convenient” ?
Reply
- 👁 Jeremy Hellstrom
  
  Jeremy Hellstrom on December 30, 2020 at 2:54 pm
  
  Theoretically yes … the STB market is where they make money and they don’t sell so well when they get expensive. That doesn’t mean someone won’t buy ’em and do exact that though.
  Reply
  - 👁 collie man
    
    collie man on December 31, 2020 at 12:53 pm
    
    I suppose, If they do something truly revolutionary intergrading STB. PI and PC into the same ecosystem, they might be bought by “Do No Evil” to integrate said technology bringing STB into their ecosphere…
    
    The KID in me hates that one company controls my entire life, but the ADULT in me likes not remembering my passwords.
    Reply

URL: https://pcper.com/2020/12/work-in-progress-check-out-the-flow-browser-engine/