tagging along on this thread to add some more bullet points about the post Being developed for STBs/TVs Also targeting Linux Mac and Android (no official Windows support) Uses SpriderMonkey as JS...
tagging along on this thread to add some more bullet points about the post
Being developed for STBs/TVs
Also targeting Linux Mac and Android (no official Windows support)
In 2006 we started developing an SVG engine for user interfaces in the set-top box market. No existing browser was full-featured, or was fast enough on the low-powered set-top box chips available at the time. User interface developers wanted HTML, but couldn’t get the performance they needed, especially in animations. SVG seemed better suited to user interfaces as there was no time spent in complex box model layout.
A user interface running on our SVG engine was much faster than any of the HTML browsers at the time and was very popular in this niche market with millions of STBs running it across most continents.
Over the next six or so years, STB chips started to move to multi-core GPUs, at the same as TV resolutions were moving to 4K. HTML was becoming fast enough on set-top boxes. On the other hand, a 4K TV has four times as many pixels as an HD TV, and a multi-core GPU doesn't make each individual core any faster. Thus, a single threaded browser won’t really see any significant speed improvements. That's why we decided to make Flow multi-threaded.
Dabbling with HTML/CSS layout seemed equally fun technically as building an SVG browser, so that’s been the main focus since. It started off being an XHTML/CSS layout engine on top of SVG, but we got carried away and over time moved to full HTML.
But, really, I suppose we did it because it would be fun to do it.
My guess: they are focused on serving specific customers (set top box manufacturers), they charge a lot, and if it were open source, their customers might not need to pay them anymore? This isn't...
My guess: they are focused on serving specific customers (set top box manufacturers), they charge a lot, and if it were open source, their customers might not need to pay them anymore?
This isn't to say there's no way to make it happen, but it would change their business model.
tagging along on this thread to add some more bullet points about the post
I see it playing the same role as Servo, TBH.
From the interview:
I'll be honest, I don't exactly understand the reasoning here...
My guess: they are focused on serving specific customers (set top box manufacturers), they charge a lot, and if it were open source, their customers might not need to pay them anymore?
This isn't to say there's no way to make it happen, but it would change their business model.
Very cool. KHTML is great, but it's fun to see these completely different takes on the browser.