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Ekioh Blog

ekioh.com · Company blog · on HN since 2019

Ekioh, a company building the Flow browser engine, posts about its closed-source, independently developed browser and its progress on web standards tests.

What HN saysHN links it in threads on independent browser engines, alongside Ladybird and Servo, noting that Flow passes Acid3 but is closed source.
35HN people shared it
25linked it in comments
12stories submitted
1.5Kstory points
11 months agolast shared
2019people per year2026

Most-shared posts

  1. 1
    Flow Browser: Flow makes HTML faster
    20 people · 342 points · first shared 2019 · 46 comments on HN
  2. 2
    Google Docs in a clean-room browser
    4 people · 428 points · first shared 2021 · 150 comments on HN
  3. 3
    Flow browser passes the Acid tests
    3 people · 525 points · first shared 2020 · 321 comments on HN
  4. 4
    Full Google Mail in a clean room browser
    3 people · 2 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
  5. 5
    Flow Browser Preview on the Raspberry Pi 400
    2 people · 162 points · first shared 2020 · 73 comments on HN
  6. 6
    Company
    2 people · first shared 2020
  7. 7
    Flow Browser Preview for All Raspberry Pi Computers
    1 people · 6 points · first shared 2021 · 2 comments on HN
  8. 8
    Gpu rendering
    1 people · first shared 2019
  9. 9
    Solutions
    1 people · first shared 2021
  10. 10
    Flow
    1 people · first shared 2020
  11. 11
    Svg browser to html browser
    1 people · first shared 2019
  12. 12
    Homepage
    1 people · first shared 2022
  13. 13
  14. 14
    Developing a faster browser engine
    1 people · first shared 2019
  15. 15

What HN people wrote when they linked it

freediver · 2022-03-10
This one is probably the closest you can get outside of mainstream web rendering engine choices: https://www.ekioh.com (it does borrow a javascript library though, so not completely from scratch)
riquito · 2020-08-11
> It does not even pass the ACID2 test. It is however the best independently developed browser engine out there Flow browser passes ACID3 [1], closed source but independent (afaik, dont't really know much about it) Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23508979 [1] https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/acid/
nicoburns · 2025-12-16
Are you talking about https://flow-browser.com ? I wasn't aware of this project before, but it appears to a new chromium based browser. The Flow people are talking about when they talk about Ladybird and Servo is https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/ which does have it's own engine. It has a similar level of standards compliance to Servo and Ladybird, although it's not open source which puts it in a somewhat different category.
cjpearson · 2024-06-09
Flow is another example I've seen. https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/
roca · 2024-06-09
I was inspired to write it by reading about Ladybird, so I wrote it for Andreas Kling basically :-). But there is also Flow: https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/ and Servo. Maybe in the future someone else will try. Also I think it's fun to think about these things even if you're not building a browser engine. It only took about 90 minutes to write.
Voultapher · 2024-04-10
The first browser mentioned is Aloha browser: > Web freely with the built-in Web3 crypto wallet Second point on their website ... Also small browsers, that are all chromium based. The only exceptions I'm aware of are: - https://ladybird.dev/ - https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/ never heard about this one before, but found it while searching.
fanf2 · 2023-04-14
There is also the Flow browser by Ekioh https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/ which is closed source and marketed for use in set-top boxes and smart TVs.
syndrig · 2022-11-22
Another data point: Flow's[1] executable is ~20MB on Raspberry Pi (under 26MB for a 64bit build; both are smaller than the ICU data bundled with public releases). WebGL, video playback and Javascript JIT are included. Disclosure: I work at Ekioh. [1] https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/
Y_Y · 2022-09-12
I haven't used it, but it seems that Flow[0] is also a plausible modern alternative browser which passes the Acid tests[1], unless you disqualify it for being closed source and borrowing its JS engine from Firefox. [0] https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/ [1] https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/acid/
tmcw · 2022-01-18
What everyone else has said about why there are so few new cleanroom browsers. If you're looking for one of the few examples that isn't based on Blink, Gecko, or WebKit, it's Flow. https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/
1MachineElf · 2021-09-20
Never heard of the Flow browser before. Here's the product page: https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/
rahimnathwani · 2021-09-20
There are bunch of use cases listed here: https://www.ekioh.com/solutions/
pg_bot · 2021-06-04
Flow is attempting to do just that. https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/
steeve · 2021-04-27
On the other side of the spectrum: https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/
butz · 2021-01-15
Ekioh "accidently" built a new browser engine. It is a commercial product, but has whole new engine: https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/
Tade0 · 2020-11-17
These guys: https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/ Probably had to ask themselves the same question. Not sure if they have a published list though.
mappu · 2020-08-11
There are a few others but all with their own caveats - https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/ is fully independent and can run Gmail, but it's commercial / non-FOSS. It's funded by contracts in the set-top-box industry. https://sciter.com/ is non-FOSS with a free edition but you shouldn't run untrusted javascript on it And there are some lightly-maintained forks of the leaked Presto 12.x engine from before Opera became a Chromium derivative, but of course it's copyright infringement.
methyl · 2020-06-13
It also supports full Google Mail [1]. While I don’t think it will ever be competitive to Chrome or Firefox, it’s super cool to see it’s actually possible to start a new web browser project and get it to this point. [1] https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/full-google-mail-in-a-clean-room-browser…
neurostimulant · 2020-06-13
No downloadable builds? The desktop builds doesn't seem to be available for general public. https://www.ekioh.com/support/
Klonoar · 2020-01-16
WebKit is a bad example, considering the KHTML history alone. These things don't just take devpower, but time - consider, for example, this: http://www.ekioh.com/flow They've managed to actually get GMail to render - a not insignificant task: https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/full-google-mail-in-a-clean-room-browser… The timeline on this page alone is in years: https://www.ekioh.com/company/#team From what I understand, that team is relatively small in comparison, but actually does have this widely-ish deployed. So it theoretically could be done with less... but it's still insane to even consider. This isn't simple, and anyone who's trying to imply otherwise is wrong. The other commentator you're responding with also never discloses they worked with Apple previously, while pretty much endlessly pumping up their work here. shrug
dgreensp · 2022-03-01
If you haven't encountered this browser before, I find it fascinating. It's meant for devices that aren't necessarily computers. For example, someone making a digital "sign" can use HTML and CSS, or dynamic HTML motion graphics, to create their content, and run it in Flow. It doesn't have to be able to run, say, Google Docs. However, the developer wrote a blog post about getting Google Docs to run, by fixing the necessary bugs and adding the necessary features: https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/google-docs-in-a-clean-room-browser/ For example, Google Docs keeps the focus in a hidden iframe, apparently, and Flow wasn't firing the right series of events when the focus traveled between frames. The way I look at it, for a custom "browser engine" whose goal is to let you use an independent implementation of the DOM to create graphics and UIs that render on the GPU of an embedded device, it's delightfully over-engineered.
dmitriid · 2021-10-07
> Why is a browser expensive? Read this: https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.html To quote, --- start quote --- The total word count of the W3C specification catalogue is 114 million words at the time of writing. If you added the combined word counts of the C11, C++17, UEFI, USB 3.2, and POSIX specifications, all 8,754 published RFCs, and the combined word counts of everything on Wikipedia’s list of longest novels, you would be 12 million words short of the W3C specifications. --- end quote --- This is why. It's currently impossible to start a greenfield browser [1]. And even forking an existing engine and trying to keep up is almost impossible [2] [1] There's Flow browser, https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/ I don't know if it's truly from scratch [2] Microsoft forked Chromium and is still almost 2000 APIs behind, https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence
lucideer · 2020-12-30
> Opera was trying to make money in a commoditized environment. From what I can tell, Ekioh appear to be doing the same[0] > that doesn't mean writing a new browser engine is impossible, it only means that it doesn't make much economic sense for a company to do so. Those two are not the same thing. This is basically what I said in my first comment above: it's always technically possible, but is it practically possible. One needs a certain small amount of economic support to continue any project (no matter how small) these days. Whether it's feasible via donations/etc. or whether some kind of commercial setup is required isn't really super-relevant. The only question here is: if it's the former, can the income support employing devs to work on it, or can voluntary developer contributions maintain the project long term (for which you typically need a large community, with which you typically get further scaling & cost concerns). It's notable also that Flow is not open source, so Opera is actually a very good comparison here (and much of the above donation/volunteer-based thoughts are not options here). [0] https://www.ekioh.com/company/#partners
palashkaria · 2019-11-29
I was curious, did some research. They do mention Servo in some places[0][1]. They also have their own white papers[2][3], & blog posts outlining their approach, things like how to make borders with triangles[4]. Fun stuff! Quote: Back in 2012, Mozilla’s Servo project had started hitting headlines about multithreaded, parallel algorithms, and we decided to see if we could do similar, initially targeting our historic market of STBs[0] Quote: Some of our early thinking was shaped by the parallel web page layout research done by Meyerovich & Bodík. That research also influenced the Servo project which was started by the Mozilla foundation around the same time that we started developing our multithreaded browser.[1] [0]: https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/svg-browser-to-html-browser/ [1]: https://www.ekioh.com/blog/developing-a-faster-browser-engine/ [2]: https://www.ekioh.com/wp-content/uploads/Designing-a-Browser-to-Benefi… [3]: https://www.ekioh.com/wp-content/uploads/An-Optimal-Browser-Design-for… [4]: https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/gpu-rendering/

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