Re:Show HN: We launched a new web browser
by iforgotpassword on Tuesday April 26, 2022 @06:45AM
(#31165848)
> closed-source
Aaaand I'm out. Still not over Opera abandoning presto. With open source there's at least a chance it can be continued by someone else.
I would also prefer to see it be open source, but I think in this context that's not the point? My parent was saying that they do not expect to see new browsers from scratch, and this is one.
Aside: you could make the argument that both Chrome and Safari are only open source because they were not built from scratch.
If they weren't based on FOSS we would all be running Firefox and Opera now, not MSIE (Firefox was popular on desktop before Chrome existed, as was Opera on mobile). Or perhaps they'd have forked Firefox/Gecko instead, or collaborated the effort with these projects. Safari and Chrome are merely a wheel in the larger ecosystem of Apple and Google, a means to an end.
What about Flow? It's a a clean-slate closed-source browser and engine, designed to make effective use of parallelism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(web_browser)