2020 is only three weeks old, but there has been a lot of browser news that decreases rendering engine diversity. It’s time for some good news on that front: a new rendering engine, Flow. Below I conduct an interview with Piers Wombwell, Flow’s lead developer.
This year alone, on the negative side Mozilla announced it’s laying off 70 people, most of whom appear to come from the browser side of things, while it turns out that Opera’s main cash cow is now providing loans in Kenya, India, and Nigeria, and it is looking to use ‘improved credit scoring’ (from browsing data?) for its business practices.
On the positive side, the Chromium-based Edge is here, and it looks good. Still, rendering engine diversity took a hit, as we knew it would ever since the announcement.
So let’s up the diversity a notch by welcoming a new rendering engine to the desktop space. British company Ekioh is working on a the Flow browser, which sports a completely new multi-threaded rendering engine that does not have any relation to WebKit, Gecko, or Blink.
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Well, I didn’t expect this bit of exciting news!
I’m not convinced that Flow is the solution to all the world’s problems (its target platforms and use-cases alone make it unlikely to make it onto the most-used-browsers leaderboard any time soon), but I’m really glad that my doomsaying about the death of browser diversity being a one-way street might… might… turn out not to be true.
Time will tell. But for now, this is Good News for the Web.