Piers Wombwell

The Register has an article about a new browser (not for RISC OS, unfortunately) called Flow. The company concerned is called Ekioh and is headed by Piers Wombwell who has a long history in the Acorn/ANT/Broadcom/Element 14 world (so says the company website.

Apparently, if you have a Pi400 running Linux, you can try it out by downloading from here.

Direct link to the article And now for something completely different: A lightweight, fast browser that won’t slurp your data

Ah, I wondered if it was the same Piers Wombwell that used to frequent the Arcade BBS.

Hello! I miss Arcade.

We have a requirement for OpenGL (or ES), which makes it hard to work on RISC OS as it is currently.

Yes, but it’s software. It’d be unusably slow.

We redraw the entire document every frame – not a small clip region, and not even just the window. That’s totally ridiculous for software rendering, but for hardware rendering, the GPU does that faster than the CPU can calculate the clip regions.

Oh, take that back – it does claim to accelerate on the Pi, though we currently require VideoCore VI, not IV. So it can’t run on the Pi 400.

I can’t find any more details about it, though. I assume it’s a port of the Linux drivers. What version? And, most importantly, does it work in a window? Without the window manager composing the screen with OpenGL, I’d be amazed if OpenGL apps could run with any performance. Otherwise you’re copying back and forth between the GPU and CPU all the time.

We have it running on the Pi3, but not optimally. Not sure I see the point, at this stage.

But, as I said, without a wimp OpenGL compositor, I can’t see OpenGL in windows being useable. As far as I’m aware, that doesn’t exist? If not, I doubt it’ll be near future.

I would think go full screen, not Wimp app. Not everything needs run in the Wimp

Who would ever want a browser in a window. Probably only me and the rest of the world?