Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nidium – A new browser engine

nidium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 113 posts

Re: Nidium – A new browser engine

#31

Post by Wilya »

ThomPete wrote: post #12

I find it saddening that the primary response from a crowd normally considering themselves visionaries and pushers, seems to be ridiculing other peoples hard work. I cannot for the life in me understand how introducing a new browser engine deserves this kind of welcoming.

There's no evidence of hard work in this page. It's a marketing video.

I can make the same claims as them. Worse, projects with catchy colors and no substance are submitted to HN all the time.

Maybe they actually worked hard and developed a good product. But I'll believe it when I see it. HN is a playground for every marketing guy hoping to raise developer hype about his doubtful product. Why should I give anyone the benefit of doubt ?

(And even then, hard work doesn't automatically mean what you do is good or noteworthy.)

Re: Nidium – A new browser engine

#32

Post by zeroDivisible »

Gatsky wrote: post #18

Just some feedback - This video reminded me of the demo scene circa 1990. This might lead some to think that the project has been under development for 20+ years and is still in alpha...

Or it might be developed by the same guys who were doing demo scene then.

Either way, I'd like to wait and see that one in action - really like the idea.

Re: Nidium – A new browser engine

#33

Post by binaryorganic »

So the only thing clear from the comments is that the folks behind this are going to have to work on their communication game. The video was obviously created to tease the product a bit, which is hard when nobody knows exactly what thye're looking at, but even when I went to sign up for updates I see:

"We will send you a maximum amount of spam as soon as possible."

Re: Nidium – A new browser engine

#34

Post by mbrock »

klrr wrote: post #15

The web is weird, it feels like HTML is meant more for documents than for actual social platforms and dynamic content... If you think about it, is the web really sane?

Nothing is sane, just more or less functional and workable. The web seems to be ticking on just fine. There are problems, but also a lot of development.

HTML is designed for more or less static content, but the DOM itself seems well adapted for dynamic content. Since it comes out of a tradition of streaming over slow connections, it's made to be dynamically rendered. The content layout is flexible and somewhat intuitive.

Compared to something like Swing or Cocoa, the only drawback seems to be the paucity of widgets -- we basically just have basic inputs and scroll bars, the rest is app-specific. But that also brings a certain flexibility. I think an update to the table element would be great, perhaps with support for streaming data and more flexible layout.

Re: Nidium – A new browser engine

#35

Post by lampe3 »

I just wanne know one thing: Will this work with older Browser? and with older browser i mean the browser we have right now. How hard will it be to adapt Browser vendors? or can i run it ontop like google chrome frame ?

Re: Nidium – A new browser engine

#36

Post by sker »

masklinn wrote: post #30
sker wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the File API give you full access to the file system? Last time I checked it didn't.

> Does the File API give you full access to the file system? The File API gives you access to the files the user has selected for your access. No website-accessible API will ever give full access to anything for rather good reasons.

Yes, that's why it isn't a good replacement for something like WPF, Qt, wxWidgets, etc. node-webkit and NiDIUM fix that problem.

Re: Nidium – A new browser engine

#37

Post by gnufied »

masklinn wrote: post #30
sker wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the File API give you full access to the file system? Last time I checked it didn't.

> Does the File API give you full access to the file system? The File API gives you access to the files the user has selected for your access. No website-accessible API will ever give full access to anything for rather good reasons.

Who is talking about building "websites"? Argument I think is- it should be possible to have regular file system access from a browser-like engine. That would greatly simplify building desktop applications.

Imagine you chose to build an IDE using Webkit and it lets you access everything via JS api that you could access using Cocoa or GTK+.

Re: Nidium – A new browser engine

#39

Post by sker »

AndreasFrom wrote: post #28
sker wrote: post #17

File I/O alone is a good enough reason for this kind of projects to exist. I've always wanted to be able to use the power of the browser for standalone, cross-platform desktop applications. I was shocked when I discovered I couldn't write a simple JS/HTML application and connect it to a local DB like SQLite without going through a server. Each browser has its own hackish way of doing something like that, but they're…

Ligth Table [1] works well and uses node-WebKit. 1: http://www.lighttable.com/

Thanks, I didn't know they were using node-webkit.

Re: Nidium – A new browser engine

#40

Post by skyebook »

xal wrote: post #8

So this is supposed to be a portable browser engine that can be directly embedded into (opengl) video games? This could be great.

There's already a couple of these: awesomium (proprietary) and berkelium (open) that basically render Chromium to OpenGL and pass it the HID events you send.

That said, they seem to specifically say it's not an actual browser engine..

Post reply on HN