Triple-Engine Browser Released As Alpha 181
jcasman passes along a heads-up on Lunascape, a Japanese browser company that is releasing its first English version of its Lunascape 5 triple-engine browser. It's for XP and Vista only. There are reviews up at CNET, OStatic (quoted below), and Lifehacker. Both the reviews and comments point out that, in its current alpha state, the browser is buggy and not very fast; but it might be one to watch. "How many web browsers do you run? If you're like me, you regularly use Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Safari. Each of those browsers, of course, has its own underlying rendering engine: Gecko (in Firefox), Trident (in Internet Explorer), and Webkit (in Chrome and Safari). Today, a Japanese startup called Lunascape has released an alpha version of its Lunascape browser ... that allows you to switch between all three of these prominent rendering engines. The company says that the Japanese version of Lunascape has been downloaded 10 million times and touts it as the fastest browser available."
Lunatic Japan (Score:5, Interesting)
Lunascape supports its own plug-ins and themes...It does not, however, support Firefox add-ons, which is a real drag.
And almost certainly not even worth the look useless unless it will be able to block ads and scripts like NoScript and AdBock can. Using the english page to search the plugins reveals...nothing! Nothing at all! Okay, trying the Google translation of the original Japanese page yields 43 plugins, all related to crap like youtube and twitter...not a single ad or script blocker.
This browser is much more chindogu [wikipedia.org], than anything else.
Can you say bloat? (Score:2, Interesting)
Target audience? (Score:5, Interesting)
How many web browsers do you run? If you're like me, you regularly use Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Safari.
What person in their right mind needs to "regularly" run 4 different web browsers? I'm a full-blown web developer, and I only use 2 browsers on a daily basis. I use Opera for the vast majority of normal browsing, references, API lookups, etc, and I use Firefox with Firebug for actual development and debugging. Periodically I test with IE and Safari, and maybe Chrome, but I would never say that I "regularly" use IE or Safari. Opera is the only browser I use where I save bookmarks, for example.
I'm having a hard time seeing where there would be an audience for a browser with 3 rendering engines. In Opera I have toolbar buttons to launch the current page in Firefox, IE, or Safari. If I want to test my page with a certain rendering engine, I'm going to launch it in that browser. I'm not interested in testing my pages with "Trident running in Lunascape", I'm interested in testing with Internet Explorer. Period. It doesn't matter if it works in Lunascape if it's broken in IE or Safari or Firefox.
And that's from a web developer's perspective, a normal user wouldn't have the first clue what a rendering engine even is and they wouldn't know when or why they would change the engine to use another one.
If you want 3 rendering engines, download 3 browsers. A single browser with 3 rendering engines is a novelty, nothing more. It is not useful as a development tool because it is not the same thing when something works in Trident vs. working in IE. IE has plenty of room to screw things up besides the engine, testing with the engine is only one part of making sure it works in IE.
Re:Nope. (Score:2, Interesting)
Hot on the heels of the article that complained about privacy in Safari 3.2, it seems like this browser really needs a central ratings server. i.e. The only point of a browser like this is to provide the use of a different rendering engine when no other engines will work correctly. Thus the ideal solution is not to make the user switch engines willy nilly. The ideal solution is for the browser to pull the ideal rendering engine from a database that matches sites against the ideal engine. If a site is unknown to the database, the browser attempts to detect what engine should be used for the site (rather difficult, and should probably default to something standards compliant like Gecko if it can't make a reasonable guess). If the user changes the engine, this should be reported back to the server. After a critical mass, this answer gets added to the central database.
Of course, such a scheme has some very concerning aspects. Particularly in the case of malware sites. When a new exploit becomes available for ANY of the engines, I could use a botnet to seed the default engine for a new malware site I deploy. Anyone using this super-browser would get infected if they visited my site. Anti-phishing technology might help, but it's almost guaranteed that some of the users will end up infected.
Fastest browser? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Target audience? (Score:3, Interesting)
so true, I don't know who else has a use for this except web developers.
As a web developer myself I rather test a page in each browser instead of having one with 3 rendering engines in it.
I didn't read the article but I'm guessing it only does 1 kind of ie. (maybe 7?) which is worthless because most of the problems occour in ie6 (god bless its heart)
And most of the time, if not ever, if firefox displays it fine, then most of all the non ie browsers will do that too. And also because of firebug, I don't get that in ie... no, you did not say iedeveloper bar.
why not have a page called trident and just put a link of all the major browsers there.
'I would click that'
This screwed up our LAN (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:End of story (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm being a little presumptuous, but I suspect that you, like me, have never looked at browser data for Japanese websites. They are much more tech savvy than we, and I would not be surprised to find that much like the population of Slashdot (myself included) they have a disproportionate share of that made up 1% of internet users that use multiple browsers you quoted.
Re:Web development (Score:3, Interesting)
"Have you ever worked on 3 or 4 pages at once that all needed to be tested in a different browsers?"
No. And most people don't. A triple-engine browser is targetting a pretty small audience.
Re:not anime friendly (Score:3, Interesting)
Stop using Windows and that file locking crap just goes away.
Re:Web development (Score:3, Interesting)
Worth mentioning, this problems is mostly Microsoft's fault. Easily 90% of the cross-browser problems are cases where it works everywhere but IE. If I didn't have to test in IE, I probably would only test outside of Firefox once a week.
That said, the solution to this is a decent window manager -- even Spaces on OS X helps a bit.
Re:Business model & source code? (Score:1, Interesting)
Safari is Apple's way of ensuring their users have some level of web access that is not dependant upon a third party and to push web standards.
IE is MS's way of ensuring that users are able to access the web through Windows and to have some kind of vendor lock-in (although arguably that's going away).
That sounds a bit biased IMHO.