Annoucing a new Chromium-based browser project – Slimjet

We have recently started working on a new browser project called Slimjet. It’s a web browser based on the Chromium code base. For users who are not familiar with Chromium, 99% of the source code in Google’s chrome is based on the chromium open source project. So, we already have SlimBrowser and SlimBoat, why another browser?

SlimBrowser is based on IE’s proprietary trident engine. We can only access via a COM interface which only exposed limited functionality. We have to do a lot of nasty hacking code in order to get a lot of things done in a non-perfect way. Also, the COM interface is very liable to deadlock and crash when used together with a multi-process architecture. SlimBrowser enjoys great features but we do have significant room to improve in terms of reliability. Chromium is open source and will give us ability to fully customize its behaviors and features without any limitation. Another reason to choose the Chromium engine (a.k.a the Blink engine) is that it is arguably the best web platform among all the candidates. It implements all the latest web standards. It also has a high-performance V8 javascript engine. And it has a robust and secure sandboxed multi-process architecture. In comparison, Firefox’s gecko engine is still stuck in the traditional single-process architecture. The major drawback of Chrome? Lack of features. Chrome is way too minimalistic for even moderately savvy users. That’s where Slimjet is going to fill the blank.

So what about SlimBoat? SlimBoat is based on QtWebkit. Blink was originally derived from Webkit as well but Google has made tons of improvements on top of that. Most of the changes are not ported back to the open-source webkit project. So, at this date, Webkit significantly lacks behind Blink on both performance and support of web standard. Recently Digia has also announced they will transit QT’s web engine to Chromium’s blink engine. Obviously they lost confidence in webkit as well. Therefore, we will wait until Digia releases its new QT-wrapped version of blink (called QtWebEngine). After that, we will migrate SlimBoat from QtWebkit to QtWebEngine.

In terms of features, Slimjet will enjoy a similar set of features as SlimBrowser. We will also be able to add some more features which are not possible in SlimBrowser due to the limitation of the IE’s COM interface. Another important good news is that Slimjet will automatically support all the chrome extensions. In comparison, SlimBrowser only works with a very small set of IE’s plugins. That will greatly enhance the usability of Slimjet. To learn more about Slimjet, please visit http://www.slimjet.com .

And there is nothing to worry about the future of SlimBrowser and SlimBoat. We will keep developing and maintaining all the three projects at the same time. We are a small team focused on developing convenient and productive features on top of a browser engine. We don’t want to be tied up to a single engine in case it gets left behind by the others (think of How Nokia fared when it decided to tie itself solely to Windows Phone OS).  We will let the big companies compete on the browser engine performance while we simply built features on top of the best engines to maximize user’s productivity.