Opera has new browser competition from a 12-year old
18 CommentsPublished November 8th, 2006 3:10 PM EST By Daniel Goldman
It looks like we at Opera have some new competition, this time from a 12-year old kid.
Running on 20,000 lines of code, the browser includes features such as tabbed browsing and whois lookup in formation for sites directly from the browser. Some screenshots were posted here (I’m not sure those are authentic).
Maybe we should buy him out now before his little browser becomes another Firefox-like phenomenon. 
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Looks a bit *cough* “familiar” *cough*.
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Ryan, yeah. That’s why I mentioned my doubts about its authenticity.
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According to some comments I read on Digg, this is really just an IE shell similar Maxthon or AvantBrowser. So I wouldn’t expect too much from it.
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Yeah in Visual Studio using .NET you can simply drag and drop the ‘browser’ component and you’ll have the IE engine ready to be used (you can do the same using win32 but it’s more complicated). I am quite sure that you can’t make a rendering engine in just 20000 rows of code…
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If 12-year-old at least implemented HTML parser that can create expected DOM from real-world-data, I’d be impressed.
But that seems to be just a bunch of buttons for MSHTML activex control. You don’t even have to know write a web page to implement browser this way.
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“if you google his username “mateuszrajca” you’ll see he’s quite active in a few forums. one caught my eye especially, one where someone was goign to give him their unreleased browser. hahaha… not saying anything here but it’s quite funny that he releases a browser after this.”
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Guess we won’t find out for sure. He has removed it from his server..:)
http://mateuszrajca.googlepages.com/
http://mateuszrajca.com
If it is the IE control it has the IE6 rendering engine though..:)
- ØØ -
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AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA the screenshots are in Vista! Kill it! Kill IT!
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Ok now that I got that out it does look familiar… sorta an FF IE2 morph (though I havn’t seem FF 2 yet). If the browser was mad from scratch that would be impressive. MY twelve year old browser have made a browser of their own in VB using the IE 6 Active X control. They have renctly put a geck based control on, so making a brwoser in easy if you steal someones Active X control.
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ooops I meant to say brothers not twleve year old browser lmao
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Same thing that has already been mention…looks very familiar, lol. If you ask me it looks an aweful lot like he grabbed some source for a ff build and customized some of it. On top of that, i didn’t see any original ideas from any of the screen shots. Most of them appear to be rip-offs of opera features. Could be a shell, either way, 20,000 lines of code is not going to parse enough of the web correctly for you to be useful at all. This kid may have gotten publicity, but when the truth comes out he’ll prolly wish he had kept quiet about it all, lol. Like Kc4 said, it could just be a control, but still not their own and nothing new.
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Just to be precise: 20,000 lines can’t parse all real-world content, but you can parse Google search pages with a simple parser.
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@kyleabaker
On top of that, i didn’t see any original ideas from any of the screen shots.
Most of them appear to be rip-offs of opera features.Looks more like a ripoff of FF Extensions to me…
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A browser written by a 12-year-old? Don’t we have enough of those around with Internet Explorer?
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lmao
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I get a 404 with the screenshots.
Care to repost them.
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The screenshots was on his google account. For some reason he has removed the album.
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Hey, we all have to start somewhere.
The screenshots are gone, but even if this is just a new IE shell (which, given the amount of code, I think it would have to be), it’s still interesting that he tried including things that most people just don’t think of as standard “browser” UI — not unlike a certain Norwegian company I’ve heard of that tried crazy things like putting a search box in the toolbar, or combining the location field and progress bar. I mean, seriously, who would have come up with ideas like that?
If nothing else, I’m sure it was a good learning experience.