If you know me, you probably know I once wrote a web browser using the gtkhtml widget for rendering pages, called Encompass. Well, after many years of not touching that code at all, I've decided it's time to bring it back from the dead. Web security has been an ever-growing issue over the past few years, and browsers haven't really done anything to improve it. Rather, they seem to only rapidly add very resource heavey features, and only deal with minor security flaws in their own code. Nor have any really sought to make drastic leaps in usability. Most all the UI differences across browsers is all for the sake of being different from the others. Why is it so hard to find a secure and usable browser, that integrates into the system?

Well, that's exactly what the new Encompass will do. Sadly, the gtkhtml engines have fallen drastically behind, and aren't up to the task of dealing with the modern era web. So I will unfortunately be required to use the webkit engine, as I am not interested in building a new rendering engine right now. Hopefully I will be able to build the browser how I want to, without having to make many changes to webkit itself; though I suspect some will be required. And hopefully it won't take too long to get a working version, as I am rewriting in Vala, to speed things up and simplify the code.