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Lunascape's Browser: Three Rendering Engines Under the Hood

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, downloadable here, 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. Is it?

Lunascape, "the world's first triple-engine browser," is interesting from several perspectives, but I'm not sure about the claims that it is the fastest browser going. At Lunascape's site you can find some graphs showing JavaScript benchmarks and the like, but I found the browser very slow to start up--to the point where I would be annoyed by the startup time when using Lunascape on a daily basis.

Lunascape allows you to pick one of three rendering engines when you set it up, as seen here:

I selected Gecko, the rendering engine in Firefox, and then compared page load speeds between the beta version of Firefox 3.1 and the Lunascape alpha. There was no real discernible difference, which doesn't surprise me since the rendering engine is the rendering engine.

With a couple of quibbles aside, though, (and this is alpha software), this browser is an interesting idea. I use Firefox most of the time, primarily because of all the useful extensions there are for it. I use Chrome, too, which is a very speedy browser, and Safari when I'm on a MacBook at home. But I still find myself reaching for Internet Explorer when a site isn't rendering properly, or a download isn't going as planned, and for more reasons. Because IE is so dominant and everyone tests their web content and applications with it, it can often solve these types of problems.

With Lunascape, you can indeed flip between the various rendering engines instantly, and in a future version perhaps that could mean no need to have an arsenal of browsers around. Still, I'll stick with Firefox most of the time because of all the great extensions.

I realize, too, that Lunascape has anticipated that there may be others like me. "Add-ons introduce new security risks, while updates to the browser break compatibility with your favorite add-ons," says the company's site. Er, I'm afraid there is a little more to those add-ons than that.

• firefox
• Internet Explorer
• Webkit
• Safari
• Gecko
• Lunascape

by aloha on Nov. 25, 2008

Good concept but its just easier to open up separate instances of each browser. Might be useful for web developers testing their UI but firefox has enough add-ons that allow you to see how the site renders in IE...

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by Justin Benjamin on Nov. 25, 2008

although I can't remember any specific examples [off the top of my head], there have been quite a few times when I went to sites that claimed to only work (or are optimized for) Firefox- and a couple other browsers, but Internet Explorer wasn't on the list. It's times like these that I'm glad I use Firefox.

Although this is just my experience, with the exception of Windows Update, I've *rarely* had sites that needed I.E. to display something- *for me* there were more sites that I.E. is the one that couldn't display pages properly.

I'm not saying this to contradict any observations- rather, I think it's interesting to see that there are quite a few sites that will only display properly in Firefox [and a couple others]- I guess those people recognize the inferiority of I.E. and the superiority of Firefox.

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by Joshua Issac on Oct. 09, 2009

Some IE testing browsers have multiple versions of the Trident rendering engine which are significantly different from each other, so I think the "first triple engine" claim is false. You can use Trident, Gecko and Webkit in IE using the XULRunner (for Gecko) Chrome Frame (for Webkit).

@Justin Benjamin: So IE-only sites' webmasters recognize the inferiority of Firefox, Chrome, etc. and the superiority of Internet Explorer?

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