16 year old whizkid writes new browser

**cronus71** · 14th January 2003

16 year old whizkid writes new browser
Business & Finance 11 Jan 2003

A superfast new web browser has won a Mullingar student the top prize at this year's Young Scientist competition.
The browser invented by 16 year old Adnan Osmani runs up to five times as fast as normal browsers.

It took him nearly two years and 1.5m lines of code to write it.

The browser - known as XWEBS - allows users to borwse while simultaneously watching a DVD movie. It can talk to the user and will also translate a web page into the language of your choice.

Adnan's parents come from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. He is a sixth form student at St Finian's College.

Adnan says he has already had interest from half a dozen companies which have stopped by to see the browser at his exhibition stand.

Among thoe showing an interest is Media Lab Europe, the Dublin computer research operation linked to Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

http://www.online.ie/business/latest...rticle=1924781

**dave208** · 14th January 2003

i used to help him with his homework..

**Bez625** · 14th January 2003

Thats the last time i help the cnut out by showing him my computing project

-Bez

**bamboosh** · 14th January 2003

dont be harsh on me lads i had to

**Aido** · 14th January 2003

There was a massive thread on /. about this - originally the browser was something like 760,000 lines of code, and it took 18 months to write it.

That's like 1500 lines of code a day - every day - for 8 months.......

Plus the original story said it was 5 -6 times quicker on a 56kb connection.

Probably using some form of server side compression like gzip which then bangs the pages to the client who then uncompresses - Apache already can do this.....

Will be interesting to see if it's a load of shite or whether this kid is actually right clever...