Hipe is...
- Taking the DOM native.
- Entirely free.
- Lean and responsive.
- Secure by design.
...a better display server.
Most display servers are unnecessarily complex. Furthermore, compared to the rendering and layout capabilities of modern web browsers, you often just can't do that much with them.
Hipe is a display server for Linux and Unix-like operating systems that uses Webkit as its internal layout and rendering engine, with some important security enhancements to prevent a rendering engine designed for the Web from accessing the network or local filesystem directly. It takes the web's Document Object Model (using HTML tag elements and CSS styling), and makes it a part of the native environment, while leaving out a lot of the baggage of the web (there are no actual web pages or HTTP requests in Hipe).
Hipe is something new. It can't run applications written for existing display servers, like X. New applications and development toolkits will need to be written for it. Although it uses Webkit, it's not a web browser. Hipe doesn't load web pages or retrieve URLs. Instead, native applications interact with the display server to manipulate individual tags directly, in real-time, using a special two-way instruction protocol.