Mobile is a different story for sure and for many reasons. We will be bringing this same architecture to Windows. It will fit it well there, and in many ways Windows is already well suited for multi-process configurations. It always has been.
Glad to finally be able to share Atlas with the world last week! There's a lot of novelty under the hood. While Atlas is using Chromium, it's not built on top of Chromium in the usual way.
As one of the engineers who designed and built Chromium's multi-process architecture back in the day, it is really cool to take it to the next level.
Cmd+s in Arc just hides all the UI of the browser but does not change the size of the window frame. This is more akin to Chrome's add shortcut to desktop feature, except that it is easy to toggle on/off with a keyboard shortcut. So if you have a web app you want to just focus on, you can just do so.
Yeah you end up designing models not to be logically separated but to instead isolate updates to Views. In theory those should align but they don’t always. And the method of finding objects thru the environment makes it all too easy to have big models that everything is listening too which of course really hurts perf. So easy to hold SwiftUI wrong.
I legit didn’t want to believe my eyes that it takes half a second after each code change before the IDE realizes whether a given change was correct or not. Also, you need clean builds quite often and I even got a “type inference times out” error message once which I haven’t seen in any PL ever even though I did dabble with quite a few static languages with even wider reaching type inference.
Well this isn’t a runtime time language it’s a compile time language they’ve actually done some great work behind the scenes to enable live view debugging (Previews).
I’m excited to try this out. The idea of cloud hosted browsers is not new, but this approach seems really promising. In this era of connectivity and cloud compute, it makes so much sense.
A side-effect of a Chromium-only web is that it gives the Chrome team at Google less incentive to invest in the web platform. It used to be a way to differentiate Chrome from other browsers. Now-a-days that is no longer the case.
Competition is a great way to drive innovation. What will motivate innovation on the web platform going forward? Will there be stagnation? Will another company emerge to push the web forward?
What will this mean for companies that have enjoyed all of the innovation on the web platform in recent years? How much longer will it take for bugs to get fixed?
This will not be a sudden shift. It will happen gradually.
> A side-effect of a Chromium-only web is that it gives the Chrome team at Google less incentive to invest in the web platform. It used to be a way to differentiate Chrome from other browsers. Now-a-days that is no longer the case.
That's what happened with Internet Explorer but the reason Microsoft was perfectly happy to stall the development of the web once it took over the browser market was because it didn't really have any incentive to use the web in the first place (it was better off if people just used desktop apps), and it only developed IE so that if the internet was going to take over it could be the one in the position to control it.
On the other hand, outside of Android, Google is extremely reliant on the web for its products on desktop and on chromebooks (there used to be chrome os apps and chrome browser apps but they have already been deprecated).
Google actually has an incentive to add new features to try to give PWA's feature parity with desktop apps, so rather than ceasing development, it may be more likely that they start just adding new features that aren't compatible with other browsers.
E.g. they could probably now go back and immediately undeprecate WebSQL and just say, "we don't care what firefox thinks now." If they announced that, they have enough market share that they could probably get people to start using it again and that would immediately break compatibility with firefox.
Yes they can act unilaterally and with Chrome OS and many popular web apps they do have incentive to care about the web. But will that translate to the Chrome organization caring? It doesn’t make Chrome a more attractive browser to users than other browsers also built on Chromium.
That's the point. They don't need to care if it makes it more attractive than other chromium browsers. They have features they want to use so being able to unilaterally add them benefits them either way.
If they decide to add new amp integration or similar features, for example, that can give them more control of the Internet even if you are using those features through Edge rather than Chrome.
Seeing Google's goal as getting everyone on Chrome is missing the point: it's just as good from their perspective to simply have everyone using chromium based browsers.
