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’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.
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.
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.
$5 / mo for a premium Neeva subscription or just use the free tier to experience ad-free search focused on the user. I left Google to join Neeva so I could be part of building a better search experience for people. Check us out. Would love feedback.
Working on much of this at Neeva. We have a free tier, no ads cluttering the results. Just focused on the user experience. We also offer a premium tier for those who are keen to support us.
This is why I left Google to join Neeva. Check us out. Unlike the alternatives, we are truly investing in our search stack.
Unfortunately there’s just too much inertia with the ads-based business model making it too hard for Google to not let itself get this way. Similar challenges with other ads supported businesses.
Exactly. Notice how "I'm feeling lucky" is only on the home page and not part of the search experience when using Chrome or any modern browser where you search from the URL bar? Wonder if that is intention? Not a wonder at all.
The "I'm feeling lucky" button would never be added to Google if it didn't already exist. It was grandfathered in.