Built in JSON encoding/decoding is one of the things I’ve enjoyed about Swift. It’s nice when it’s not necessary to shop around for libraries for common needs like that.
The stick and dongle streaming device variants in particular are astonishingly weak. The current Chromecast 4K dongle for example is handily outgunned by a first gen Apple TV 4K, which this year will be a 7 year old device.
WebKit went multiprocess with the release of WebKit2 around 14 years ago, with the difference being that the multiprocess architecture is part of WebKit itself and thus easily reusable — just embed a WebView in your app and you have it. This contrasts to the Chromium implementation where multiprocess is handled by Chromium rather than Blink, meaning to get multiprocess you have to ship the whole of Chromium and can’t just embed Blink.
That said this really only relevant for Apple platforms and Linux/Android, unfortunately. WebKit for Windows is somewhat in a state of disrepair.
Chrome’s quality is what’s usually cited as being the primary driver behind its rise to its current position of most popular browser, but the reality is that Google’s intense marketing is at least as responsible. In-app prompts, prompts in Google search, and Chrome getting bundled in installers for every other Windows app were big contributors to its momentum.
Of course it becoming the default browser on the majority of Android devices and Google web apps underperforming in other browsers also played a role but that’s a bit of a different topic.
I would hope that this “best case outcome” also comes with regulations to keep other giants (mostly Google) from marketing and cross-promoting their way into dominance on iOS, creating monopolies in the process.
For instance, Google apps shouldn’t be able to drive Chrome installs by presenting a sheet offering to download Chrome every time I tap a link in them, as they do currently.
Problems like this seem like a natural consequence of trying to mash together distribution and sandboxing, rather than leaving the sandboxing to the OS. It’s so much easier to build something that “just works” if you’re concerned only with distribution (really, it’s as simple as macOS style app bundles. Yes it takes a bit more space but the UX improvement is worth it).
Following this, it seems like there should be an XDG standard for sandboxing which distros are free to implement whichever way they feel is best. With that, Linux app packaging solutions need only worry about playing nice with that spec.
Out of curiosity, do you happen to know the differences for the Costco Sony TVs?
It may have changed recently but last I knew Sony TVs had few if any ties to Sony services, come loaded with basically unchanged Google TV, and are perfectly happy to be used as fully offline "dumb" TVs. If that holds true for current Sony TVs it's hard to imagine what would be different in Costco versions.