Chrome is announcing that they are moving into a two-week release cycle! Exciting bc the web needs to move quickly- resolving bug fixes, feature improvements, etc. It goes along with devops principles of shipping smaller, more frequent releases for stability
developer.chrome.com/blog/chrome-...
Shouldn't be, we were already doing weekly security pushes. Half of those updates will now just get more than just security fixes.
Personally I believe this will help us to increase quality and stability. Today there's a lot of merging changes to release branches because they can't afford to wait, which creates some instability. With 2-week releases I expect more can just "ride the train".
How will agentic coding tools impact app platform choices? Lovable says: "web apps cost 40-60% less than native development and reach the market 50-70% faster." lovable.dev/guides/nativ...
6 years and 300+ experiments later, I've concluded that sequencing all the viruses going through my house is actually slightly useful, while still wildly impractical of course!
lab.rbyers.ca/essays/20260...
Yeah if there's someone who could justify $100k+ (maybe $1M+) in browser engineering costs, it might be possible to get that done. And yes hiring Igalia would likely be the most practical way.
In my experience, vague concerns are often a sign that the cost / benefit tradeoff is considered poor - high cost for low benefit. Decreasing the cost a bit by reducing the privacy and security risks will not likely be sufficient to make the overall equation look good.
Are you looking for Apple / Mozilla to actually invest in the work? Or is there some external contributor who might do all the work and would just need Apple / Mozilla to agree to ship it and review patches? Those are very different states which require very different strategies in my opinion.
Wow, I am constantly impressed by Google Antigravity and Gemini 3.5 pro. I used it to build a whole blog website, including totally custom Tweet archive, in just a few hours of work! Eg. see lab.rbyers.ca/posts/2024. Code at github.com/Rbyers/lab-b....
Nice, which product? I guess I'm paying about $3.40 USD each when I order 50 preps at a time (not including shipping).
I use BioBasic EZ-10, <$5 per extraction. www.biobasic.com/covid-19-vir...
My talk at @henrihelvetica.bsky.social's SPDY meetup in Toronto is live: www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq2c.... It's pretty rough and unpolished, but I included some fun stories of the history of performance work in Chrome which you likely can't find anywhere else. Slides: docs.google.com/presentation...
That feeling when a family member shares photos like this 🤬😭. I spent much of Sunday formatting and reinstalling Windows, and formulating a credit card transaction dispute.
Me with a sled and very snowy
People tobogganing
I hosted a number of visiting global Chrome leads in Waterloo this week. Several had never seen snow quite like we had today, so of course we had to take them tobogganing. Looks like we'll be doing Chrome leads summits in Canada every winter now 😂.
The Chrome Identity and Payments team in Waterloo Canada is hiring several early/mid-career developers. I'm on the lookout for exceptional candidates with a passion for browsers and/or the identity/payments space! www.linkedin.com/posts/rick-b...
Progressive enhancement is really important for enabling the best possible user experiences for everyone!
Aw, very kind but I'm mainly just the messenger.
✨ Exciting proposal alert: the CPU Performance API.
This proposal will add `navigator.cpuPerformance`, a value that measures the broad performance capability of the CPU.
That way, we can scale up/down our animations to make sure everyone has the best experience possible for their device. 😄
So I subscribe on Android instead and see it's about 25% cheaper there ($2.99/mo vs. $3.99), with the creator presumably getting the extra 5%. Yay!
I almost completed it until I noticed the text "cancel at any time in Apple settings". Wait, oh right, only 49% of my money will go to the creator! 21% to YouTube for the platform/serving and 30% to Apple for ... what exactly?
I just almost made a dumb mistake. I've been enjoying Kurzgesagt videos for years (on various devices). After watching their video on AI slop I figured it was time to support them on a recurring basis, so I hit the join button... youtu.be/_zfN9wnPvU0?...
It was fun to be part of this, thanks Henri!
I wasn't able to join the livestream for the rest today but really looking forward to listening to it over the next couple days!
Yup. But also predicting the next token from a massive amount of data is probably a very biologically relevant and powerful capability.
We never thought Chrome would get so popular. Of course I don't personally think we "went wrong", but it sure is more fun and celebrated to be in the back racing to catch up. It feels like some of that again now with all the AI competition and it's invigorating!
Yeah I appreciate that. "We supported it, then changed our minds" also isn't totally wrong. It's just that we supported experimentation behind a flag (like always) and when it came time to make the key one-way-door decision of shipping it, we thought the cost/benefit tradeoff didn't look good.
This chart displays the number of features that are missing in exactly one major browser, for each browser. The counted features are present in all browsers except that browser. Each of the features would be considered Baseline once the feature is supported in the corresponding browser. Chart showing Firefox climbing to about 50, Safari falling to about 50 and Chrome/Edge holding steady at about 10.
Now, if two engines have shipped a feature for an extended period and the third is still holding out, that's something to be suspicious of! We are always keeping an eye on the data to try to ensure Chromium isn't holding back interoperability. webstatus.dev/stats
E-mail from Rick Byers to blink-dev saying: Hi everyone, Since JPEG XL was last evaluated, Safari has shipped support and Firefox has updated their position. We also continue to see developer signals for this in bug upvotes, Interop proposals, and survey data. There was also a recent announcement that JPEG XL will be added to PDF. Given these positive signals, we would welcome contributions to integrate a performant and memory-safe JPEG XL decoder in Chromium. In order to enable it by default in Chromium we would need a commitment to long-term maintenance. With those and our usual launch criteria met, we would ship it in Chrome. Rick (on behalf of Chrome ATLs)
I think it's fair to criticize the Chromium project for apparently getting the initial cost/benefit prediction wrong on JPEG XL. But the fact that JPEG XL is moving forward anyway is a success to be celebrated in the consensus-forming process of the web platform! groups.google.com/a/chromium.o...
When we first reviewed JPEG XL, as far as we could see no other browser engine wanted it. Our judgement was the benefit wasn't worth the cost. Then Safari decided otherwise and shipped it. Once Mozilla expressed their openness to shipping, it was inevitable that Chromium would too.
It's good and healthy for different browser engines to have different opinions on the cost/benefit tradeoffs of features. This is what we want from "engine diversity" after all, right? But then we each watch the public signals of the others when deciding what to ship.
Lots of people incorrectly claiming Chrome/Google "tried to kill JPEG XL". Just because an engine chooses not to be the FIRST to ship a new technology does NOT mean they are trying to kill it!
