This is a thoughtful piece; what Chris didn't see were some of the failure modes of Hixie's hubris when it came to inventing new elements in HTML5 (see also: "what we need is WASM and WebGPU" pipe dreams). But it's spot-on about how Google has turned a...
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Alex Russellreplied to Alex Russell last edited by [email protected]
Adam Barth and Eric Seidel and Rafael Weinstein and a few others went off to polish up Razor; Hixie joined a bit later, IIRC. My north star for it had been "strict subset". That held for a few weeks. The insight being, that if a Razor document *also* loaded in a full-fat browser, perhaps the subset stood a chance of taking off.
After coming back from a vacation, the siren song of features had won; V8 had been swapped for Dart, and non-subset features were sprouting. Flutter was born.
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Alex Russellreplied to Alex Russell last edited by [email protected]
...but I reckoned this wasn't the biggest problem; distribution was (and is). Mobile success is about being part of the tap-and-swipe ecosystem. If a service can't be on the homescreen or in the notification tray, it functionally doesn't matter on mobile. Having to type is orders of magnitude harder on a low-end phone than tap/swipe, and in '14, that was even more true.
So the efforts diverged.
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Alex Russellreplied to Alex Russell last edited by [email protected]
The founding moment of Flutter and PWAs was a crisis within the Chrome team as we realised the web was being locked out of mobile, even as Chrome was being made Android's default browser. One train of thought was that the web simply wasn't fast enough; this begat "Razor", a project to cut down Blink to a fast subset of HTML. The initial gains were pretty killer. HTML's cadillac error correction does, indeed, slow down HTML parsing by a lot. And you can clobber a LOT of code.
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This, it turned out was a *major* "if". Nothing went smoothly, and there were many explosions along the way. In the end, it was the Android team's lust for more native app installs that allowed us to ship *anything*. But that's a story for another day.
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@slightlyoff Microsoft opting into it was a big help. But even then, not having iOS really hurt that track. =(
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@gurupanguji Jeff Burtoft is a mensch.
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@slightlyoff just curious: you're talking about Flutter, not Fuchsia, right? Unless Dart is particularly related to Fuchsia's APIs or something like that...?
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Alex Russellreplied to bars last edited by [email protected]
@bars Flutter became past of that whole package of stuff. But yes. Edited to reflect. Thanks
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@slightlyoff Speaking of PWA, I recall your original article from 2015: https://medium.com/@slightlylate/progressive-apps-escaping-tabs-without-losing-our-soul-3b93a8561955
But we need to remember that Apple has supported web apps since the 1st iPhone, @w3c had Packaged Web Apps and @mozilla had Open Web Apps long before PWAs existed. -
Alex Russellreplied to niu tech last edited by [email protected]
@niutech @mozilla @w3c Apple used the web as a bridge into the iPhone when there wasn't any native software for it, making it more attractive to buyers. As soon as the App Store (which they restricted to native apps) took off, they left the web to rot. That has been the status quo for going on 15 years now.
Under those conditions, you absolutely do not have to give them the benefit of the doubt, particularly *while they actively suppress browser competition*.
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@slightlyoff idle q: has anything been published about "Razor" (I'm bad at search and a .net thing called that makes it harder)? Engine optimized for a fast subset of HTML sounds like a great idea. I guess no relation to AMP (by my superficial understanding close to being a fast subset of HTML, among other things, but associated with garbage content and URLs)?
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@mlinksva Nope. It never broke cover as anything but Flutter, IIRC, which was many months later
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@slightlyoff fuchsia could have been so much more than it has been so far, it's really been trapped in a googled state, and that's really the best way to describe it sadly. alas, it's even now caused substantial decay in the projects vision and targets, so it's now unlikely it'll ever meet anything like the original goals, even if it's temporarily useful for the company
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@raggi There's no multi-miracle moment on the horizon, and it looks like the Android team is collecting scalps as layoffs do damage to ambition.