_alastair
Joined 12 years ago
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426
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56
Member since
Mar 4
Recent submissions
Comment · 10 months ago
It’s fascinating to see so many implementations targeting the same thing, along with the crazy variation in runtime size. I’d love to see memory usage comparisons too but I suppose you’d need to establish what you’re actually measuring first.
A few years ago I started work on a kind of abstraction layer that would let you plug Rust code into multiple different engines. Got as far as a proof of concept for JavascriptCore and QuickJS (at the time I had iOS and Android in mind as targets). I still think there’s some value in the idea, to avoid making too heavy a bet on one single JS engine.
Comment · 1 year ago
Thanks! I'm hoping to continue down this path and write up some thoughts on how you might actually achieve seamless in-app webviews at some point but, y'know... time.
In the meantime (hey, it's already a thread of self-promotion) my last writeup was about the native views WKWebView generates when you use hardware accelerated CSS transforms:
https://alastair.is/learning-about-what-happens-when-you-use...
Comment · 1 year ago
"The Toupée Theory of In-App Webviews" is perfect. I might change it in the post.
Comment · 7 years ago
This is interesting! If anyone from WebKit is in the comments, can you provide link(s) to the bugs discussing the bytecode caching API? I'd love to take a look but my Bugzilla search skills are evidently weak.
Comment · 7 years ago
I was part of a team that used web notifications as an experiment in sending live election results to people's devices:
https://medium.com/the-guardian-mobile-innovation-lab/genera...
It's a pretty fascinating feature set. You can attach images, update the content of an existing notification, attach buttons to perform custom actions, choose to make it silent or not... I think there is more utility than most implementations in the wild would suggest. One fascinating aspect of it for me is that you can do very time limited things (e.g. send election results) - users might be reluctant to download an entire app just for one evening of updates, but being able to send notification through the browser sidesteps that entirely (and more broadly, it puts a useful tool in the hands of people who can't afford native development).
That said, I agree that it's total madness that the default UI allows you to ask for permission on page load. We always had the prompt behind a button on the page and it worked great, so I think Mozilla have the right idea here.
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