Disclaimer, just in case… 🔗I work for Google on the Chrome Developer Relations team. But for this post, Iwant to make it super duper clear that I'm speaking not on behalf of myemployer and that all views and opinions expressed in this blog post are purelymy own: Thomas Steiner's, the guy commonly known for his avatar with a greenhat, but today in my pajamas having my second morning coffee. Oh, thanks forasking, the two cats are Lluna (yes, with double 'l', it means moon in Catalan)Norris, looking at the camera, and Skinny Norris, looking out of the window.How I noticed 🔗With this out of the way, it's time to dive in and answer the question of whatexactly did Apple break in the EU? I'm physically located in the European Unionand my iPhone has a German SIM card. On January 30, 2024, I sent the followingtoot with attached screenshot(cropped here):Hope this is a bug in the beta, but opening previously installed Home ScreenWeb apps on iOS 17.4 (21E5184i) results in a prompt:Open "Example ...

TheLenovo ThinkVision P27h-20screen I get from work is a decent 27 inch screen. Coming from the Retina screenof my laptop thatI worked on for a long time,I was initially (and still am) not impressed by the resolution of 2560×1440. Ittook some time to get used to the low resolution on such a big screen, but itgets the job done…My biggest gripe with the screen was that it just randomly turned off whenconnected to my MacBook Pro in clamshell mode. I finally found the culprit aftercombing through theConsole system logs forany trace for the longest time. I found out that the MacBook Pro thought thepower was changing from grid to battery and vice versa (all while beingconstantly on-power), and whenever it did that, the screen would turn off.The solution was to disable the "Smart Power" option in the screen's settings.According to themanual,the "Smart Power" option does the following:Smart Power intelligently distributes power to connected USB and USB Type-Cdevices, maximizing power supply ef

Background 🔗The WebAssembly meetup in Munich has a history thatreaches back to 2018.After a long Covid-related hiatus and a lack of organizers to pick up the ballagain, A Wasm New Year! was the first event under the new organizing team.Google always had a strong presence at the events, so to continue the traditionI happily agreed to offer a talk at the first post-Covid meetup.Talks 🔗Compiling to and Optimizing Wasm with Binaryen 🔗Speaker: Thomas SteinerIn the first half of the talk, I showed at the example of a toy programminglanguage that I called ExampleScript how to write a compiler with Binaryen thatcompiles the toy programming language to WebAssembly. In the second half, I thendemonstrated various optimization techniques in Binaryen and ways to use themfrom JavaScript with Binaryen.js and from the command line with tools likewasm-opt and wasm-merge.Resources:Compiling to and optimizing Wasm with BinaryenLLM inference with WebAssembly 🔗Speaker: Sven PfennigIn this talk, Sven sh...

Background 🔗The 2023 edition of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Technical Plenary andAdvisory Committee (TPAC) meeting took place from September 11 to 15 in theMeliã hotel in Seville,Spain. The hotel is located right next to thePlaza de España,a major Spanish tourist destination. The setup of the meeting was hybrid, and onsite, strict Covid precautions were enforced, even though the pandemic wasdeclared to be "over". Despite these methods, several people caught it. This ismy personal report as a representative of the Chrome DevRel team at Google.Monday, Tuesday 🔗Web Applications Working Group 🔗I attended theWeb Applications Working Group meetings onMonday and Tuesday. After a quick rundown of all the APIs in scope for theworking group, the first topic was theScreen Orientation API,which was mostly driven by questions and improvement proposals the WebKit folkshad after implementing it.Next, the group discussed the Badging API, which is only available afterinstallation, and browse...

Executive summary 🔗With macOS Sonoma, Apple goes all-in on the concept of installable web apps.They're highly integrated in the overall macOS experience and don't give awaytheir web roots by not showing any Safari UI at all.Testing environment 🔗Tested on macOS Sonoma 14.0 Beta (23A5257q) with Safari version 17.0(19616.1.14.11.11). It probably doesn't matter, but the testing device was a13-inch, M1, 2020 MacBook Pro.Install experience 🔗On macOS Sonoma, you can add a website—any website, not just apps with amanifest—to your Dock. Go to the Share icon and click Add to Dock, oruse the menu item File > Add to Dock.Adding an app via the Share icon.Adding an app via the File menu.You can adjust the name and icon if desired. The URL is the URL you're on forpages without a manifest, or the start_url for pages with a manifest. It can'tbe changed. For pages without an icon, Safari will create a fallback icon basedon the first letter of the page's title.👀 Observation: Unlike on iOS/iPadOS, you...

There's this old mantra thatCool URIs don't change that Tim BernersLee has been championing since 1998. And in the subtitle of the linked documentit says:What makes a cool URI? A cool URI is one which does not change. Whatsorts of URI change? > URIs don't change: people change them.And that's exactly what happened in my case: I changed them. Tim goes on laterin the document:Pretty much the only good reason for a document to disappear from the Web isthat the company which owned the domain name went out of business or can nolonger afford to keep the server running.That latter part ("or can no longer afford to keep the server running") wasme—a person, not a company—in my late, money-saving student days. At the time, Iowned tomayac.de, and after making the switch to tomayac.com, I let go the.de domain after a while because I didn't want to pay for it anymore.While I did make sure to redirect everything properly (that is, using apermanent 301 redirect),the problem really was that I had refe

Cross Platform Software Frameworks 🔗The other day, I came acrossElk Native, a native version of therather excellent, if early-stage, Mastodon Web client Elk.To be honest, I wondered why they would build a native version, if the Webclient works so well. I downloaded the 7.8 MBElk_0.4.0_macos_x86_64.dmgand immediately ran intoIssue #74, that is, a blankscreen.To better understand the motivation behind the Elk Native developers, I triedthe same for one of my apps, with different frameworks. Thisrepositorycontains the same PWA, SVGcode, wrapped five times withdifferent cross platform software frameworks.Running the apps 🔗SVGcode is included as a git submodule in each framework folder. To run theapps, you first need to build SVGcode, and then start the wrapper app. In eachsubfolder, run the following commands.npm run build-svgcodenpm startIncluded frameworks 🔗Electron.js("Getting started" guide)NW.js("Getting started" guide)Tauri("Getting started" guide)Neutralinojs("Getting started" gui...

I'm a big fan of the macOSContinuity Camera feature, whichlets me use the camera system of my iPhone (11 Pro Max) as a webcam in macOS,since the built-in FaceTime HD camera on my MacBook Pro (13-inch, M1, 2020) is,well, not the greatest.It used to work just fine everywhere in the past, but at some point it stoppedworking in Chrome. It would still find the camera in native apps likePhotoBooth, FaceTime, etc., but not in the browser. As I'm also a Ventura betatester and always on the latest betas, I blamed a bug there. Turns out, this isa new-ish privacy feature and working as intended. Redditorbonnerup filed feedback (FB11639588)about the problem with Apple, and got the following response (sic):Due to privacy concern with unintended camera selection, browser based videoapps only see the phone when it is in "magic pose" of landscape, screen off,locked, motionless (not handheld), and unobstructed camera. This pose is alsoused to trigger Automatic Camera Selection in supporting application

If you want to build an app, you have several ways of doing it. You can build aplatform-specific app for the platforms you care about, for example, Windows,Android, and iOS. In which case you would build three apps. You can also build a(progressive) Web app, possibly in addition to platform-specific apps.Alternatively, you can choose a cross-platform framework such asElectron.js orIonic that promises to let you write once and runanywhere. Let me begin by walking you through three extraordinary examples ofapps whose makers chose to also build for the Web, apart from buildingplatform-specific apps.Beacon cases that demonstrate the Web's abilities 🔗Photoshop 🔗I always saw Photoshop as one of the last bastions of high quality apps thatsupposedly would never make it to the Web platform. Forget that—this lastbastion has finally fallen. With Photoshop,Adobe, together with Chromium engineering, has managed to get a beta version ofPhotoshop running in the browser that can serve as the new bea...

I had the honor of being interviewed on theJS Party podcast and chat about Project Fugu🐡. Thanks to the hosts, Amal Hussein andNick Nisi, for the interesting questions. Here's theepisode for your listening pleasure.This post appeared first on https://blog.tomayac.com/2022/12/05/project-fugu-on-the-js-party-podcast/.