Hey folks, welcome to the digest! This week, I had the pleasure of catching up with Can, CTO of Felt, about building collaborative, browser-based software in GIS world, where desktop software has dominated.

Thanks to reader Ankesh for suggesting the interview.

My highlights

• Felt’s multiplayer backend is powered by a single scaled-up server.
• After the initial page load, there are no fetch requests – all communication with the server goes over WebSocket.
• When computationally-intensive work (like tiling) is needed, pipelines that run on AWS Lambda are triggered.
• SVG was too high-level; WebGL is too low-level; HTML Canvas API is the Goldilocks pick.

Hey folks, welcome to the digest.

Gaussian Splatting

Gaussian Splatting is a technique for representing real-world 3D scenes as a point cloud.

The result is similar to a point cloud generated from a LiDAR scan, but with fewer artifacts. This is remarkable given that unlike a LiDAR scan, it doesn’t require depth information, and unlike NeRFs, it doesn’t use a deep neural network.

Hey folks! For this issue I had the pleasure of chatting with Bastien Dolla, co-founder of the collaborative, browser-based CAD tool Rayon.

But first: Taylor and I will be at Strange Loop and the local-first software unconference this month. If you’ll be at either, hit reply and let me know.

Interview with Bastien Dolla (Rayon)

Some tl;dr tidbits:

Hey folks, welcome to the digest.

Last issue, I wrote about applications that treat documents like files, not rows in a database using Figma’s architecture as an example.

Yesterday, we open-sourced y-sweet, a Rust Yjs server with S3 persistence, which implements the architecture laid out in that post. Try it out!

My conversation with Modyfi

Hey folks, welcome to the digest! Today’s issue is about a pain point developers encounter when shipping desktop-class apps to the browser.

File editors and database apps

Most desktop applications are what I call file editors.

By file editor, I mean that the user selects a file on disk, and the program loads it into memory. User changes are applied in-memory and periodically saved back to disk.

Crockford on JavaScript

In this short video, Douglas Crockford argues that it’s time for the software industry to move on from JavaScript.

The message is notable coming from Crockford. His 2008 book JavaScript: The Good Parts was among the first to champion the idea that JavaScript can, with some self-restraint, be used to engineer maintainable applications. (He also created JSON.)

Welcome to the Browsertech Digest!

AI×UX

On Wednesday we held an AI×UX event in NYC. We had some great talks and our best turnout yet. A recording is now online.

Welcome to issue #20 of the digest.

Look ma, no origin trial!

Yesterday, WebGPU landed in Chrome stable.

Welcome to issue 19 of the digest. To not bury the lede, here’s the registration meetup for AI×UX NYC on May 17.

I’m getting bored of chat interface demos.

Don’t get me wrong, the tech is impressive and all that. It’s just a low-bandwidth way of interacting with computers for many tasks.

Compare the ChatGPT interface that Expedia recently launched to a search on Expedia proper:

Welcome to the digest.

While a lot of the attention in AI lately has been hosted APIs, people have also been excited about getting smaller versions of these models to run in the browser.

This is appealing for a few reasons. The big one is that AI inference is still expensive to run. Prices are coming down, but the cutting-edge stuff is still prohibitively expensive to put in a freemium product -- if you run it on the server. If you run it on the user's device, you only have to pay for hosting the model weights.

The other major advantage is privacy (data never leaves your machine). Sometimes people also mention latency, but it's a bit overrated -- inference latency will usually dominate network latency anyway.

Hey folks, welcome to the digest.

Today’s issue is a round-up of data visualization and AI inference tools that have popped onto my radar recently. But first:

Triplicate email post-mortem

Some of you received the last issue of the digest three times, and I apologize for that.

There is an ongoing tug-of-war over the future of server-side WebAssembly.

One side embraces the idea that Wasm was designed in the context of a broader web platform. Their approach to running Wasm outside of the browser is to transplant relevant parts of the web platform onto the server, and run Wasm within this browser-like context.

The other side sees Wasm as a CPU-independent bytecode, for which the browser is just one use case. Their approach is to standardize a syscall-like interface (WASI), akin to the one an operating system provides to native code.

The source of the rift is that Wasm doesn't specify a particular interface with the outside world, by design. While Wasm itself is portable across platforms, it’s only really useful when paired with such an interface.

Welcome to issue #15 of the Browsertech Digest.

In a few months, WebGPU will be enabled by default in Chrome. This issue is about why that matters for games and machine learning.

Background: GPU compute on the web

To do any sort of high-performance graphics, you need to be able to send instructions directly to the computer’s graphics processing unit (GPU).

Welcome to issue #14 of the digest.

The Bull Case for Rust on the Web

Over on the Drifting blog, I wrote about why we increasingly see Rust pop up in the stack of in browser-based apps.

A tl;dr:

Welcome to issue #13 of the browsertech digest.

WebContainers

Most browser-based IDEs work by running the development toolchain — compilers, packaging tools, etc., on a VM in the cloud. One exception to this is StackBlitz, which instead compiles a version of node.js into WebAssembly and runs the entire development toolchain client-side.

This week, StackBlitz launched WebContainers, which exposes their browser-based node.js runtime for others to build on. Although the runtime itself runs entirely in the browser, it is designed to be used in conjunction with a remote network proxy, which they provide (presumably needed fetch packages from npm, among other things).

Welcome to issue #12 of the Browsertech Digest. Today’s issue is about the trend of applications rendering their entire UI directly on the GPU.

The Good Old Days, When Apps were Apps

Traditionally, if you wanted to write desktop software, you would use the operating system’s APIs to create a user interface. That’s why Windows apps looked like Windows apps, and Mac apps looked like Mac apps.

This also meant that if you wanted to turn a Windows app into a Mac app, it was an expensive and time-consuming process. As browser rendering engines became more powerful, developers realized they could be used as a foundation for a cross-platform UI framework, bypassing much (not all) of the work in maintaining a cross-platform app.

Hey folks, this is issue #11 of the digest.

Browsertech SF

This past week we ran our first Browsertech meetup outside of NYC, in San Francisco. I’m really happy with how things came together.

Hey folks, welcome to the tenth issue of Browsertech Digest.

Apps are distributed systems now

Something that’s been fascinating me lately is how distributed systems theory has quietly snuck into the application layer of software.

Web apps have long been built on top of a distributed data layer — a replicated RDBMS, say, or a web-scale document store. But the complexity was handled by database engineers, not application engineers. Client-side code could reason about “the server” as an abstract, singular entity, blissfully unconcerned by its distributed nature.

Welcome to issue nine of the digest. Browsertech SF is one week away. If you’re in San Francisco, come say hi!

Apropos of Apple’s addition of two new chips to their M2 line, this issue is about how Apple silicon is breaking developer workflows, and why it could be a catalyst for server-side WebAssembly.

The golden age of universal containers is over

In the nine years since Docker was first released, container images have become the default way to package software for deployment on servers.

Hey folks, happy new year and welcome to the eighth issue of Browsertech Digest.

Browsertech SF

This month, we’ll be hosting our first browsertech event outside of NYC. I’m very excited to have talks from Gabriela at Womp and Hamilton at Rill Data. Myself and the Drifting team will have a few things to demo as well.

Registrations are now open. Here’s the event page.

Welcome to the Browsertech Digest, this is issue #7.

Browsertech NYC II

Last week we had the pleasure of hosting Yining Shi at our second in-person browsertech event in NYC.

Yining is a founding engineer at Runway, one of the original AI-based creativity tools founded back in 2018. Runway is also known for collaborating with Stability AI to develop Stable Diffusion. Yining also teaches about creative ML at NYU.

Hey folks, this is issue #6 of the Browsertech Digest.

Welcome to the new subscribers who found it through our CRDT post.

You might not need a CRDT

Over on the Drifting blog, I published a post called “You might not need a CRDT”.

Hey folks! This is issue #5 of the browsertech digest.

The Browsertech Index

Between operating Drifting in Space, running Browsertech events, and writing this newsletter, I have a lot of exposure to people building ambitious apps that run in the browser.

In the early days, I kept a mental list of products to keep track of, but it quickly outgrew my brain and I had to start making notes.

Welcome back to the Browsertech Digest. This is issue #4.

Mighty

Yesterday, Mighty founder Suhail Doshi announced a pivot from building a “Chrome in the cloud” browser and into building an AI-powered Adobe Creative Suite competitor.

Mighty started in 2019, and represents the vanguard of what I think of as the neobrowsers: upstart web browsers that treat the browser not as a tool of passive consumption, but instead embrace the browser’s role as an operating system of sorts for modern apps.

Welcome to another Browsertech Digest! This is issue #3.

Womp

Last week, the browser-based 3D editor Womp launched.

Womp is notable for a couple of reasons.

SQLite gets wasm support

SQLite announced official support for wasm. Specifically, support for browser targets via emscripten. The goal is to support persisting data client-side via the Origin Private File System browser API, which isn’t ready yet.

For context, SQLite is a public-domain database that’s become the go-to embedded database across lots of software (we use it in Plane).

Previously, browsers attempted to standardize a built-in SQLite API via the Web SQL Database standard, but it failed to become a standard and browser support is currently mixed.

For this inaugural issue of Browsertech Digest, I want to talk about what we mean by browsertech, and why it matters.

Web browsers have grown in scope from humble hypertext renders to a runtime for full-fledged applications (see: Google Maps; Figma).

Along with this evolution, the term “web application” has expanded in scope to include not just webmail clients and social media sites, but anything that happens to run in the browser, from video editors to 3D games.

When we talk about browsertech, we’re talking about that latter emerging subset of web development, which consists of writing desktop-like applications on top of browser APIs like WebAssembly, WebGPU, and WebRTC.