Welcome to issue #20 of the digest.
Look ma, no origin trial!
Yesterday, WebGPU landed in Chrome stable.
I wrote back in March about why this excites me on two fronts: in-browser gaming and pushing ML inference to the edge.
I don’t have much new to say on WebGPU except “yay!”, but here’s a great post from yesterday that provides some historic context for WebGPU and provides a good overview of the current state of things.
Link round-up
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Why Chatbots Are Not the Future of Interfaces by Amelia Wattenberger. Strong agree. (PS. this is why we are hosting AI×UX in a few weeks, which has sold out but has a waitlist)
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Matt Rickard posits that WebGPU is another step towards browsers being the new operating system.
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Sunil Pai hit the publish button on the much-anticipated partykit framework. Partykit improves the developer experience of building WebSocket apps in JavaScript/TypeScript and deploying them to a hosted platform set to go live later this year. The underlying infrastructure is powered Cloudflare, where Sunil used to work on Wrangler, so he knows what he’s doing.
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Towards the end of last year, the Whist browser, which I wrote about in issue #4, wound down operations. Co-founder Philippe Noel reflected on what he learned in a thoughtful piece that’s dense with observations about building a company in the browser space.
Until next time,
Paul