Thread by @DotProto

#ThisJS State of Browsers is just kicking off over at 😁🎉🍿

Come join @ladyleet, @BrendanEich, @pfrazee, @Paul_Kinlan, @patrickkettner, @potch, and @nomadtechie as they talk about the current state of web browsers and recent updates!

Just learned from @patrickkettner that Edge is working on WebP & WebM support. Image & video are a HUGE part of bandwidth consumed by modern sites, so this is a big deal 😯

He covered a bunch of other stuff too, but I wasn't thinking about live notes then so it already fell out of my brain. Sorry, Patrick 😓

Next @potch is giving a quick rundown of the Firefox Quantum effort at Mozilla. Huge effort to modernize browser internals that spanned across the whole org

Other notable improvements include Web Authentication, ES Modules, WebAssembly, Accessibility Inspector, and soon… TIME TRAVEL DEBUGGING 🤯

I believe they've written on all of these topics on the Hacks blog hacks.mozilla.org

As for Firefox devtools, they're adding/have added tools for Flexbox, Grid, Shapes, and Variable Fonts. They've also committed to adding new tools features for new CSS features as they come online.

FF 63 is finishing out the Web Component support (Shadow DOM & Custom Elements specs).

For Android they're exposing a Gecko View similar to Chrome's WebView

And Finally, Firefox Reality is … new to me. VR stuff! Read more here blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/04/0…

Next up we've got @pfrazee from @BeakerBrowser, a P2P focused web browser

They've recently added an inline editor that allows you to modify any page you visit, JSON viewer, and a site diff tool to compare two versions of a site.

The team has also been working on Fritter, a purely peer-to-peer Twitter clone created to help demo & push the boundaries of what you can do with a decentralized application.

Each person's profile is a distinct DAT site & they're exploring ways to let you follow N users 🤯

Next, @Paul_Kinlan from @ChromiumDev! Their focus is on helping developers make better websites & experiences.

They're trying to help JS heavy sites be more discoverable through SSR & other technologies, & help devs better understand perf budgets through tools like Lighthouse

The team is trying to rally around clear goals of what devs should be able to aim for in terms of clear metrics. For example, Time To Interactive (TTI) in less than 3 seconds on 3G

Another metric is First Input Delay (FID) - how users perceive the site in the wild. It's still early in dev; they want to make sure it's a good metric for developers

Another perf issue they're focusing on is UI responsiveness. Chrome folks aim to help devs achieve 60 FPS everywhere through a variety of techniques like FLIP and technologies like Houdini, ResizeObserver, & moving work off the main thread aerotwist.com/blog/flip-your…

The team is also working on helping common open source projects implement PWA features. For example, they've been working with WordPress to implement service worker features & improve offline support github.com/GoogleChromeLa…

Paul did a quick review of some APIs recently added to Chrome

- Payment Request Handler - makes it easier for sites to accept payments
- Share Target API - allows websites to be the target of a share action
- Remote Display - cast your current screen to another screen

- Picture in Picture (PIP) - Take any video element & expose it as a modal control
- WebXR - Augmented reality in your web experience

Finally, the team wants to help improve adoption of security technologies like CSP and CORB chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+…

Finally, we've got @BrendanEich of @brave!

Brendan gave a quick overview of how advertising works on the web today. It's resource heavy, incentives poor behavior by advertisers. "Ad tech is a data breach"

According to Brendan, Brave is putting user security front and center. One concrete example of that is Tor private tabs, currently in beta brave.com/tor-tabs-beta

Brave payments are powered by @attentiontoken, and they're moving towards phase 2 where users can opt into Brave ads

Brave's ads pay both the site and user. This gives users some funds they can use to support specific sites.

I think it's safe to say Brave is upending the traditional web advertising model

Q&A is going on now.

I'd love to share my notes on that convo, but I need to actually get some work done today, so I'm bowing out here

Thanks to @ThisDotMedia, @ladyleet, and @nomadtechie for hosting. Y'all are doing good things for this community.

And a big thank you to ,@patrickkettner, @potch, @pfrazee, @Paul_Kinlan,
@BrendanEich for taking the time to share the updates on your respective projects & thoughts