Jason Kottke:

For much of the nearly 25-year lifespan of kottke.org, the site’s
tagline has been “home of fine hypertext products”. I always liked
that it felt olde timey and futuristic at the same time, although
hypertext itself has become antiquated — no one talks of
hypertextual media anymore even though we’re all soaking in it.

And so but anyway, I thought it would fun to turn that tagline
into a t-shirt, so I partnered with the good folks at Cotton
Bureau to make a fine “hypertext” product that you can actually
buy and wear around and eventually it’ll wear out and then you can
use it to wash your car. If you want to support the site and look
good doing it, you can order a Kottke.org Hypertext Tee right
now.

 ★ 

Jason Kottke:

For much of the nearly 25-year lifespan of kottke.org, the site’s
tagline has been “home of fine hypertext products”. I always liked
that it felt olde timey and futuristic at the same time, although
hypertext itself has become antiquated — no one talks of
hypertextual media anymore even though we’re all soaking in it.

And so but anyway, I thought it would fun to turn that tagline
into a t-shirt, so I partnered with the good folks at Cotton
Bureau to make a fine “hypertext” product that you can actually
buy and wear around and eventually it’ll wear out and then you can
use it to wash your car. If you want to support the site and look
good doing it, you can order a Kottke.org Hypertext Tee right
now.

Read More 

Ben Lovejoy, rounding up the latest in mobile browser news for 9to5Mac:

Currently, anyone can create a new iPhone browser, but with one
huge restriction: Apple insists that it uses the same WebKit
rendering engine as Safari. […] Apple is therefore expected to
drop the WebKit requirement sooner rather than later. In
particular, the European Digital Markets Act looks set to force
the hand of the iPhone maker, with reports that Apple will drop
the requirement as part of iOS 17 later this year.

Both Google and Mozilla are now working on new iOS browsers which
use the same rendering engines as their desktop browsers.

For Google’s Chrome, that’s Blink:

Google’s Chromium team has moved full steam ahead on porting
Blink to iOS, introducing dozens of related code changes in the
past week. At the pace things are progressing, we may have our
first look at the browser engine for Chrome — and Microsoft
Edge, Opera, and more — running on iOS in the coming weeks.

For Mozilla’s Firefox, it’s Gecko:

Mozilla is planning for the day when Apple will no longer require
its competitors to use the WebKit browser engine in iOS. Mozilla
conducted similar experiments that never went anywhere years ago
but in October 2022 posted an issue in the GitHub repository
housing the code for the iOS version of Firefox that includes a
reference to GeckoView, a wrapper for Firefox’s Gecko rendering
engine.

There are a lot of different ways this could play out. If third-party browser engines are allowed, will they be able to use just-in-time compilation for JavaScript — a technique that results in faster performance but exposes more exploitable bugs?

I also suspect, if it comes to pass that non-WebKit rendering engines are allowed on iOS, that it will be via an entitlement specifically for general-purpose web browsers like Chrome and Firefox. I would expect Apple to continue disallowing such engines for use in any and all apps — no Electron for iOS. I would also expect that browsers like Chrome and Firefox won’t be able to save web apps to the home screen as standalone web apps.

 ★ 

Ben Lovejoy, rounding up the latest in mobile browser news for 9to5Mac:

Currently, anyone can create a new iPhone browser, but with one
huge restriction: Apple insists that it uses the same WebKit
rendering engine as Safari. […] Apple is therefore expected to
drop the WebKit requirement sooner rather than later. In
particular, the European Digital Markets Act looks set to force
the hand of the iPhone maker, with reports that Apple will drop
the requirement as part of iOS 17 later this year.

Both Google and Mozilla are now working on new iOS browsers which
use the same rendering engines as their desktop browsers.

For Google’s Chrome, that’s Blink:

Google’s Chromium team has moved full steam ahead on porting
Blink to iOS, introducing dozens of related code changes in the
past week. At the pace things are progressing, we may have our
first look at the browser engine for Chrome — and Microsoft
Edge, Opera, and more — running on iOS in the coming weeks.

For Mozilla’s Firefox, it’s Gecko:

Mozilla is planning for the day when Apple will no longer require
its competitors to use the WebKit browser engine in iOS. Mozilla
conducted similar experiments that never went anywhere years ago
but in October 2022 posted an issue in the GitHub repository
housing the code for the iOS version of Firefox that includes a
reference to GeckoView, a wrapper for Firefox’s Gecko rendering
engine.

There are a lot of different ways this could play out. If third-party browser engines are allowed, will they be able to use just-in-time compilation for JavaScript — a technique that results in faster performance but exposes more exploitable bugs?

I also suspect, if it comes to pass that non-WebKit rendering engines are allowed on iOS, that it will be via an entitlement specifically for general-purpose web browsers like Chrome and Firefox. I would expect Apple to continue disallowing such engines for use in any and all apps — no Electron for iOS. I would also expect that browsers like Chrome and Firefox won’t be able to save web apps to the home screen as standalone web apps.

Read More 

Dustin Shahidehpour, writing for Facebook’s engineering blog:

Facebook for iOS (FBiOS) is the oldest mobile codebase at Meta.
Since the app was rewritten in 2012, it has been worked on
by thousands of engineers and shipped to billions of users, and it
can support hundreds of engineers iterating on it at a time.

As Eric Vitiello commented on Mastodon regarding this post, if we assume “thousands of engineers” means just 2,000, that means a new engineer has started adding code to Facebook’s iOS app every two days, nonstop, for a decade. It’s closer to one new engineer every day if we count only weekdays. Someone should check if Fred Brooks is rolling over in his grave.

After years of iteration, the Facebook codebase does not
resemble a typical iOS codebase:

It’s full of C++, Objective-C(++), and Swift.
It has dozens of dynamically loaded libraries
(dylibs), and so many classes that they can’t be loaded
into Xcode at once.
There is almost zero raw usage of Apple’s SDK — everything has
been wrapped or replaced by an in-house abstraction.
The app makes heavy use of code generation, spurred by
Buck, our custom build system.
Without heavy caching from our build system, engineers would
have to spend an entire workday waiting for the app to build.

FBiOS was never intentionally architected this way. The app’s
codebase reflects 10 years of evolution, spurred by technical
decisions necessary to support the growing number of engineers
working on the app, its stability, and, above all, the user
experience.

I believe Shahidehpour’s post is an attempt at bragging, but to me it reads like a cry for help.

My thoughts turn to Melvin Conway’s eponymous law: “Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.” If that’s true regarding Facebook’s system design for their iOS app, it’s a miracle the company ever gets anything done.

 ★ 

Dustin Shahidehpour, writing for Facebook’s engineering blog:

Facebook for iOS (FBiOS) is the oldest mobile codebase at Meta.
Since the app was rewritten in 2012, it has been worked on
by thousands of engineers and shipped to billions of users, and it
can support hundreds of engineers iterating on it at a time.

As Eric Vitiello commented on Mastodon regarding this post, if we assume “thousands of engineers” means just 2,000, that means a new engineer has started adding code to Facebook’s iOS app every two days, nonstop, for a decade. It’s closer to one new engineer every day if we count only weekdays. Someone should check if Fred Brooks is rolling over in his grave.

After years of iteration, the Facebook codebase does not
resemble a typical iOS codebase:

It’s full of C++, Objective-C(++), and Swift.
It has dozens of dynamically loaded libraries
(dylibs), and so many classes that they can’t be loaded
into Xcode at once.
There is almost zero raw usage of Apple’s SDK — everything has
been wrapped or replaced by an in-house abstraction.
The app makes heavy use of code generation, spurred by
Buck, our custom build system.
Without heavy caching from our build system, engineers would
have to spend an entire workday waiting for the app to build.

FBiOS was never intentionally architected this way. The app’s
codebase reflects 10 years of evolution, spurred by technical
decisions necessary to support the growing number of engineers
working on the app, its stability, and, above all, the user
experience.

I believe Shahidehpour’s post is an attempt at bragging, but to me it reads like a cry for help.

My thoughts turn to Melvin Conway’s eponymous law: “Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.” If that’s true regarding Facebook’s system design for their iOS app, it’s a miracle the company ever gets anything done.

Read More 

Joanna Stern interviewed Satya Nadella about Microsoft’s OpenAI-powered improvements to Bing and Edge (News+ link):

“We are grounded in the fact that Google dominates this [search]
space,” Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella told me in an
interview. “A new race is starting with a completely new platform
technology. I’m excited for users to have a choice finally.”

Google — which holds 93% of the global search engine market
share, according to analytics company StatCounter — is on
Microsoft’s heels. On Monday, the search company said it is
working on Bard, a similar chat tool that generates responses from
web-based information.

Again, you’d be a fool to count Google out in this race. But shipping talks and bullshit walks. Microsoft is opening up the new Bing to real people now. Not so with Bard.

 ★ 

Joanna Stern interviewed Satya Nadella about Microsoft’s OpenAI-powered improvements to Bing and Edge (News+ link):

“We are grounded in the fact that Google dominates this [search]
space,” Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella told me in an
interview. “A new race is starting with a completely new platform
technology. I’m excited for users to have a choice finally.”

Google — which holds 93% of the global search engine market
share, according to analytics company StatCounter — is on
Microsoft’s heels. On Monday, the search company said it is
working on Bard, a similar chat tool that generates responses from
web-based information.

Again, you’d be a fool to count Google out in this race. But shipping talks and bullshit walks. Microsoft is opening up the new Bing to real people now. Not so with Bard.

Read More 

Yusuf Mehdi, consumer marketing chief at Microsoft:

The new Bing experience is a culmination of four technical
breakthroughs:

Next-generation OpenAI model. We’re excited to announce the
new Bing is running on a new, next-generation OpenAI large
language model that is more powerful than ChatGPT and customized
specifically for search. It takes key learnings and advancements
from ChatGPT and GPT-3.5 — and it is even faster, more accurate
and more capable.
Microsoft Prometheus model. We have developed a proprietary
way of working with the OpenAI model that allows us to best
leverage its power. We call this collection of capabilities and
techniques the Prometheus model. This combination gives you more
relevant, timely and targeted results, with improved safety.
Applying AI to core search algorithm. We’ve also applied the
AI model to our core Bing search ranking engine, which led to
the largest jump in relevance in two decades. With this AI
model, even basic search queries are more accurate and more
relevant.
New user experience. We’re reimagining how you interact with
search, browser and chat by pulling them into a unified
experience. This will unlock a completely new way to interact
with the web.

The new Bing is available today in a limited preview on desktop,
and everyone can visit Bing.com today to try sample queries and
sign up for the waitlist. We’re going to scale the preview to
millions in the coming weeks. A mobile experience will also be in
preview soon.

Microsoft has been doggedly chasing Google Search for over 20 years. Tenacity is arguably the defining cultural principle at Microsoft. If they want to do something, they simply do not give up.

 ★ 

Yusuf Mehdi, consumer marketing chief at Microsoft:

The new Bing experience is a culmination of four technical
breakthroughs:

Next-generation OpenAI model. We’re excited to announce the
new Bing is running on a new, next-generation OpenAI large
language model that is more powerful than ChatGPT and customized
specifically for search. It takes key learnings and advancements
from ChatGPT and GPT-3.5 — and it is even faster, more accurate
and more capable.

Microsoft Prometheus model. We have developed a proprietary
way of working with the OpenAI model that allows us to best
leverage its power. We call this collection of capabilities and
techniques the Prometheus model. This combination gives you more
relevant, timely and targeted results, with improved safety.

Applying AI to core search algorithm. We’ve also applied the
AI model to our core Bing search ranking engine, which led to
the largest jump in relevance in two decades. With this AI
model, even basic search queries are more accurate and more
relevant.

New user experience. We’re reimagining how you interact with
search, browser and chat by pulling them into a unified
experience. This will unlock a completely new way to interact
with the web.

The new Bing is available today in a limited preview on desktop,
and everyone can visit Bing.com today to try sample queries and
sign up for the waitlist. We’re going to scale the preview to
millions in the coming weeks. A mobile experience will also be in
preview soon.

Microsoft has been doggedly chasing Google Search for over 20 years. Tenacity is arguably the defining cultural principle at Microsoft. If they want to do something, they simply do not give up.

Read More