Linked List: February 7, 2023

Tuesday, 7 February 2023

The Kottke.org T-Shirt, a Fine Hypertext Product ★

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.

Google and Mozilla Are Working on Versions of Chrome and Firefox for iOS That Don’t Use WebKit ★

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.

Facebook’s iOS App Architecture ★

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.

Joanna Stern on Microsoft’s New AI-Powered Bing ★

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.

Microsoft Announces New AI-Powered Bing Search and Edge Web Browser ★

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.

‘Shift Happens: A Book About Keyboards’ ★

Marcin Wichary:

Keyboards fascinated me for years. But it occurred to me that a good, comprehensive, and human story of keyboards — starting with typewriters and ending with modern computers and phones — has never been written. How did we get from then to now? What were the steps along the way? And how on earth does QWERTY still look the same now as it did 150 years ago?

I wanted a book like this for years. So I wrote it.

If this rings a bell, that’s because Glenn Fleishman — who is the editor and print production manager for the book — mentioned this project on The Talk Show a few weeks ago. I’ve been looking forward to supporting it on Kickstarter ever since.

Poe: New AI Chatbot App From Quora ★

Sarah Perez, reporting for TechCrunch:

Q&A platform Quora has opened up public access to its new AI chatbot app, Poe, which lets users ask questions and get answers from a range of AI chatbots, including those from ChatGPT maker, OpenAI, and other companies like Anthropic. Beyond allowing users to experiment with new AI technologies, Poe’s content will ultimately help to evolve Quora itself, the company says.

Quora first announced Poe’s mobile app in December, but at the time, it required an invite to try it out. With the public launch on Friday, anyone can now use Poe’s app. For now, it’s available only to iOS users, but Quora says the service will arrive on other platforms in a few months.

Impressive results, I must say.