| 13:17 | <domfarolino> | Thoughts from people with module script fetching background would be appreciated in https://github.com/w3c/webappsec-referrer-policy/issues/123 |
| 14:35 | <PiersW> | Hi again. I don't intend to be off-topic, but I thought you might like to see what your attention to detail in writing the specs has let us do: https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/full-google-mail-in-a-clean-room-browser/ |
| 14:54 | <MikeSmith> | PiersW: extremely cool |
| 14:54 | <MikeSmith> | kind of amazing, even |
| 14:55 | <MikeSmith> | how many people have you had working on that engine and for how long? |
| 14:58 | <PiersW> | Thanks... It sort of evolved from our earlier SVG-only browser (2006), then we started on HTML in 2012, but only started seriously in ~2014. 5 or 6 people, since then. |
| 14:59 | <PiersW> | The SVG browser was used in lots of set top boxes. We kept adding newer DOM/CSS features, so it was sort of why not do the rest :-) |
| 14:59 | <MikeSmith> | impressive |
| 15:02 | <MikeSmith> | for the whole time the WHATWG spec work has been going on, the specs have been written with the goal that they could be used to write a new engine from scratch |
| 15:02 | <MikeSmith> | I guess servo was kind of the first test of how well the specs met that goal |
| 15:03 | <MikeSmith> | but now it’s encouraging to hear that y’all found it possible |
| 15:03 | <PiersW> | Yeah, I worked on an embedded browser in ~2001, and the specs were not very good. When we started the HTML parser (2012) the level of detail was pretty amazing. |
| 15:04 | <MikeSmith> | yeah it’s like night and day compared to the old days of specs for the platform |
| 15:04 | <PiersW> | I remember HTML parsing was the biggest blocker for web compatibility, really. But now it's the huge size of the JS APIs. |
| 15:05 | <MikeSmith> | yeah I can imagine |
| 15:05 | <MikeSmith> | it’s an extremely ambitious task to take on |
| 15:05 | <MikeSmith> | super cool to see it happening and really producing something |
| 15:06 | <PiersW> | We haven't written the JS engine from scratch - it's spidermonkey. But everything else is clean room. OpenGL rendering (like web render), and multi-threaded layout engine (erm, like servo). |
| 15:06 | <MikeSmith> | ok |
| 15:07 | <MikeSmith> | JS engines are naturally a whole other thing |
| 15:08 | <MikeSmith> | I guess you can build in such a way as to be able to swap out the JS engine later if you wanted to |
| 15:08 | <MikeSmith> | or write your own if you wanted to |
| 15:08 | <PiersW> | Yeah, the separation is very clear (from an implementor's pov), so can be swapped not that we have any intention of doing so. |
| 15:08 | <MikeSmith> | yeah |
| 15:10 | <MikeSmith> | well, if you have time to formulate an update tweet from https://twitter.com/FlowBrowser, I would be happy to retweet it from @html5, which will go out to 100K+ people |
| 15:10 | <PiersW> | oh, cool. I'll do that now :-) |
| 15:10 | <MikeSmith> | super |
| 15:12 | <MikeSmith> | something with a bit of background like "Flow is a new cleanroom multithreaded HTML browser. Today it reached a new milestone: Rendering full Google Mail [link to blog post]" |
| 15:12 | <MikeSmith> | or however you want to do it |
| 15:14 | <PiersW> | I'll use that ;-) |
| 15:15 | <PiersW> | https://twitter.com/FlowBrowser/status/1200070712121348096 |
| 15:17 | <MikeSmith> | PiersW: cool, thanks — just now retweeted |
| 15:18 | <PiersW> | That's great! Thank you. |
| 15:18 | <MikeSmith> | cheers |
| 15:29 | <MikeSmith> | PiersW: https://twitter.com/w3c/status/1200073994805927937 too |
| 15:29 | <PiersW> | Wow, yeah, thanks! |
| 15:30 | <MikeSmith> | :) |
| 15:31 | <MikeSmith> | a heads-up progress message here now and then would not be off-topic |
| 15:32 | <MikeSmith> | I don’t actually follow twitter myself, so personally I wouldn’t otherwise hear about it I guess |
| 15:33 | <PiersW> | Fair enough. I barely use it - just enough to get the latest brexit gossip :-) |
| 15:33 | <MikeSmith> | heh |
| 15:39 | <Ms2ger> | PiersW, somewhat surprised I don't see Servo mentioned anywhere :) |
| 15:40 | <PiersW> | In what way? |
| 17:13 | <jgraham> | PiersW: Servo seems like the cloest thing to Flow in the sense that it's clean-room and going for massive parallelism |
| 17:14 | <jgraham> | So some comparison would be technically interesting |
| 17:28 | <PiersW> | Sure. It’s been mentioned on a few previous blog posts. Just didn’t see much relevance on one about gmail. |
| 18:33 | <jgraham> | Ah OK |
| 22:19 | <annevk> | PiersW: amazing, really cool to see this |