What I'm hoping happens here is that this means more focus on Chromium and potentially more work on Electron + Carlo.
Electron is amazing but it's pretty bloated per app. If it's made lighter weight and something like Carlo can just use the OS installed browser in an isolated process you'll have the best of both worlds.
You can use web standards to build your apps and at the same time dock into native OS features without the massive bloat.
Right now Polar is about 100MB to download and uses about 200MB of RAM. Not the end of the world but also not super fun.
There's the issue of one central monoculture but there's still the opportunity to fork if chrome/edge gain too much market share.
The fact that projects choose to target a specific rendering engine as opposed to just writing web standards compliant code and having it work in any browser that follows those standards is precisely the reason why people (me, at least) are lamenting this decision.
With Edge, Blink, and Webkit competing for marketshare, app developers are forced to at least think about sticking to web standards or risk losing a chunk of potential users. In a world where only Blink exists and all developers care about is that things work in Blink, any new browser entering the market now not only has to worry about compliance with official web standards, they also need to worry about emulating the idiosyncratic behavior of Blink that developers have discovered and started abusing or taking advantage of. The actual standards essentially become moot and Blink becomes the real standard. And while, sure, Blink/Chromium is open source, with both Google and Microsoft heavily invested in its development and direction, who do you think is going to have all the power in making the important decisions?
The problem is versioning. Chromium jumps major versions in releases very very often. This often includes security updates. Microsoft isn't going to keep old versions of the browser around nor are apps totally not going to break when the chromium version gets a bump.
I'm insanely excited about it!
I've been working on a new reader and documentation manager for PDF and cached web content:
https://getpolarized.io/
It's based on Electron and targets Chromium.
What I'm hoping happens here is that this means more focus on Chromium and potentially more work on Electron + Carlo.
Electron is amazing but it's pretty bloated per app. If it's made lighter weight and something like Carlo can just use the OS installed browser in an isolated process you'll have the best of both worlds.
You can use web standards to build your apps and at the same time dock into native OS features without the massive bloat.
Right now Polar is about 100MB to download and uses about 200MB of RAM. Not the end of the world but also not super fun.
There's the issue of one central monoculture but there's still the opportunity to fork if chrome/edge gain too much market share.