darinf

Electron works differently. It runs in process, similar to how a normal Chromium embedding works (like Chrome itself).

Mobile is a different story for sure and for many reasons. We will be bringing this same architecture to Windows. It will fit it well there, and in many ways Windows is already well suited for multi-process configurations. It always has been.

Glad to finally be able to share Atlas with the world last week! There's a lot of novelty under the hood. While Atlas is using Chromium, it's not built on top of Chromium in the usual way.

As one of the engineers who designed and built Chromium's multi-process architecture back in the day, it is really cool to take it to the next level.

^^^ this

fullscreen != fullwindow

Cmd+s in Arc just hides all the UI of the browser but does not change the size of the window frame. This is more akin to Chrome's add shortcut to desktop feature, except that it is easy to toggle on/off with a keyboard shortcut. So if you have a web app you want to just focus on, you can just do so.

What bugs will we get this time?

Yeah you end up designing models not to be logically separated but to instead isolate updates to Views. In theory those should align but they don’t always. And the method of finding objects thru the environment makes it all too easy to have big models that everything is listening too which of course really hurts perf. So easy to hold SwiftUI wrong.

So wish they would decouple SwiftUI from the OS releases and opensource it!

I’m excited to try this out. The idea of cloud hosted browsers is not new, but this approach seems really promising. In this era of connectivity and cloud compute, it makes so much sense.

Nope. Chrome usage is free traffic to google.com/search. Chrome usage is the high order bit. The rest is gravy.

Yes they can act unilaterally and with Chrome OS and many popular web apps they do have incentive to care about the web. But will that translate to the Chrome organization caring? It doesn’t make Chrome a more attractive browser to users than other browsers also built on Chromium.

A side-effect of a Chromium-only web is that it gives the Chrome team at Google less incentive to invest in the web platform. It used to be a way to differentiate Chrome from other browsers. Now-a-days that is no longer the case.

Competition is a great way to drive innovation. What will motivate innovation on the web platform going forward? Will there be stagnation? Will another company emerge to push the web forward?

What will this mean for companies that have enjoyed all of the innovation on the web platform in recent years? How much longer will it take for bugs to get fixed?

This will not be a sudden shift. It will happen gradually.

Check out cookie cutter by Neeva: https://neeva.com/blog/introducing-cookie-cutter-by-neeva-a-...

Check out Neeva. This is what we are all about.

$5 / mo for a premium Neeva subscription or just use the free tier to experience ad-free search focused on the user. I left Google to join Neeva so I could be part of building a better search experience for people. Check us out. Would love feedback.

DDG is just repackaged Bing with their own ads inserted.

Working on much of this at Neeva. We have a free tier, no ads cluttering the results. Just focused on the user experience. We also offer a premium tier for those who are keen to support us.

This is why I left Google to join Neeva. Check us out. Unlike the alternatives, we are truly investing in our search stack.

Unfortunately there’s just too much inertia with the ads-based business model making it too hard for Google to not let itself get this way. Similar challenges with other ads supported businesses.

Yes you are correct. Google Desktop Search. Connected Apps in Neeva is similar but better. It supports indexing more apps, like Figma and GitHub.

Exactly. Notice how "I'm feeling lucky" is only on the home page and not part of the search experience when using Chrome or any modern browser where you search from the URL bar? Wonder if that is intention? Not a wonder at all.

The "I'm feeling lucky" button would never be added to Google if it didn't already exist. It was grandfathered in.

I was talking about mobile. As for desktop, Instant Search was serving up full page results instantly, which included ads. That's a different thing altogether, and of course, in the case of Instant Search there was plenty of room for both sponsored results as well as real results. On mobile there isn't.

Actually, just taking the ads out of the experience can make for a simpler and better search experience. I think the google founders knew this too (https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/rzr2n3/the_founde...). They just couldn't hold back the avalanche of revenue that search ads yields.

I work for Neeva, and this is a big part of why I left Google to join Neeva. There has to be a better experience, and it doesn't start from another business that works just like Google. It has to be a different kind of business. Neeva does not make money from showing you ads, so it can provide a different search experience... a simpler search experience, like the original google even, but it can go further...

With the Neeva app for example as you start typing in the URL bar, it will take your input as search suggestions (just as any other browser + search engine would) but instead of just showing you completed search suggestion, Neeva will show you the results from running those searches inline. The idea being that maybe those results will be helpful to you and make it so you don't even need to go to the search results page. You can just take the result right there from the URL bar suggestions drop down. Saves you time. Simpler.

Stuff like that. There's a swim lane of innovation and ideas on how searching and browsing can be better that is just really hard for Google to build, even though many of these ideas are thought of inside the walls of Google. They just can't ship them if they are stuck being beholden to their search ads model.

Another great example... ever wonder why Google isn't working to make it so Chrome doesn't have a million tabs at the top of your browser? It gets to the point where it is hard to get back to what you were doing. Me, I just end up closing the tabs, declaring tab bankruptcy. Google is okay with that because it means I have to search again. The Chrome team wants to fix this but it is hard to do so as it would result in people searching less often!

Again, just means there is opportunity for a simpler better experience to be had and Google won't be the ones creating it.

Actually, you are spot on. One simple feature of the Neeva app is that it shows inline search results as you type into the URL bar. This is because we aren't trying to show you ads, so we don't need you to visit the search results page (where Google and others show you those ads). We just show you the results straight away in the suggest experience. Now, this isn't going to show you everything you care about and you can still click to see the search results page. It is just handy to be able to quickly get to where you are trying to go and especially if it is likely to match what you are looking for (e.g., a wikipedia link). This is something Google cannot bring itself to do because it would be cost way too much in terms of lost ads revenue. There are other examples like this where Google and other ad-supported search engines just can't innovate, can't change the search experience. The current way of searching is too lucrative and there is too much business inertia around it. That's why Neeva is interesting and why I left Google to join and help :)

Happy to answer any questions you all might have about Neeva. I left Google to join Neeva about a year ago. Got inspired by the opportunity to make a better product. AMA :)

I love having lunch with co-workers. It’s a great way to connect. Even though at my office only about 30% of folks are back, it’s roughly the same group each day. So I’m happy being back even if all meetings involve Zoom. At least getting a conference room for all the zoom calls is not too hard :)

This is why we created Neeva.

Neeva has this feature. Configure sites you want to see more from and sites you want to see less from. Easy.

Great, please let us know how you find it. There's a way in product to report if a site's cookie notice is not handled. Thanks!

Hi all, I'm Darin. I work at Neeva with John (the author of the medium post) on this new extension. If you have any questions or comments, I’ll do my best to answer.

With Neeva you can set preferred providers, more of this, less of that. See Site Preferences in Settings.