Google soft launches collaborative Jupyter-like notebook | Hacker News Reader

Google soft launches collaborative Jupyter-like notebook

colab.research.google.com

85 pointskodisha28 comments

> This site may not work in your browser. Please use Chrome for Desktop.

Thanks, but no.

You don't actually need Chrome for Desktop, just a browser with WebComponents support. In fact, it will partially work in Firefox if you go into about:config and enable `dom.webcomponents.enabled` and `dom.webcomponents.customelements.enabled` - the banner is just a warning.

Not quite sure why I'm getting downvoted on this one, I said 'partially working' and it really does. Here it is in Firefox Developer Edition with those two config items changed and nothing else:

https://i.imgur.com/MFXE6uA.png

Of course, the CSS is broken, but Firefox isn't really done with WebComponents support, so that's probably not surprising.

I didn't downvote you, but upvoted the "thanks no" and flagged the post.

1) A website that doesn't work in browsers (without configuration) is crap

2) Google again shoving that unwanted browser in my face (on top of afs all over the place and the "Upgrade to Chrome" bullshit) is getting out of hand

You might present a workaround to read the website. Downvoters might feel like me and don't give a damn about this content if it doesn't display in a normal, modern browser..

Well, that is fair enough, but I wasn't claiming to support Google's position so much as I was pointing out that this is not a case of UA blocking. It seems a lot more innocuous than that.

Rather than tell Google engineers they can't use cutting edge features that they may have even worked on getting standardized, I'd rather go the route of doing what I can to support Mozilla in implementing these features faster. Right now I'm not sure what that is aside monetary donations and code contributions, but either way it seems like a more sustainable future.

If Google were using non-standard features or blocking the entire page based on UA, I'd agree this would be very annoying. But it certainly isn't, as far as I can tell.

On the other hand, Hangouts deserves all of this scorn. It doesn't work in Firefox in any capacity to this day. Very disappointed about that. That being said, it's the only Google service I use right now that doesn't, among Maps, Docs, Search, Drive, Inbox...

I don't complain when I try to charge my Pixel with an iPhone cable (without a dongle) and it doesn't work. Do you not give a damn about their cable because it doesn't charge a normal, modern phone?

It's almost like companies have a right to push their own products by building things into that ecosystem. Does it also bother you that Apple doesn't develop iMessage for Android?

The web isn't a magical universal standard anymore. Every browser is different and supports different things. If you want to use something that's not supported by your browser but you're not willing to switch, that's not the developer's problem.

>Google again shoving that unwanted browser in my face.

It's almost like companies are allowed to advertise their products. I don't complain about Coca-Cola again shoving that unwanted drink in my face because their vending machines only sell Coke, and because their ads are everywhere.

At some point you're just arguing against Google, and not against the specific product in the post.

I guess we cannot agree here.

The charging cable comparison seems silly. If I click on a link on this site I expect it to work in my (standard, modern, no snowflake configuration) browser. If it doesn't, it's not part of the web for me. You can discuss Apple and Android, cables and connectors all you want.

The comparison with a vending machine was equally flawed, but at least it wasn't a car analogy..

I cannot argue against the product in the post, because the link is inaccessible. The "web components" explanation makes some sense (that explains the why, although I still think that a fallback message should explain that. Say "your browser doesn't support web components" instead of "you need our browser". I still flag it, but would kinda get it).

Companies are allowed to advertise their products. I'm allowed to label their practices as shitty.

Collaboration over jupyter notebooks has been available in CoCalc [ https://cocalc.com/ ], formerly the SageMathCloud online notebook, for several years now. I wonder what prompted Google to introduce this.

Googler here, no relation to the colab team. What probably prompted us to introduce this is that it was an internal project that many of us really really like and use quite often, and we thought it would be nice if you guys could use it too. That's it. It was probably somebody's 20% project at first, I don't think there was any great ambition for an actual product when they started it.

Googlers tend to reinvent the wheel a lot because somebody here likes some tool or library or application, wants to use it, but wants to avoid licensing restrictions, incompatibilities with our internal tools, wants total control over its development so they can change and add things as they see fit, etc. Then it grows up and gets a team with a PM and everything, and if it does really well we might share it and let it out of its cage into the wild. You can take it or leave it.

Also did I mention that I really really like colab? I've been evangelizing it to my team at Google Cloud support for all kinds of things like playbooks, reproductions, easily modifiable tools and scripts, etc. It's like Google docs for jupyter notebooks, it's pretty great.

Any timeline for Python3 support?

Wants me to use Chrome to open the site.

Wants me to sign into Google, on mobile.

Same on desktop.

Someone in Google really has jumped the shark at this point. How we (geeks) knashed our teeth in the 90's when sites were IE only - it's been over a decade since I've seen this - and now GOOGLE is pushing their browser to the exclusion of others. Seriously do I have to start playing with my browser string again!

> it's been over a decade since I've seen this

Apple does this every year in order to stream WWDC. It’s the one time a year I open up safari :)

Edge can also understand the video format.

It is a different situation, because FF and Chrome would also able to show the stream if their developers used the macOS and Windows media APIs.

It's not checking your user agent - the banner is a warning, it's not blocking anything. And for good reason, WebComponents support is not stable in Firefox or Edge yet. The page won't work properly, but you can at least view it if you enable WebComponents support in about:config.

doesn't work on firefox...

things like these are why I (half-jokingly) think that google is the new "old microsoft", hahha

then again, I'm probably gonna stop using firefox soon after some key extensions (which can't be ported to the new API) stop working

Try it anyway. From all the browsers that don't have your key extensions, Firefox 57+ might still be the best option. It's still greatly customizable via userContent.css file, and there's a lot of motion to improve the abilities of WebExtensions. Thanks to that I've brought back vertical tabs on Firefox 57 that now look and work even better than before - something I wouldn't be able to do on Chromium at all.

What an earth is on that web app that it can't work on an up-to-date Firefox?

It's basically a demo of their native code sandbox technology: (P)NaCL

https://developer.chrome.com/native-client

This new online notebook system is probably the successor of:

http://colaboratory.jupyter.org/welcome/

I was confused. This is a hosted colaboraty service.

But the new google drive / jupyter integration is called jupyter-drive:

https://github.com/jupyter/jupyter-drive

Is this really a demo of PNaCl? While I can find references to a previous project also called Colaboratory, which appears to have a Chrome app and probably indeed used NaCl/PNaCl, this actually appears to connect to a backend of some sort, as evidenced by the "Registration required" whenever you try to run any code in Google Chrome.

Embrace, extend and extinguish. Welcome to the new boss, same as the old boss.

WebComponents is the reason the page won't display anything in Firefox. If you enable them in about:config, you will at least be able to view the sheet.

This looks promising, and I remember them announcing this sometime ago. I was curious as to how they would handle CSVs or other datasources, and the only example I see is bigtable. I thought I'd be able to type open and hit tab a few times but no luck. It wouldn't let me run any code until I "connected a runtime", but I had to wait for that to become available. That took me to a wait list page.

I guess it will be a few more months before there is something meaningful to try.

Does it support version control? Since that is one of the main challenges while using Jupyter notebooks.

appears so - was just playing with it and similar to google docs/sheets there is 'Revision History'. It allows you to 'restore' to a previous save, or download that version.

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