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Comment by scottlamb | Hacker News Reader

> The correlated activity from Google and Mozilla could suggest that they're expecting Apple to drop its restrictions on third-party browser engines in the near future, or the companies could simply be hedging their bets.

Ugh, imagine being an engineer on the project if it's the latter. At a company strategy level, it may be wise to put resources into having this ready to go. [1] At an individual level, putting tons of effort into something like this with less than average hopes of launching seems extremely demotivating (and doesn't look so hot for "impact" in perf either).

I wonder how much effort it is combine the iOS UI layer and the non-iOS blink layer. I'm terrible at estimating effort even for my own projects so it's hard to speculate.

[1] A bit less wise to do speculative projects while simultaneously laying off 12,000 people with no warning.

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> Ugh, imagine being an engineer on the project if it's the latter.

OTOH, no users means no bugs.

Yeah. This seems like a dream job for mediocre developers who are just at google for the paycheck and the creds. And considering the layoffs, they don't seem to have a shortage of those.

I’d love to work on this, and I certainly hope I’m not mediocre :P Porting projects are always fun.

Agree, sometimes it's fun and relaxing to have really clear, well-defined goals to work towards.

At google the problem will be that the product can't be said to have impact.

Quite the opposite! I would find it highly motivating to work on something like this, even if it was just a 5% chance it would make it onto actual phones. You certainly need the right types of people who are motivated by the right factors, but that is not unique for this case.

> even if it was just a 5% chance

It would be more motivating for me if in the 95% event that Apple rejects it from the app store, a PR disaster can be launched against Apple for it, and instructions are published to install it on a jailbroken phone.

What's the latest iOS version that can be jail broken? With all of the exploits on iOS, I'd be pretty nervous running an old iOS version.

Isn't it a requirement that the iOS be exploitable so that it can be jailbroken?

Is your hope that the exploit for the jailbreak is the one and only flaw? :)

True. I guess my point was that, given the insane number of zero-click iMessage exploits there have been, you’d have to really not care about any of your data to use a jail broken phone.

Don't even need to jailbreak, nowadays you can build/sideload using a free iOS developer account, especially if the projects in question are open source.

You’d need a jailbreak to get the ability to JIT properly.

...which only works for a few days until you need to build/sideload again on a free account. (Or a full year if you have a 100$ a year paid dev account).

Sideloading isn't a solution because Apple artificially crippled it to make it only useful for demoing and testing apps, not as a secondary install method.

Do you think this would work considering for all of the iPhone only WebKit has been allowed?

Why though?

I mean, i could understand if you were working on some sort of research prototype that might fail, or otherwise something new and unique, but just porting an existing browser engine hardly seems to be instrinsically exciting in and of itself, so what would the motivation be?

I've worked on these sort of "5%" / "just in case" projects before and mainly accepted them because they were deeply technical, difficult and I was sure I was gonna learn a lot from them, no matter if we got the go ahead to ship them or not. Sometimes I was the only one in the company who wanted to work on it, while other times it was something everyone wanted to jump on, I guess the conclusion is that different people find different things interesting. Some people like porting software to different platforms for example :)

Well, lots of people find structural problems with a massive code base but have no justification to rewrite/make changes to it. A chance to revisit decisions might be exciting for someone who feels they could perhaps do a better job with it.

> I would find it highly motivating to work on something like this, even if it was just a 5% chance it would make it onto actual phones.

Have you ever put 6-18 months of your life into a project that got canned? If you haven't, I'm not sure you should make that kind of statement without having actual experience knowing what that's like.

It happens. Let's not pretend that everything we do changes the world or is even meaningful. It pays our bills and lets us do what matters to us.

On a less cynical tone, 6-18 months on a project, then we change company, or get fired, or the company shuts down for good. Some of my startup customers pivoted or shut down. I got paid, not my problem.

Anyway, it's better to work on successful projects. They expand the business.

Oh, I have!

It’s a balance. I more-or-less learned the first time that I needed to be getting more out of it than the “release success”; nowadays I’d codify a specific part of that as “always carve out the time to improve your skills as part of the project.”

I’m teaching the computer how to do something, at the same time I’m teaching myself how to do it.

That said, when that’s not possible - At least one project had at least a few weeks (it’s been awhile) of stupid wrestling with undocumented Xcode CLI internals. That was nearly completely wasted time. It sucked then, and it (dilutedly) sucks now.

I doubt this would require 6-18 months; this looks like an exploratory demo rather than an actual project.

Haha, let me count the ways. This describes nearly an entire decade at Microsoft for me. It's not that bad. Some of those projects were amazing feats and fun to build. You eventually develop an "ok, what are you going to pay me to build next" attitude.

Some people may develop that attitude, but I haven’t. I care a lot about what I build and I care that it’s useful to people. I am unable to accept putting in tons of work only for something to never see the light of day.

A project I put years of my life into got killed off in a merger and it’s still the most demoralizing event of my career.

> I care a lot about what I build

Careful not to imply that other's don't. I'm pretty passionate about what I build, but cancellation is a fact of life. Doesn't mean it wasn't fun to do the building. One of my projects at Microsoft was something that was always destined to actually be sold by hardware partners, and the hardware partners released devices that were far, far too expensive so it flopped and the whole thing was canned. But we made an excellent product that won some awards, and frankly, knowing we killed it on the software side is good enough for me.

I sure have. It requires a specific attitude and mind set. If you go through those 18 months hoping this will actually see the light of day, there’s a big chance you will be disappointed. If you rather see this as a technical challenge, and your task is to prove that it is possible, releasing the final product might not be as big of a motivator itself. Of course, you might not always know that the chance of success is so low up front. If you don’t, I would guess it is a lot harder.

Kind of a stretch, but all of my hobby projects are like this. I have spent years on a TUI library for Swift, without any intention of releasing it. I do it to understand how terminals and layout systems work. In this case I am more motivated by the knowledge gain and experimentation than actually having others use the product.

Working on a project with only 5% chance of launch is almost a guarantee that you will be at the front of the queue for layoff when the company decides to do layoffs.

There was an entire massive team engineers at Microsoft that worked on iPhone/iPad versions of Office for many years, and every time they were ready for release it was blocked by Ballmer. Their work finally saw the light of day the moment Nadella took over and was instantly a hit.

Google engineers often spend years on less exciting and interesting projects that get canceled or don’t succeed. Plenty of people would enjoy working on this whether or not it launches, and it’s also a high-profile bet, so I’d say it’s in the very top tier of desirable projects.

If Apple will be forced by law to allow apps from outside AppStore, vendors will possibly have less restrictions.

As much as I hate the App Store and want competition, for the sake of all the non tech loved ones in my life, I sincerely hope that either doesn’t happen, or that it is difficult enough to get people to “add” additional stores.

Whatever happened to parental control?

I'm not going to setup parental controls for Aunt Marge but sure as hell she'll call me when she installs spyware/malware and wants my help in fixing the problem.

I know that's the result of multiple app stores if a trusted entity can't/won't police them.

It’s for my parents and others.

I just know the idiots like Verizon will start preloading their own App Store on the phone and make a mess of things with all kinds of garbage.

I’m shocked at the crap that is preloaded onto android phones whenever I see one.

This doesn't seem to be the practice in a European country I live in btw, but I've seen it elsewhere (once bought a cheap android phone while travelling).

Why does it matter whether project is shipped or not? I work for money. I don't have income cut from this project. Whether it's shipped or not is outside of my interest. All that matters is whether it's good enough to ship.

I'd even say that shipped projects usually are less interesting because they're filled with mundane but necessary tasks and bugs, dragged by compatibility.

It's good to work for money, but even better if you can work on something meaningful, too.

> I wonder how much effort it is combine the iOS UI layer and the non-iOS blink layer.

These browsers all compile and work on macOS. Getting them to work on iOS involves lots of fiddly details like forcing the browsers into single-process mode, integrating it with their existing mobile UI, etc

but core technologies like rendering won't be much different

The actual launch (or landing) probably doesn't really mean much for less senior employees as long as they would get enough attention from their management. But for those managers and above, it might.

Seems like a great grift gig to me. Low pressure, possible chance of high reward.

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