Flurin Egger: Taming the browsers of tomorrow

Published: November 9th 2013by Orde Saunders

Flurin Egger (@flurin) was speaking at Side View about the future of web browsers, these are my notes from his talk.

Browsers are getting smarter and more aware of their surroundings.

Promises (natively)

A promise represents the eventual result of an async operation. These are like events or callbacks but are resolved asynchronously, they lead to more readable code than callback hell. Can also handle multiple results without needing a global state var to manage them. There are some versions of this in libraries but they are coming natively - already in FF, Safari and Chrome.

Ambient light events

Gives access to the device's ambient light sensor via an event when it changes. Event is devicelight and event.value is the lux value of the new ambient light. Currently working in FF 22 including on Android.

Vibration API

navigator.vibrate(milliseconds) - simple. milliseconds argument can be int or array of ints.

Web speech API

Text to speech. Create a new SpeechSynthesisUtterance('string') - can specify different attributes and then call .speak().

Speech recognition - this needs an internet connection. window.webkitSpeechRecognition()

Screen sharing

getUserMedia + WebRTC can be used to share the screen.

Service workers

Allow us to persistently cache resources and handle requests to these resources, even when the network isn't available. This allows us to build better offline apps. There is a shared worker that lives across page loads and an HTTP cache. Not available anywhere right now - just a specification. Firefox are looking into implementing this.