by upghost on 2/15/23, 12:47 AM
Can anyone translate this from marketing speak to developer speak? I’m genuinely not sure what this is. Is this like… WASM docker in the browser or what?
by pcj-github on 2/14/23, 10:15 PM
This looks really cool (I love anything with a filesystem API), but I'm unclear on the role of hosted proxies in this setup. Also, the licensing costs aren't clear.
"WebContainers rely on hosted proxies and server-side acceleration to enable truly instant development environments. By obtaining a WebContainer API license, your business can gain access to higher API rate limits, uptime reliability, and a range of benefits designed to help you maximize the potential of the WebContainer API in your organization."
by skeoh on 2/14/23, 11:09 PM
Short of building my own using this API, does a self-hosted Codesandbox/Stackblitz alternative exist? I love the idea of spinning up web containers within my corporate network so I can prototype applications using internal APIs.
by koolala on 2/14/23, 10:20 PM
I hope this kind of thing will be open source or standard one day.
by ilaksh on 2/15/23, 1:40 AM
It's tempting to try to integrate this as an alternative to actual containers or fly.io but it seems to need to execute arbitrary npm installs on my server which defeats the purpose since the goal is to everything in the customer's browser instead of trusting their code on my server.
by drunkenmagician on 2/15/23, 2:06 AM
Er, I must be missing an important nuance here, can someone who understands this explain. What is the real world use case for this? I'm afraid I don't understand what this provides that either wasm or the browser sandbox does not.
by avallach on 2/15/23, 7:56 PM
Does "WebContainer API" mean "proprietary web service for accessing npm and git over http"?
Or is it "ECMAScript API of new open source WASM-based POSIX-style browser OS"?
The documentation doesn't seem to separate these two, and applying such name for the former would seem intentionally misleading to me, especially if it gets trademarked by commercial entity providing the service.
by ashishbijlani on 2/14/23, 9:53 PM
"This site is blocked due to a security threat that was discovered by the Cisco Umbrella security researchers."
by lanecwagner on 2/15/23, 8:01 AM
This is potentially exactly what I'm looking for to take Boot.dev to the next level. I'm a bit worried that it's too JS focused, but if I can hack in the other stuff I need with wasm then this gets really exciting. thanks for posting :)
by Spivak on 2/14/23, 9:50 PM
While this is really cool the setup guide feels like a lot of work and headache for an app that's already running in your browser in step 1.
by kasperni on 2/15/23, 3:23 AM
I like the website layout. Knowing little about Web development. Is this custom made or using some kind of framework/template?
by tnzk on 2/15/23, 2:13 AM
I thought this was like a standardization effort of Firefox's Multi-Account Container.
by wdb on 2/15/23, 4:53 PM
Doesn’t work in Safari for me
by brundolf on 2/14/23, 10:30 PM
HN title is a little editorialized, making it sound like a new browser standard. Should be edited imo
The materials themselves also drip with exaggeration and hand-waving, talking about things like "the legacy cloud VM" (emphasis mine), "unmatched security", "spinning up the entire dev environment in milliseconds"
All of this is aside from the actual technology, which could be cool, I have no idea yet. But it rubbed me the wrong way
by bob778 on 2/14/23, 11:14 PM
Site is blocked due to “active security threat” so that’s not a good sign for an enterprise SaaS