Proprietary: Apple Development Hell, Microsoft Layoffs, and Google's Complex Web Bloat
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Safari releases are development hell - Ashley's blog
Safari 16.4 rolled out last week, and for us it's been a nightmare. We make the browser-based game creation app Construct. Early versions of Safari 16.4 broke opening projects, previewing projects, and all existing content published with Construct, all in different ways. I wanted to share our experience so customers, developers, regulators, and Apple themselves can see what we go through with what is supposed to be a routine Safari release.
Most browsers provide pre-release versions for early testing. For example Chrome Canary and Firefox Nightly update daily, and there's also less frequent dev and beta releases. Apple provide Safari Technology Preview (STP), but it's only for macOS, and does not update to any public schedule. It seems to be about once every 2 weeks. Pre-release browsers are usually pretty rocky with obvious issues that get sorted out soon enough. However when things start making their way to beta, it's time to look more closely. So when Safari 16.4 beta 1 was announced on February 16th (also not to any public schedule), we started taking a closer look - and there were a lot of problems.
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Layoffs are ramping up among hospitals and health systems. Here are 34 examples from 2023
Layoff announcements have increased this year as hospitals and health systems limp out of a financially devastating 2022.
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5 Ways the Rising Costs of Games Are Affecting the Industry
However, 343 Industries were hit hard by layoffs at Microsoft, so Microsoft may have been unhappy with Halo Infinite despite its monetization. But this does highlight rising costs as having a curious effect on the industry: pushing developers to incorporate profitable monetization regardless of the potential damage to the game itself.
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Chrome ships WebGPU
The Chrome team is thrilled to announce that WebGPU is now available by default in Chrome 113, which is currently in the Beta channel. WebGPU is a new web graphics API that offers significant benefits such as greatly reduced JavaScript workload for the same graphics and more than three times improvements in machine learning model inferences. This is possible due to more flexible GPU programming and access to advanced capabilities that WebGL does not provide.