I’m a browser engineer working on Google Chrome and I work on Web Platform APIs (WebOTP, FedCM, Digital Credentials, Email Verification Protocol and TC39 in Chrome … schema.org in my past life in Google Search … and OpenSocial / Salmon / ActivityStreams in my past past life on Orkut.com … yeah, I like open ecosystems :))!
I’m a big fan of atproto and have been using it for a while (although I failed at running my own PDS :(), and I think atproto (and other comparable things, like activity pub and so on) is a great step to make the web better!
I can not make any promises that anything will actually change (it is not like I have a “sudo” here), but I figured it would be useful to at least ask the question: are there ways that you think the browser is holding this community back? Any ideas that you think are lacking in the browser?
Ben Vandersloot was implementing FedCM at Mozilla but got pulled into other things, I think. In case you can help get it reprioritized, it would be great!
A couple things come to mind, there’s probably a bunch more.
One thing that would help is BLAKE-3 support. In general, anything that helps content addressing work better (given that AT builds on DASL) helps AT. BLAKE-3 didn’t become the default hash for DASL CIDs in large part because of the lack of browser support. But projects that deal with large chunks of data, be it Stream.place, science stuff, doing verifiable range requests so as to query a remote DuckDB of the whole Atmosphere would benefit from that.
There’s also ongoing work on small contained web apps that could be safely embedded into social contexts (also being worked on as part of DASL) shipped over AT. These could benefit from the ability to create an opaque origin (or some form of partitioned suborigin) and attach a service worker to it or even just the ability to process fetch events for it. (Right now you can have the former with sandboxing but the moment you do SWs don’t work.)
@sgo.to One idea I’d love your thoughts on is making it obvious to non‑technical users when a site can store data on their PDS and “speaks atproto,” so they see the concrete benefit first. A possible way to do this could be a dedicated .atproto TLD that clearly signals this capability to users. I’m not fully sure how feasible this is on the standards side, but I’ve seen things like .google in the wild, so I’m curious how much of this could be done via browser‑level support. Alternatively, it could be an icon near the domain name (I find the SkyLink chrome extension to be quite clever in detecting that a website has atproto presence https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/skylink-bluesky-did-detec/aflpfginfpjhanhkmdpohpggpolfopmb
