Wavebox is Evolving - Our Move to Chromium.

Here at Wavebox HQ we have been busy working away on a completely new version of Wavebox, which we are calling Wavebox 10. With a fresh look, some great new features and full extension support, Wavebox 10 has been completely transformed. It now works better and faster than ever before.

Part of this transformation is down to the fact that we have moved away from Electron to a direct Chromium foundation. It's a massively exciting move that allows Wavebox to grow and evolve.

From Electron to Chromium. Why the Change?

Ever since the beginning of Wavebox, the app has used an underlying framework called Electron, which allows developers to build desktop applications using the Chromium rendering engine for displaying and showing web sites. This has been a great tool and framework for Wavebox, and has allowed us to experiment with new ideas and iterate quickly on them.

However, Electron has some downsides for us, as its primary use is for building desktop apps rather than browsers. This means that some essential browser-type functionality is missing, such as PDF rendering, extension support and so forth.

As Wavebox matures, we have found that we are spending more of our time re-adding the browser functionality back into the Electron framework, so we have been investigating building Wavebox directly on top of Chromium.

We have been very pleased with the result and have been impressed with not only the improved performance and stability we’ve seen but also the way we’ve been able to quickly add support for the latest Chrome APIs and the core browsing engine. This is exactly what our users have been asking for.

We think this is a larger trend in the industry - read on to find out why.

Wavebox, Your Work Browser - Everything Just Works.

The industry is experiencing a general move towards a Chromium foundation. Google’s ‘Chrome’ browser and ‘Brave’ are both built on Chromium, and Microsoft is using the framework to develop a new version of Edge for release in January 2020.

There seems no doubt that the use of Chromium-based tools is growing fast, and we intend to use this momentum for our development of Wavebox and our aim to build the best browser specifically designed for everyday working.

Pain-points that don't work great in current Wavebox now just work in Wavebox 10, out-of-the-box. There’s enhanced support for all Chrome extensions, so we have put a direct link to the Chrome Web Store in the app itself. There’s also improved support for website functionality, such as Google Hangouts, chat apps and screen sharing. Plus there are significant reductions in memory and CPU usage to boot. The result is a faster and snappier work-browser experience.

Benefits of Chromium.

The current version of Wavebox uses Chromium for rendering but then relies on HTML & JavaScript for the UI and NodeJS and Electron for managing the browser sessions. The new version of Wavebox does all of this natively. Here are the top 5 benefits this better approach has given Wavebox:

1. Chrome Extensions
We ship with full extension API support, rather than the extension framework we’ve handcrafted in the current version of Wavebox. As we continue developing Wavebox we’ll be extending these API’s and allowing developers to extend and customize Wavebox further.

2. Sandboxing
Wavebox continues to support account Sandboxing as it has from day one - we now call these "Profiles", with some new UI to manage them. Profiles allow you to segment sites from each other, have multiple Gmail tabs, a work profile, a personal profile and so forth.

3. Stability
The new Wavebox benefits from the maturity and stability of Chromium. This is visible from the managing of browser sessions, right up to the user interface, giving us more time and resources to add Wavebox features and improve our functionality without needing to focus on patching and fixing the underlying framework.

4. Themes
Many of our users will be delighted to know that themes work out of the box - you can choose dark or light and add any theme extensions from the Chrome Web Store.

5. Faster
Way more improved performance and stability by removing lots of technical debt that we’ve accumulated by running JavaScript atop of Electron. As well as being faster and snappier, running natively gives us an additional saving of 10% - 20% of memory across the board.

Getting ready for Wavebox 10.

Keep an eye on our blog and your inbox over the next few weeks for news on how to download Wavebox 10 and information on all the new fantastic features!