Shift’s interface looks clean, fresh and simple — but under the hood, it’s a powerful Chromium browser that’s the first of its kind. Shift’s browser merges web apps and search into a single interface, eliminating window-switching and making it easy for users to manage multiple email inboxes. In Shift, users can create custom browser workspaces with separate apps, accounts and tabs, promoting natural organization and reducing tab pile-ups.
By developing the browser on top of a Chromium base and tapping into underlying APIs, Shift created a highly custom interface. Shift’s Chromium foundations allow the development team to explore new features and iterate in a more responsive and agile way. It’s how they reimagined the modern browser to align with how people are actually using the internet, says Michael Foucher, VP of Product at Shift. The flexibility of their software base is Shift’s competitive advantage.
“We chose Chromium because it’s by far the most active open-source browser in the world, and they’re constantly trying to make it better, more secure and more performant,” Foucher says. “We’ve built a browser that consolidates apps and search into a single interface, and Chromium gives us a rock-solid foundation to keep innovating.”
Shift’s approach to development is unique, he adds, and that’s the secret sauce and their competitive advantage.
Shift’s browser is pushing the boundaries of Chromium
Most Chromium variants out there, like Opera, Brave and Microsoft Edge, are building their UI using bulky C++ code — resulting in all their products looking very much like Chrome — and it’s not because they love the interface.
“It’s because developers don’t want to touch it,” Foucher says. “If you touch C++ code, everything blows up. It’s very hard to make any substantial UI changes because any small change to that code can destroy the whole thing.”
Shift’s browser, however, leverages powerful web technologies to craft a unique user experience on top of Chromium, replacing the standard look and feel. Shift makes a number of customizations directly to Chromium, including proprietary APIs to facilitate communication between the parts of the browser that users interact with and the engine that drives it. Through this process, Shift creates a fully customized interface very quickly and easily makes alterations or additions — without the need for an army of developers.
“It’s a major productivity boost, and makes our small team mighty,” Foucher says. “We can develop and test and make improvements in a flash. That speed and that ability to leverage the newest and best in web tech is a huge advantage for us.”
However, Chromium itself can slow down the development process significantly. At over 20 million lines of code, Chromium is massive. A build can take a whole day locally, or multiple hours in the cloud. To solve the issue, Shift turned to EngFlow for remote execution that distributes, builds and tests across a cluster of machines, and remotely caches the results. At Shift, build times have dropped from two or more hours to under 20 minutes.
“It’s not inexpensive. But it is a huge savings because of the productivity enhancement and the cost of developers not sitting around waiting for things to build,” Foucher says. “That’s a huge factor in allowing us to move forward quickly.”
Designing a new kind of interface
From the start, Shift has been intentional with the look and feel of its interface, working with multiple designers to create an environment that’s organized, flexible and efficient — and more attractive than a bare-bones browser.
While it’s a new kind of browsing experience, Shift users can quickly get comfortable with the interface. Shift draws from the Chromium community for open-source features that have become staples in the browser experience and users are already familiar with.
“I look to them as the muscle memory we’re trying to mimic for people. The keyboard shortcuts you love in Chrome, you’ll be able to use them in Shift,” Foucher says. “We try to take advantage of those familiar, heavily used features. Where we do diverge, it’s to provide a net new experience that will make our browser better.”
Behind the scenes, Shift is exploring more customization in user settings with the ultimate goal of handing users more control over their browsers. These highly-anticipated features will be released in future product updates. In the meantime, Shift is continually rolling out upgrades to their browser including cosmetic changes that might appear to be minor on the surface, Foucher says, but they’re important.
“It shows a sense of pride in the product we’re releasing,” he explains. “It might be subtle, but it just shows that we really care about the user experience.”
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