alt Hacker NewsLooks nice!
Somewhat off topic question though: if you guys are such skilled developers to be building something as involved as this, why not just use something other than Firebase? I used Firebase mainly as a crutch when I was first getting into web dev, but feel that I’ve sorta outgrown it. Do you feel Firebase still serves developers like you well or are you developing this moreso for people like my old self?
Again, nice work!
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This post also begs the question:
Why didnt you simply provision more powerful developer boxes to handle the needs of the Firebase emulator?
If runtime performance is the moat then won’t Google simply improve on these regressions using their decades of cloud database expertise with projects like Google Spanner?
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These are hardball questions and I feel a bit bad asking them, but I believe asking hard questions is kinder than blind adulation and support.
Thanks Josh! Of course I'm using many other services other than Firebase. But Firebase even on 2026, I feel it still does what is suppose to do well. It does have many gaps tho, but tons of small projects or for beginners where it's really easy to get started with Firebase.
And surprisingly, there are still many large scale mobile app and webapps that's running on Firebase. For most of them, the local development without costing them, depends on this local emulators suite.
Compare to the alternatives like Supabase, where the team are really focused on giving best dev exps, for some reason Firebase local development has been the same for a long time.
I personally thought, giving that best dev exps locally for Firebase, could give devs a fresh of breath air for maintaining or developing new projects faster.