HN user
One of the core values behind this project is that it should work extremely well cross-device and that most definitely means on devices where Chrome isn't the primary browser. During development we've ensured that we test on Firefox OS, Windows phone, iOS and browsers other than Chrome which run on Android. I want to give people something that they can rely on. Chrome isn't the only browser in the world for sure :)
Google Code is great, but I personally love GitHub <3 We've been actively pushing to do more development there across https://github.com/google https://github.com/googlechrome and so on.
On the Chrome team we're always looking at ways to better provide access to lower level primitives and machinery to enable you to do things like this. It's a multi-faceted problem however. If you have specific suggestions around alternative layout engines, discourse.specifiction.org is a great place to lay out your suggestions in more detail (not that HN isn't useful for this, but those interested in standards generally frequent the discussion board). Outside of layout engines, we're also looking at enabling developers to do more things they would like to with native hardware. Take a look at https://github.com/w3c-webmob/web-api-gap/tree/master/featur... for feature gaps and efforts to fill them.
For sure. This is just a start and we don't intend on competing with Bootstrap in terms of UI components. We spent a long time evaluating many of the existing UI libraries available today and if a developer chooses to use one of them with the kit, they can. That's cool.
We cover this in our browser support section: https://github.com/google/web-starter-kit#browser-support
Good question. We don't consider ourselves a Bootstrap competitor, but rather a combination of best practices and tooling when it comes to starting work on new multi-device/mobile web projects.
Bootstrap, Zurb and similar libraries provide a great start for prototyping your apps, but one of the biggest challenges with them is that it’s (almost too) easy to get stuck using their styles, look and feel for the lifetime of your application. We think this leads to a poorer experience. It's also easy to just end up with 100KB+ of styles (unless you're opting for a modular build) that never get removed.
In Web Starter Kit, we provide you a boilerplate set of base styles and a visual style guide for your components, but we actively encourage you to change these to suit your own app. This may require a little more work, but the reality is that any serious project is going to have it’s own look and feel and we want you to feel comfortable changing the kit to suit your own needs.
We also include tooling for removing unused CSS. So, even if you use our styles (or choose to use Bootstrap instead) we should hopefully help keep your pages lean.