I love this kind of spelunking into the history of why things are they way they are on the web!
Here, Detective Chief Inspector Suzanne tries to get to the bottom of why every browser has eight pixels of margin applied to the body element in the user-agent stylesheet.
It’s great to see browsers working together to collectively implement a range of much-needed features.
These scores represent how browser engines are doing in 15 focus areas and 3 joint investigation efforts.
If Apple allowed Safari to actually compete, it would be better for web developers, businesses, consumers, and for the health of the web. Come on, Apple, set Safari free!
I have this expensive computer in my pocket and it feels unfair that it is hamstrung in this very specific way of not allowing other browser engines. I also have an Apple laptop and it’s not hamstrung in that way, and I really hope it never is.
You may not realise that all browsers on iOS are required to use the same rendering engine as Safari. On other platforms, this is not the case.
A terrific in-depth look at the frustrating state of the web on iOS.
So it’s not just one browser that falls behind. It’s all browsers on iOS. The whole web on iOS falls behind. And iOS has become so important that the entire web platform is being held back as a result.
And this damning assessment is mercifully free of conspiracy theories.
The Safari and Chrome team both want to make the web safer and work hard to improve the web. But they do have different views on what the web should be.
Google is focussing on improving the web by making it more capable.
Safari seems to focus on improving the web as it currently is.
Read the whole thing—it’s excellent!
There can only be one proper solution: Apple needs to open up their App Store to browsers with other rendering engines. Scrap rule 2.5.6 and allow other browsers on iOS and let them genuinely compete. Even though Apple has been forced to compromise on some App Store rules, I have little hope for this to happen.
Following on from Stuart’s, here’s Bruce’s presentation to the CMA on Apple’s monopolistic practices and hostility to progressive web apps.
What I would like is that I can give users the best experience on the web, on the best mobile hardware. That best mobile hardware is Apple’s, but at the moment if I want to choose Apple hardware I have to choose a sub-par web experience. Nobody can fix this other than Apple, and there are a bunch of approaches that they could take — they could make Safari be a best-in-class experience for the web, or they could allow other people to collaborate on making the browser best-in-class, or they could stop blocking other browsers from their hardware. People have lots of opinions about which of these, or what else, could and should be done about this; I think pretty much everyone thinks that something should be done about it, though.
I do want to recognize that the Safari/WebKit team are working hard, and I do desperately want them to succeed! Chromium’s domination is bad for everybody, and building a popular browser that’s focused on privacy & security, as they appear to be trying to do, is a fantastic goal. That does not mean their current approach deserves our blind support.
I’m sure the Safari team are working on the issues below already, and I think it’s likely that the problems fundamentally derive from management decisions about company priorities rather than the team themselves.
In the past (the early 2010s) Apple was frequently leading the way on new features, as the very first browser to ship major JavaScript APIs like Web Workers, and the browser driving experimental prefixed features like CSS Canvas backgrounds. It’s exceedingly rare now to see a web feature primarily driven by Apple. Something has changed.
We’ve enjoyed a relatively long period when we didn’t have to think about which browser to use. Alas, that period is ending: I must now keep Chrome running all the time, much like I needed that PC in the early 2000s.
A great long-term perspective from Rachel on the pace of change in standards getting shipped in browsers:
The pace that things are shipping, and at which bugs are fixed is like nothing we have seen before. I know from sitting around a table with representatives from each browser vendor at the CSS Working Group how important interop is. No-one wants features to be implemented differently in browsers. This is what we were asking for with WaSP, and despite the new complexity of the platform, browsers rendering standard features in different ways is becoming increasingly rare. Bugs happen, sometimes in the browser and sometimes in the spec, but there is a commitment to avoid these and to create a stable platform we can all rely on. It is exciting to be part of it.
One of the things we’d hoped to enable via Web Components was a return to ctrl-r web development. At some level of complexity and scale we all need tools to help cope with code size, application structure, and more. But the tender, loving maintainance of babel and webpack and NPM configurations that represents a huge part of “front end development” today seems…punitive. None of this should be necessary when developing one (or a few) components and composing things shouldn’t be this hard. The sophistication of the tools needs to get back to being proportional with the complexity of the problem at hand.
I completely agree with Alex here. But that’s also why I was surprised and disheartened when I linked to Monica’s excellent introduction to web components that a package manager seemed to be a minimum requirement.
Rachel is maintaining this (short) list of browser bugs with CSS Grid, inspired by the excellent Flexbugs.
Grid shipped into browsers](https://gridbyexample.com/browsers) in a highly interoperable state, however there are a few issues - let’s document any we find here.
Interesting ideas around front-end frameworks:
The common view is that frameworks make it easier to manage the complexity of your code: the framework abstracts away all the fussy implementation details with techniques like virtual DOM diffing. But that’s not really true. At best, frameworks move the complexity around, away from code that you had to write and into code you didn’t.
Instead, the reason that ideas like React are so wildly and deservedly successful is that they make it easier to manage the complexity of your concepts. Frameworks are primarily a tool for structuring your thoughts, not your code.
The proposed alternative here is to transpile from the idiom of the framework into vanilla JavaScript as part of the build process, which should result in better performance and interoperability.
As always with sci-fi interfaces, the important part is telling the story, not realism or accuracy. Personally, I liked the way that the World War II trappings of Rogue One extended to communications and networking technologies.
This document provides Best Practices related to the publication and usage of data on the Web designed to help support a self-sustaining ecosystem. Data should be discoverable and understandable by humans and machines.
We need the Internet of Things to be the next step in the series that began with the general purpose PC and continued with the Internet and general purpose protocols—systems that support personal autonomy and choice. The coming Internet of Things envisions computing devices that will intermediate every aspect of our lives. I strongly believe that this will only provide the envisioned benefits or even be tolerable if we build an Internet of Things rather than a CompuServe of Things.
Kenneth has isolated Chrome’s dev tools into its own app. This is a big step towards this goal:
Why are DevTools still bundled with the browsers? What if clicking “inspect element” simply started an external DevTools app?
With DevTools separated from one specific browser, a natural next step would be making the DevTools app work with other browsers.
A cute videolette on web standards.
This is what Scott Jenson has been working on—a first stab at just-in-time interactions by having physical devices broadcasting URLs.
Walk up and use anything
A cautionary tale from Stuart. We, the makers of modern technology, are letting people down. Badly.
We’re in this to help users, remember: not just the ones who think as we do, but the ones who rely on us to build things for them because they don’t know what they’re doing. If your response is honestly “well, he should have spent more on a phone to get something better”, then I’m exceedingly disillusioned by you.