I’ve thought about these questions for over a year and narrowed my feelings of browser diversity down to two major value propositions:
- Browser diversity keeps the Web deliberately slow
- Browser diversity fosters consensus and cooperation over corporate rule
John weighs in on the clashing priorities of browser vendors.
Imagine if the web never got CSS. Never got a way to style content in sophisticated ways. It’s hard to imagine its rise to prominence in the early 2000s. I’d not be alone in arguing a similar lack of access to the sort of features inherent to the mobile experience that WebKit and the folks at Mozilla have expressed concern about would (not might) largely consign the Web to an increasingly marginal role.
Myself and Stuart had a chat with Brian about browser engine diversity.
Here’s the audio file if you’d like to huffduff it.
Here’s an end-of-year roundup of all the data that Mozilla have gathered through their Firefox browser—very impressive!
A good overview of the unfair playing field of web browsers, dominated by the monopolistic practices by Google and Apple.
Mozilla is no longer fighting for market share of its browser: it is fighting for the future of the web.
I really like this latest addition in Firefox to show how many tracking scripts are being blocked. I think it’s always good to make the invisible visible (one of the reasons why I like RequestMap so much).
If you haven’t done so already, you should really switch to Firefox.
Then encourage your friends and family to switch to Firefox too.
Mozilla comes out with all guns blazing:
Microsoft is officially giving up on an independent shared platform for the internet. By adopting Chromium, Microsoft hands over control of even more of online life to Google.
Losing [browser] engines is like losing languages. People may wish that everyone spoke the same language, they may claim it leads to easier understanding, but what people fail to consider is that this leads to losing all the culture and way of thought that that language produced. If you are a Web developer smiling and happy that Microsoft might be adopting Chrome, and this will make your work easier because it will be one less browser to test, don’t be! You’re trading convenience for diversity.
This is excellent news from Mozilla. Firefox is going to make it easier to block vampiric privacy-leeching and performance-draining third-party scripts and trackers.
In the physical world, users wouldn’t expect hundreds of vendors to follow them from store to store, spying on the products they look at or purchase. Users have the same expectations of privacy on the web, and yet in reality, they are tracked wherever they go.
Mozilla’s work-in-progress style guide and pattern library.
I’m impressed by Mozilla’s commitment to designing in the open—one of the hardest parts of any kind of brand work is getting agreement, and this process must make that even more difficult.
I have to say, I quite like both options on display here.
A Firefox plugin that ring-fences all Facebook activity to the facebook.com domain. Once you close that tab, this extension takes care of garbage collection, ensuring that Facebook tracking scripts don’t leak into any other browsing activities.
I’m all in favour of HTTPS everywhere, but this kind of strong-arming just feels like blackmail to me.
All new CSS properties won’t work without HTTPS‽ Come on!
I thought Mozilla was better than this.
That’s a harsh headline but it is unfortunately deserved. We should indeed hold Mozilla to a higher standard.
It must be the day for documenting the history of CSS. Here’s an article by Aaron on the extraordinary success story of CSS Grid. A lot of the credit for that quite rightly goes to Rachel and Jen:
Starting with Rachel Andrew coming in and creating a ton of demos and excitement around CSS Grid with Grid by Example and starting to really champion it and show it to web developers and what it was capable of and the problems that it solves.
Then, a little bit later, Jen Simmons created something called Labs where she put a lot of demos that she created for CSS Grid up on the web and, again, continued that momentum and that wave of enthusiasm for CSS Grid with web developers in the community.
At the 14 minute mark I had to deal with an obstreperous member of the audience. He wasn’t heckling exactly …he just had a very bad experience with web components, and I think my talk was triggering for him.
A ten-part tutorial on CSS Grid from Mozilla.
I had the great pleasure of finally meeting Hui Jing when Mozilla invited me along to Singapore to speak at their developer roadshow. Hui Jing is speaking at each one of the events on the roadshow, and documenting the journey here.
She’s being very modest about her talk: it was superb! Entertaining and informative in equal measure, delivered with gusto. Seriously, frontend conference organisers, try to get Hui Jing to speak about CSS at your event—you won’t regret it.
I had the honour of being invited along to kick off the first leg of Mozilla’s Developer Roadshow in Singapore.
