Link tags: mp

Chrome is the new Safari. And so are Edge and Firefox. – Hello my name is Niels Leenheer

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.

Bruce Lawson’s personal site  : Briefing to the UK Competition and Markets Authority on Apple’s iOS browser monopoly and Progressive Web Apps

Following on from Stuart’s, here’s Bruce’s presentation to the CMA on Apple’s monopolistic practices and hostility to progressive web apps.

as days pass by — Talking to the Competition and Markets Authority about Apple

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.

Using the platform

Elise Hein documents what it was like to build a website (or web app, if you prefer) the stackless way:

• use custom elements (for modular HTML without frameworks)
• use the in-browser package manager (for JavaScript packages without build tools)
• match pages with files (to avoid routing and simplify architecture)
• stick to standards (to avoid obsolescence and framework fatigue)

Her conclusions are similar to my own: ES6 modules mean you can kiss your bundler goodbye; web components are a mixed bag—it’s frustrating that Apple are refusing to allow native elements to be extended. Interestingly, Elise feels that a CSS preprocessor is still needed for her because she wants to be able to nest selectors …but even that’s on its way now!

Perhaps we might get to the stage where it isn’t an automatic default to assume you’ll need bundling, concatenation, transpiling, preprocessing, and all those other tasks that we’ve become dependent on build tools for.

I have a special disdain for beginner JavaScript tutorials that have you run create-react-app as the first step, and this exercise has only strengthened my conviction that every beginner programmer should get to grips with HTML, CSS and vanilla JS before delving into frameworks. Features native to the web are what all frameworks share, and knowing the platform makes for a stronger foundation in the face of change.

Why are hyperlinks blue?

A wonderful bit of spelunking into the annals of software interfaces by Elise Blanchard.

Computers should expose their internal workings as a 6th sense (Interconnected)

What about a scarf or collar so the back of your neck prickles when somebody is talking about you on Twitter.

Or a ghost detector for homes, restaurants, etc that glows when someone is “visiting” in Google Maps/Facebook Pages or looking through a webcam? Maybe it would be better to control the air conditioning to produce a chill, or play barely audible infrasound, indications that there is a haunting in progress and the veil here is thin.

Representation and what happened to women in Tech

Men specialized in hardware while software development was seen as an exciting alternative to secretarial work. In 1967, Cosmopolitan published an article titled The Computer Girls, encouraging young women to pursue careers in computer science. So the curve went up, and continued to do so up until 1984. That’s when personal computers appeared.

Marketing matters:

When Apple released the Macintosh 128K and the Commodore 64 was introduced to the market, they were presented as toys. And, as toys were gendered, they were targeted at boys. We can look at advertisements from that time and quickly find a pattern: fathers and sons, young men, even one where a man is being undressed by two women with the motto Two bytes are better than one. It’s more evident with the ads for computer games; if women appear, they do so sexualized and half-naked. Not that appealing for young girls, one could imagine.

Software Crisis 2.0 – Baldur Bjarnason

Baldur Bjarnason writes an immense treatise on the current sad state of software, grounded in the historical perspective of the past sad state of software.

canistilluse.com - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

…you would be forgiven if you saw an API where a feature went from green (supported) to red (unsupported) and you thought: is the browser being deprecated?

That’s the idea behind my new shiny domain: canistilluse.com. I made the site as satire after reading Jeremy Keith’s insightful piece where he notes:

the onus is not on web developers to keep track of older features in danger of being deprecated. That’s on the browser makers. I sincerely hope we’re not expected to consult a site called canistilluse.com.

It’s weirdly gratifying to see a hastily-written sarcastic quip tuned into something real.

Collecting my thoughts about notation and user interfaces (Interconnected)

HTML sits on a boundary between the machine, the creator, and the reader.

Stay alert - DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻

It’s not just a story about unloved APIs, it’s a story about power, standards design, and who owns the platform — and it makes me afraid for the future of the web.

A thoughtful, considered post by Rich Harris on the whole ballyhoo with alert and its ilk:

For all its flaws, the web is generally agreed to be a stable platform, where investments made today will stand the test of time. A world in which websites are treated as inherently transient objects, where APIs we commonly rely on today could be cast aside as unwanted baggage by tomorrow’s spec wranglers, is a world in which the web has already lost.

Choice Words about the Upcoming Deprecation of JavaScript Dialogs | CSS-Tricks

Believe it or not, I generally am a fan of Google and think they do a good job of pushing the web forward. I also think it’s appropriate to waggle fingers when I see problems and request they do better. “Better” here means way more developer and user outreach to spell out the situation, way more conversation about the potential implications and transition ideas, and way more openness to bending the course ahead.

Google vs. the web | Go Make Things

With any changes to the platform, but especially breaking ones, communication and feedback on how this will impact people who actually build things with the web is super important, and that was not done here.

Chris has written a thoughtful reflection on last week’s brouhaha around confirm, prompt, and alert being deprecated in Chrome. The way that the “developer relations” folks at Google handled feedback was less than ideal.

I reached out to one of the Google Chrome developer advocates I know to see if I could learn more. It did not go well.

Chromium Blog: Increasing HTTPS adoption

At some point, you won’t be able to visit the first web page ever published without first clicking through a full-page warning injected by your web browser:

Chrome will offer HTTPS-First Mode, which will attempt to upgrade all page loads to HTTPS and display a full-page warning before loading sites that don’t support it. Based on ecosystem feedback, we’ll explore making HTTPS-First mode the default for all users in the future.

Making Reasonable Use of Computer Resources

The paradox of performance:

This era of incredibly fast hardware is also the era of programs that take tens of seconds to start from an SSD or NVMe disk; of bloated web applications that take many seconds to show a simple list, even on a broadband connection; of programs that process data at a thousandth of the speed we should expect. Software is laggy and sluggish — and the situation shows little signs of improvement. Why is that?

Because we prioritise the developer experience over the user experience, that’s why:

Although our job is ostensibly to create programs that let users do stuff with their computers, we place a greater emphasis on the development process and dev-oriented concerns than on the final user product.

We would do well to heed Craig’s observations on Fast Software, the Best Software.

How To Build Resilient JavaScript UIs — Smashing Magazine

The opening paragraphs of this article should be a mantra recited by every web developer before they begin their working day:

Things on the web can break — the odds are stacked against us. Lots can go wrong: a network request fails, a third-party library breaks, a JavaScript feature is unsupported (assuming JavaScript is even available), a CDN goes down, a user behaves unexpectedly (they double-click a submit button), the list goes on.

Fortunately, we as engineers can avoid, or at least mitigate the impact of breakages in the web apps we build. This however requires a conscious effort and mindset shift towards thinking about unhappy scenarios just as much as happy ones.

I love, love, love the emphasis on reducing assumptions:

Taking a more defensive approach when writing code helps reduce programmer errors arising from making assumptions. Pessimism over optimism favours resilience.

Hell, yeah!

Accepting the fragility of the web is a necessary step towards building resilient systems. A more reliable user experience is synonymous with happy customers. Being equipped for the worst (proactive) is better than putting out fires (reactive) from a business, customer, and developer standpoint (less bugs!).

When shaken to the core, we get priorities right. Can we stick to it? – Dr. Carolina Odman

Carolina’s post reminds me of A Paradise Built In Hell by Rebecca Solnit:

In the face of disaster, survivors get together, make time and help one another regardless of their differences. It is beautiful and inspiring.

Dancing With Systems - The Donella Meadows Project

We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!

1. Get the beat.
2. Listen to the wisdom of the system.
3. Expose your mental models to the open air.
4. Stay humble. Stay a learner.
5. Honor and protect information.
6. Locate responsibility in the system.
7. Make feedback policies for feedback systems.
8. Pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable.
9. Go for the good of the whole.
10. Expand time horizons.
11. Expand thought horizons.
12. Expand the boundary of caring.
13. Celebrate complexity.
14. Hold fast to the goal of goodness.

Goomics

These comics by a former Googler give a cumulative insight into the decaying culture there.

Back to the Bad Old Days of the Web – Jorge Arango

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.