It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan. — Eleanor Roosevelt
I edit a good amount of technical articles about the web, and there is a tendency for authors to be super broad in their opening sentence, like “What we’re able to do on the web has expanded greatly over the years.”
I tend to remove stuff like that because it usually doesn’t serve the article well, even though I understand the sentiment. It’s so true, browsers are capable of so much. Most of us are probably unaware of a lot … Read article “Things you can do with a browser in 2020”
The word “microbrowser” clearly got my attention. Never heard that before. Colin Bendell defines them as the little parts of other software that do HTTP requests to a URL to generate a preview. Like the little URL preview in iOS messages, WhatsApp, or Slack.
I’m a tiny bit skeptical of the name, because what’s happening is the software making that HTTP request and parsing out a little data to use however it will. I’m not sure I’d call that a … Read article “Microbrowsers are Everywhere”
Asked an entire room full of webdevs yesterday if any of them knew that FF/Chrome/Opera/Brave/etc. for iOS weren't allowed to compete on engine quality.
Zero hands up.
— Alex Russell (@slightlylate) September 25, 2019
It’s worth making this clear then. On iOS, the only browser engine is WebKit. There are other browsers, but they can’t bring their own engine (Blink/Gecko). So, if you’re using Chrome or Firefox on iOS, it’s really the same engine Safari is using, only slightly less … Read article “Zero hands up.”
Interesting research from Jonathan Sampson, where he watches the network requests a browser makes the very first time you launch it on a fresh install, and otherwise do nothing. This gives you a little insight into what kind of information that browser wants to collect and disseminate.
This was all shared as tweets, but I’m linking to an unrolled thread if there’s one available:
… Read article “What happens when you open a new install of browsers for the 1st time?”
We lost Opera when they went Chrome in 2013. Same deal with Edge when it also went Chrome earlier this year. Mike Taylor called these changes a “Decreasingly Diverse Browser Engine World” in a talk I’d like to see.
So all we’ve got left is Chrome-stuff, Firefox-stuff, and Safari-stuff. Chrome and Safari share the same lineage but have diverged enough, evolve separately enough, and are walled away from each other enough that it makes sense to think of them as … Read article “Browser Engine Diversity”
For the 30th anniversary of the web, CERN brought nine web nerds together to recreate the very first web browser — Or a working replication of it anyway, as you use it from your web browser, inception style.
Well done, Mark Boulton, John Allsopp, Kimberly Blessing, Jeremy Keith, Remy Sharp, Craig Mod, Martin Akolo Chiteri, Angela Ricci, and Brian Suda! I love that it was written in React and the font is an actual replication of what was used … Read article “WorldWideWeb”
Still no word from the horse’s mouth about the reported EdgeHTML demise, but I hear that’s coming later today. The blog posts are starting to roll in about the possible impact of this though.
Update: here are the official announcements.… Read article “Browser Diversity Commentary, Regarding the Edge News”
Security researcher Sabri posted a bit of code that will “force restart any iOS device.” It’s interesting to see HTML & CSS have this kind of dangerous power. It’s essentially a ton of <div>s scaled to be pretty huge and then set over a repeating JPG image with each <div> blurring the background via backdrop-filter. It must cause such extreme and unhandled memory usage that it wreaks havoc on the browser as well as the entire operating system.… Read article “Safari Ripper ☠️”
Early in my career when I worked at agencies and later at Microsoft on Edge, I heard the same lament over and over: “Argh, why doesn’t Edge just run on Blink? Then I would have access to ALL THE APIs I want to use and would only have to test in one browser!”
Let me be clear: an Internet that runs only on Chrome’s engine, Blink, and its offspring, is not the paradise we like to imagine it to be.… Read article “The Ecological Impact of Browser Diversity”
The process of a web browser turning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into a finished visual representation is quite complex and involves a good bit of magic. Here’s a simplified set of steps the browser goes through:
display: none elements are avoided).