Articles Tagged browser

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

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:

• Opera / Vivaldi
• Firefox
• Chrome
• Dissenter
• Brave
• Safari
• Edge (Chromium)

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

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

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 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:

1. Browser creates the DOM and CSSOM.
2. Browser creates the render tree, where the DOM and styles from the CSSOM are taken into account (display: none elements are avoided).
3. Browser computes the geometry of the layout and its elements based on the render tree.

In August of 2013, Aaron Gustafson posted to the WaSP blog. He had a bittersweet message for a community that he had helped lead:

Thanks to the hard work of countless WaSP members and supporters (like you), Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web as an open, accessible, and universal community is largely the reality. While there is still work to be done, the sting of the WaSP is no longer necessary. And so it is time for us to