Why? Fingerprinting. Rather than these APIs being used for what they are meant for, they end up being used for gross ad tech. As in, “hey, we don’t know exactly who you are, but wait, through a script we can tell your phone stopped being idle from 8:00 am to 8:13 am and were near the Bluetooth device JBL BATHROOM, so it’s probably dad taking his morning poop! Let’s show him some ads for nicer speakers and flannel shirts ASAP.”… Read article “Apple declined to implement 16 Web APIs in Safari due to privacy concerns”
WebP Image Support Coming to iOS 14
Geoff Graham
Apple announced a ton of new updates at yesterday’s WWDC20 keynote address, from new hardware to updated applications. There’s lots to gawk at and enough device-envy to go around.
But there’s one little line in the Safari 14 Beta release notes that caught my eye:
Added WebP image support.
Weekly Platform News: Strict Tracking Protection, Dark Web Pages, Periodic Background Sync
In this week’s news: Firefox gets strict, Opera goes to the dark side, and Chrome plans to let web apps run in the background.
Let’s get into the news.… Read article “Weekly Platform News: Strict Tracking Protection, Dark Web Pages, Periodic Background Sync”
Weekly Platform News: Tracking via Web Storage, First Input Delay, Navigating by Headings
In this week’s roundup, Safari takes on cross-site tracking, the delay between load and user interaction is greater on mobile, and a new survey says headings are a popular way for screen readers to navigate a webpage.
Let’s get into the news.… Read article “Weekly Platform News: Tracking via Web Storage, First Input Delay, Navigating by Headings”
Browser Engine Diversity
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”
Weekly Platform News: Feature Policy, ECMAScript i18n API, Packaged PWAs
In this week's news, a new Feature Policy API in Chrome, Firefox blocks cookies from known trackers, Chrome for Android now allows websites to share images, and more.
Safari Ripper ☠️
Chris Coyier
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 ☠️”
The Ecological Impact of Browser Diversity
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”
Fallbacks for Videos-as-Images
Safari 11.1 shipped a strange-but-very-useful feature: the ability to use a video source in the <img /> tag. The idea is it does the same job as a GIF (silent, autoplaying, repeating), but with big performance gains. How big? “20x faster and decode 7x faster than the GIF equivalent,” says Colin Bendell.… Read article “Fallbacks for Videos-as-Images”
New Features Coming Soon in Safari
Robin Rendle
Here’s a great thread by Ricky Mondello that outlines all of the nifty new features in the latest Safari across macOS and iOS. Some of my favorites include the ability to replace gifs with mp4s, the Payment Request API and support for the Web App Manifest.… Read article “New Features Coming Soon in Safari”
