It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan. — Eleanor Roosevelt
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.
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”
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”
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”
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”
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”
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”