Bugs I’ve filed on browsers | Read the Tea Leaves
I think filing bugs on browsers is one of the most useful things a web developer can do.
Agreed!
Link tags: firefox
62
Browsers Are Weird Right Now – Tyler Sticka
‘Sfunny, I’d been meaning to write a blog post on exactly this topic, but Tyler says it all …and that’s before Apple’s scandalous shenanigans.
Baseline’s evolution on MDN | MDN Blog
These updated definitions makes sense to me:
- Newly available. The feature is marked as interoperable from the day the last core browser implements it. It marks the moment when developers can start getting excited and learning about a feature.
- Widely available. The feature is marked as having wider support thirty months or 2.5 years later. It marks the moment when it’s safe to start using a feature without explicit cross-browser compatibility knowledge.
The monoculture web
Firefox as the asphyxiating canary in the coalmine of the web.
Webrise
Prompted by my talk, The State Of The Web, Brian zooms out to get some perspective on how browser power is consolidated.
The web is made of clients and servers. There’s a huge amount of diversity in the server space but there’s very little diversity when it comes to clients because making a browser has become so complex and expensive.
But Brian hopes that this complexity and expense could be distributed amongst a large amount of smaller players.
10 companies agreeing to invest $10k apiece to advance and maintain some area of shared interest is every bit as useful as 1 agreeing to invest $100k generally. In fact, maybe it’s more representative.
We believe that there is a very long tail of increasingly smaller companies who could do something, if only they coordinated to fund it together. The further we stretch this out, the more sources we enable, the more its potential adds up.
A Web Browser Built for Me • Robin Rendle
What I want instead is an anarchist web browser.
What I’d really like to see is a browser that cuts things out, that takes things away from the web. Colors, fonts, confusion. Do you need an enormous JavaScript engine under the hood to power a modern web browser? I don’t think you do. Do you need all the extensions? All the latest CSS features? Nah, mate.
Throw away everything and start again and focus intensely about what people care about when it comes to the web.
Compat2021: Eliminating five top compatibility pain points on the web
Good to see Google, Mozilla, and Apple collaborating on fixing cross-browser CSS compatability issues:
- flexbox
- grid
- position: sticky
- aspect-ratio
- transforms
You can track progress here.
Introducing State Partitioning - Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog
This is a terrific approach to tackling cross-site surveillance. I’d love it to be implemented in all browsers. I can imagine Safari implementing this. Chrome …we’ll see.
Introducing Simple Search – The Markup
A browser extension that will highlight the actual search results on a Google search results page—as opposed to Google’s own crap. Handy!
Or you can use Duck Duck Go.
What is the Value of Browser Diversity? - daverupert.com
I’ve thought about these questions for over a year and narrowed my feelings of browser diversity down to two major value propositions:
- Browser diversity keeps the Web deliberately slow
- Browser diversity fosters consensus and cooperation over corporate rule
the Web at a crossroads - Web Directions
John weighs in on the clashing priorities of browser vendors.
Imagine if the web never got CSS. Never got a way to style content in sophisticated ways. It’s hard to imagine its rise to prominence in the early 2000s. I’d not be alone in arguing a similar lack of access to the sort of features inherent to the mobile experience that WebKit and the folks at Mozilla have expressed concern about would (not might) largely consign the Web to an increasingly marginal role.
Custom Property Coverup | Amber’s Website
This is a great bit of detective work by Amber! It’s the puzzling case of The Browser Dev Tools and the Missing Computed Values from Custom Properties.
Who do I know working on dev tools for Chrome, Firefox, or Safari that can help Amber find an answer to this mystery?
Igalia Chats: Web Ecosystem Health with Jeremy Keith and Stuart Landridge
Myself and Stuart had a chat with Brian about browser engine diversity.
Here’s the audio file if you’d like to huffduff it.
Switching to Firefox | Brad Frost
Like Brad, I switched to Firefox for web browsing and Duck Duck Go for searching quite a while back. I highly recommend it.
Old CSS, new CSS / fuzzy notepad
I absolutely love this in-depth history of the web, written in a snappy, snarky tone.
In the beginning, there was no CSS.
This was very bad.
Even if you—like me—lived through all this stuff, I guarantee there’ll still be something in here you didn’t know.
Intent to Deprecate and Freeze: The User-Agent string - Google Groups
Excellent news! All the major browsers have agreed to freeze their user-agent strings, effectively making them a relic (which they kinda always were).
For many (most?) uses of UA sniffing today, a better tool for the job would be to use feature detection.
2019 Firefox Flashback
Here’s an end-of-year roundup of all the data that Mozilla have gathered through their Firefox browser—very impressive!
Firefox’s fight for the future of the web | Technology | The Guardian
A good overview of the unfair playing field of web browsers, dominated by the monopolistic practices by Google and Apple.
Mozilla is no longer fighting for market share of its browser: it is fighting for the future of the web.
What would happen if we allowed blocking 3rd-Party JavaScript as an option?
This would be a fascinating experiment to run in Firefox nightly! This is in response to that post I wrote about third-party scripts.
(It’s fascinating to see how different this response is to the responses from people working at Google.)