Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide? - Charlie’s Diary
Recall undermines trust, and once an institution loses trust it’s really hard to regain it.
Recall undermines trust, and once an institution loses trust it’s really hard to regain it.
Look out someone else’s window somewhere in the world.
There’s something indescribably lovely about this. It’s like a kind of positive voyeurism.
I lost a lot of time to this.
Well, this is a fun bit of CSS. Instantly transform a web page into a blast from the past (1998, to be precise).
Here are the many, many reasons why you should not open links in a new window (or tab).
Regardless of what accessibility conformance level you target, do not arbitrarily open links in a new window or tab. If you are required to do so anyway, inform users in text.
Automatically generates icons and splash screens based on Web App Manifest specs and Apple Human Interface Guidelines. Updates manifest.json and index.html files with the generated images.
A handy command line tool. Though be aware that it will generate the shit-ton of link
elements for splash screens that Apple demands you provide for a multitude of different screen sizes.
An interesting look at the mortality causes for Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 8, and what they can tell us for the hoped-for death of Internet Explorer 11.
I disagree with the conclusion (that we should actively block IE11—barring any good security reasons, I don’t think that’s defensible), but I absolutely agree that we shouldn’t be shipping polyfills in production just for IE11. Give it your HTML. Give it your CSS. Withhold modern JavaScript. If you’re building with progressive enhancement (and you are, right?), then giving IE11 users a sub-par experience is absolutely fine …it’s certainly better than blocking them completely.
We use too many damn modals.
Amen! This site offers some alternatives, or—if you really must use a modal dialogue—some dos and dont’s.
And remember to always ask, kids: “Why does this have to be a modal?”
Well, Microsoft really buried the lede in this announcement:
…we will begin testing a change where links clicked on within the Windows Mail app will open in Microsoft Edge…
Yup, no matter which browser you’ve chosen to set as your default, hyperlinks will be hijacked to open with Edge. This is disgusting. It feels like a return to the shitty old days of Microsoft’s strong-arm tactics, just when Microsoft were gaining trust and respect.
I’m not sure why but I genuinely love this Windows 95 style interface for Instagram coded up by Gabrielle Wee.
It’s really great to hear about how Microsoft will be promoting progressive web apps as first-class citizens …but it’s really unhelpful that they’re using this fudgy definition:
Progressive Web Apps are just great web sites that can behave like native apps—or, perhaps, Progressive Web Apps are just great apps, powered by Web technologies and delivered with Web infrastructure.
Although they also give a more technical definition:
Technologically speaking, PWAs are web apps, progressively enhanced with modern web technologies (Service Worker, Fetch networking, Cache API, Push notifications, Web App Manifest) to provide a more app-like experience.
Nice try, slipping notifications in there like that, but no. No, no, no. Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that one of the most annoying “features” of native apps is even desirable on the web.
If you want to use notifications, fine. But they are absolutely not a requirement for a progressive web app.
(A responsive design, on the other hand, totally is.)
Under the hood it’s the same Blink engine that power’s the regular Opera browser (and Chrome) but I really like the interface on this experiment. It’s described as being a “concept browser”, much like a “concept car”, which is a nice way of framing experiments like this. More concept browsers please!
I think I’ve gotten tired of Google telling me “This is how you have to build websites now.” Or Apple coming down from the mountain once a year saying “Here are the two new products you will buy this year.”
Jason documents some pretty amazing levels of emulation in JavaScript:
That’s Netscape 1.0n, released in December of 1994, running inside Windows 3.11, released in August of 1993, running inside of Google Chrome 39.0.2171.99 m, released about a week ago, on a Windows 7 PC, released in 2009.
But when it comes to trying to navigate the web with that set-up, things get a bit depressing.
This is fascinating—it looks like there might be an entirely practical reason for Microsoft to skip having a version 9 of Windows …and it’s down to crappy pattern-matching code that’s supposed to target Windows 95 and 98.
This is exactly like the crappy user-agent sniffing that forced browsers to lie in their user-agent strings.
Léonie gives a great, clear description of how screen readers switch modes as they traverse the DOM snapshot.
Lovely little graphics inspired by New York architecture.
A good explanation of the litany of woes that comes from Internet Explorer 8 being the highest that users of Windows XP can upgrade to. It’s a particularly woeful situation if you are a web developer attempting to provide parity. But there is hope on the horizon:
2013 will see the culmination of all these issues; support for IE 8 will drop of rapidly, users of XP will find an increasingly broken web, the cost of building software in XP organisations will increase.
There is an elephant in the Microsoft store.
Useful advice from Tim on preparing your responsive site for IE10’s new “snap mode”. Don’t worry: it doesn’t involve adding any proprietary crap …quite the opposite, in fact.
Wallow in nerd nostalgia and experience the Proustian rush of rebooting old operating systems.