Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress.| Infrequently Noted
By subverting the voluntary nature of open standards, Apple has defanged them as tools that users might use against the totalising power of native apps in their digital lives. This high-modernist approach is antithetical to the foundational commitments of internet standards bodies and, over time, erode them.| Infrequently Noted
Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress.| Infrequently Noted
Anyone who has worked closely with me, or followed on social media [, ], will have seen a post or comment to the effect of:| Infrequently Noted
Mel Conway's seminal paper "How Do Committees Invent?" (PDF) is commonly paraphrased as Conway's Law:| Infrequently Noted
Frances has urged me for years to collect resources for folks getting into performance and platform-oriented web development. The effort has always seemed daunting, but the lack of such a list came up again at work, prompting me to take on the side-quest amidst a different performance yak-shave. If that sounds like procrastination, well, you might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.| Infrequently Noted
Note:This post first ran as part of Sergey Chernyshev and Stoyan Stefanov's indispensible annual series. It's being reposted here for completeness, but if you care about web performance, make sure to check out the whole series and get subscribed to their RSS feed to avoid missing any of next year's posts.| Infrequently Noted
There has been a recent flurry of regulatory, legislative, and courtroom activity regarding mobile OSes and their app stores. One emergent theme is Apple's shocking disregard for the spirit of legal findings it views as adverse to its interests.| Infrequently Noted
Photo by Jarrod ReedThe rhetorical "web3" land-grab by various VCs, their shills, and folks genuinely confused about legal jurisdiction may appear to be a done deal.| Infrequently Noted
Update (September 25th, 2021): Commenters appear confused about Apple's many options to ensure safety in a world of true browser competition, JITs and all. This post has been expanded to more clearly enunciate a few of these alternatives.| Infrequently Noted
Mobile OSes and their most successful apps have drained browser choice of meaning for more than a decade. This has lead to confusion for users and loss of control over data. Web developers, meanwhile, face higher costs and reduced ability to escape walled gardens. It's time for the charade to end.| Infrequently Noted
Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress.| Infrequently Noted
Here's a tiny sketch to help illuminate how web platform development _works_.| Infrequently Noted
Like other meta-platforms **the web thrives or declines to the extent it can accomplish the lion's share of the things we expect most computers to do**. Platform Adjacency Theory explains how to expand in a principled way and what we risk when natural expansion is prevented mechanisms that prevent effective competition.| Infrequently Noted
Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress.| Infrequently Noted
Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress.| Infrequently Noted
Apple vs. Facebook is, and always was, kayfabe. In reality, Apple is Facebook's chauffeur; holding Zuck's coat while Facebook wantonly surveils iPhones owners. How can we be sure? Because Apple continues to allow wide-scale abuse of In-App Browsers.| Infrequently Noted
If frontend aspires to be a profession -- something we do for others, not just ourselves -- then we need a culture that can use statistical methods for measuring quality and reject the marketing that dominates the React discourse.| Infrequently Noted
Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress.| Infrequently Noted
Frameworkism is now the dominant creed of today's frontend discourse, and it's bullshit. We owe it to ourselves and to our users to reject dogma and embrace engineering as a discipline that strives to serve users first and foremost.| Infrequently Noted
Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress.| Infrequently Noted
JavaScript overindulgence remains an affirmative choice, no matter how hard industry 'thought leaders' gaslight us. Better is possible, but we must want it enough to put users ahead of our own interests.| Infrequently Noted
I have worked with dozens of teams surprised to have found themselves in the JavaScript ditch. They all feel ashamed because they've been led to believe they're the first; that the technology is working fine for other folks. It isn't.| Infrequently Noted
SNAP benefits sites for more than 20% of Americans are unusably slow. All of them would be significantly faster if states abandoned client-side-rendering, and along with it, the legacy JavaScript frameworks (React, Angular, etc.) built to enable the SPA model.| Infrequently Noted
It would be tragic if public sector services adopted the JavaScript-heavy stacks that frontend influencers have popularised. Right?| Infrequently Noted
Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress.| Infrequently Noted
There are only two-and-a-half reasons to build a browser, and they couldn't be more different in intent and outcome, even when they look superficially similar.| Infrequently Noted
Cupertino's attempt to scuttle Progressive Web Apps under cover of chaos is exactly what it appears to be: a shocking attempt to keep the web from ever emerging as a true threat to the App Store and blame regulators for Apple's own malicious choices. By hook or by crook, Apple's going to maintain its home screen advantage.| Infrequently Noted
How much HTML, CSS, and JavaScript can we afford? More than in years past, but much less than frontend developers are burdening users with.| Infrequently Noted
Apple's iOS browser (Safari) and engine (WebKit) are uniquely under-powered. Consistent delays in the delivery of important features ensure the web can never be a credible alternative to its proprietary tools and App Store. This is a bold assertion, and proving it requires examining the record from multiple directions.| Infrequently Noted
Under regulatory pressure, mobile OSes are opening up and adding features that will allow PWAs to disrupt app stores ... Yet with shockingly few exceptions, coverage accepts that the solution to crummy, extractive native app stores will be other native app stores. ... The press fails to mention the web as a sustitute for native apps, and fail to inform readers of its disruptive potential. Why?| Infrequently Noted
What's going on with WebKit is not 'normal'. At no time since 2007 has the codebase gotten this much love this quickly; but why? Time for a deep dive.| Infrequently Noted
Progressive Web Apps are aren't packaged and deployed through stores, they're just websites that took all the right vitamins.| Infrequently Noted
Performance budgets are an essential but under-appreciated part of product success and team health. Most partners we work with are not aware of the real-world operating environment and make inappropriate technology choices as a result. We set a time budget of less than 5 seconds first-load Time-to-Interactive and less than two seconds for subsequent loads. We further constrain ourselves to a baseline device and network configuration to measure progress. 2017's global baseline is a ~$200 Andro...| Infrequently Noted
We cannot continue to use as much JavaScript as is now normal and expect the web to flourish. At the same time, most developers experience no constraint on their use of JS...until it's too late. Lightweight, effective tools are here, but we're stuck in a rhetorical rut. We need to reset our conversation about 'developer experience' to factor in the asymmetric cost of JS.| Infrequently Noted
New web services are being built to a self-defeatingly low UX and performance standard, and existing experiences are now pervasively re-developed on unspeakably slow, JS-taxed stacks. At a business level, this is a disaster, raising the question: why are new teams buying into stacks that have failed so often before?| Infrequently Noted
To serve users at the global P75 of devices and networks, we can now afford ~150KiB of HTML/CSS/fonts and ~300-350KiB of JavaScript (gzipped). This is a slight upgrade on last year's budgets, thanks to device and network improvements. Meanwhile, web developers continue to send more script than is reasonable for 80+% of the world's users, widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots. This is an ethical crisis for frontend. Meanwhile, the most popular tools and frameworks remain in stub...| Infrequently Noted
Some folks claim that Apple's mandated inadequacy for browsers and their engines is somehow beneficial to the cause of ensuring a diverse pool of web engines. Nothing could be farther from the truth, but to understand why, we need to understand how browsers are funded. With that understanding, we can see that not only has Apple has starved its own browser team of resources, but has done grevious damage to Mozilla along the way.| Infrequently Noted
Despite advances in browser tooling, automated evaluation, lab tools, guidance, and runtimes, modern teams struggle to deliver even decent performance with today's popular frameworks. This is not a technical problem per se. It's a management issue, and one that teams can conquer with the right frame of mind and support.| Infrequently Noted
The idea of the browser pre-caching heavily used JS libraries is an attractive nuisance: looks good, probably won't work. Is there a workable version of this idea? What would the constraints on it be? Could it ever be effective and fair? Down the rabbit hole we go.| Infrequently Noted
If you live or do business in the UK or the US, what you do in the next seven days could define the web for decades to come. By filing public comments with UK regulators and US legislators this week_ you can change the course of mobile computing more than at any other time in the past decade. Read on for why this moment matters and how to seize the day.| Infrequently Noted
