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.
Link tags: mozilla
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A Global Documentation Platform - Piccalilli
I was chatting to Andy last week and he started ranting about the future of online documentation for web developers. “Write a blog post!” I said. So he did.
I think he’s right. We need a Wikimedia model for web docs. I’m not sure if MDN fits the bill anymore now that they’re deliberately spewing hallucinations back at web developers.
Over the Edge: The Use of Design Tactics to Undermine Browser Choice - Mozilla Research
It’s a dream team of former Clearlefties: Harry and Cennydd joined forces to investigate and write an in-depth report looking into deceptive design practices used by Microsoft to stop people changing their default browser from Edge. They don’t pull their punches:
We judge that Microsoft cannot justify the use of these techniques, and should stop using them immediately. If they do not, we would welcome – where the law provides for it – regulatory intervention to protect against these harms.
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.
Introducing AI Help: Your Trusted Companion for Web Development | MDN Blog
As part of this pointless push, an “AI explain” button appeared on MDN articles. This terrible idea actually got pushed to production (bypassing the usual deploy steps) where it lasted less than a day.
You can read the havoc it wreaked in the short term. We’ll find out how much long-term damage it has done to trust in Mozilla and MDN.
This may be the worst use of a large language model I’ve seen since synthentic users (if you click that link, no it’s not a joke: “user research without the users” is what they’re actually proposing).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center Letting You Track the Trackers - The Mozilla Blog
I really like this latest addition in Firefox to show how many tracking scripts are being blocked. I think it’s always good to make the invisible visible (one of the reasons why I like RequestMap so much).
Today’s Firefox Blocks Third-Party Tracking Cookies and Cryptomining by Default - The Mozilla Blog
If you haven’t done so already, you should really switch to Firefox.
Then encourage your friends and family to switch to Firefox too.
Goodbye, EdgeHTML - The Mozilla Blog
Mozilla comes out with all guns blazing:
Microsoft is officially giving up on an independent shared platform for the internet. By adopting Chromium, Microsoft hands over control of even more of online life to Google.
While we Blink, we lose the Web
Losing [browser] engines is like losing languages. People may wish that everyone spoke the same language, they may claim it leads to easier understanding, but what people fail to consider is that this leads to losing all the culture and way of thought that that language produced. If you are a Web developer smiling and happy that Microsoft might be adopting Chrome, and this will make your work easier because it will be one less browser to test, don’t be! You’re trading convenience for diversity.
Changing Our Approach to Anti-tracking - Future Releases
This is excellent news from Mozilla. Firefox is going to make it easier to block vampiric privacy-leeching and performance-draining third-party scripts and trackers.
In the physical world, users wouldn’t expect hundreds of vendors to follow them from store to store, spying on the products they look at or purchase. Users have the same expectations of privacy on the web, and yet in reality, they are tracked wherever they go.
Mozilla Protocol - Protocol Design System
Mozilla’s work-in-progress style guide and pattern library.
Evolving the Firefox Brand - Mozilla Open Design
I’m impressed by Mozilla’s commitment to designing in the open—one of the hardest parts of any kind of brand work is getting agreement, and this process must make that even more difficult.
I have to say, I quite like both options on display here.