Hey,
“Don’t put your entire life on hold because of work” —Dann Petty straightens up in his new video that too much work isn’t the key for success. Instead, making memories, taking time off with friends or family or just being with yourself will be the things that inspire you. And working over-time doesn’t make us happy, it’s preventing us from doing great work and makes us unhappy. Enjoy work responsibly and take time off. It’s not that Service Workers, Grid layout updates or any new ECMAScript feature are worth more than your free time.
Photo by Flo Karr on Unsplash
News
- Brad Westfall shows us what’s new about React Router 4, a new major release that brings a lot of changes and improvements. This article explains what’s different, why it’s been done that way and how you can migrate from older versions and understand the new logic.
- Firefox 55 is out this week and brings Background Tasks API (
requestIdleCallback), WebVR 1.1, the Intersection Observer API, a whole lot of fixes, additions and updates to existing features. This version finally restricts Geolocation API, and Storage API to secure contexts (HTTPS), allows mixed content forlocalhost, and makes Flash click-to-activate by default and restricts the plugin to only be loaded by thehttp://andhttps://scheme. On Linux, you can now run Firefox in headless mode with the-headlessflag.
Generic
- This article by Google now reveals that the search engine crawler bot is based on Chrome 41 (M41) and therefore is able to render JavaScript apps. Things to consider though are: No HTTP/2 support yet, basically no storage support such as cookies, localstorage or IndexedDB, no WebGL, and no Service Worker support.
- Ben Vinegar from Sentry on why companies should give back to open source projects and shares the story of matching donations of Webpack. The motto?
“What’s a few hundred a month to support the critical tools you use, compared with the cost of hiring a full time software engineer to build them for you?”
UI/UX
- Max Böck shares his thoughts on how we should not only blindly provide our website offline, but how we should design for real offline usage. While it’s nice to have a website displaying its content offline, we should indicate that a form cannot be submitted while offline or that a video can’t be played currently.
Web Performance
- Ben Schwarz wrote a new guide about how we can use resource priorities to improve the speed of delivery in our browsers. This in-depth article reveals internal structures of browsers like Chrome and show us what’s most important to consider when building a web application.
JavaScript
- Jerome Etienne has built an open source Augmented Reality web library called AR.js. With it, you can recognize marker tags with your website and act on it. It’s built upon WebRTC and WebGL, and has great performance. And for those who’re new to AR, there is a collection of blog articles with tutorials available.
- Bernhard Mueller shares how security vulnerabilities can be created by users of the React ecosystem, despite React is relatively safe by design.
- Dean Hume shares how we can use Intersection Observer to lazy load images, a relatively new technique that’s landing in more and more browsers right now and brings several advantages over the existing approaches of lazy loading images.
- Tiago Lopes Ferreira explains how
async/awaitworks. This new JavaScript syntax is used to declare asynchronous functions and is built upon Promises.
CSS
- Belén Albeza shares the difference between clipping and masking shapes in CSS with the
clip-pathandmaskproperties with understandable demos. Sadly, the browser support could be way better but you can already play with it and await the future.
Go beyond…
- Autonomous cars heavily rely on cameras and infrared sensors and try to recognize street signs and similar things by algorithms. Researchers now found a way to hack a self-driving car by putting stickers on street signs, effectively telling the car to drive 45mph instead of reading the stop sign properly. With improved algorithms and such bug reports this will get better, but it shows also the danger of autonomous driving.
Anselm