Hey,
It’s December now and with it, a lot of great things start. For the next 24 days you can read and learn a lot about Performance, User Experience, Crazy Web Technology Experiments or various other skills you want to improve. Adrian Roselli collected a couple of these Advent calendars for you so you have one resource to access all.
Generic
- Artem Syzonenko shares the reason why images on the web often look blurry and how you can, at least for Webkit browsers, improve the sharpness of images resized by the browser with an easy trick.
Security
- Tobias Tom shares how at Colloq they implemented a password check that prevents users from choosing a password that has been exposed in a public data breach. It’s based on the amazing dataset by Troy Hunt and shares some interesting data on how to check against a 40GB Postgres dataset without affecting your site’s performance.
- You probably heard of crypto mining in the browser already. A newly discovered script looks if WebAssembly support is there to make full advantage of the hardware’s capability and then launch a pop-under window that in the background mines cryptocurrency. The only mitigation is to manually force close all the task processes of the browser. However, there are also some browser extensions available that block the most common mining scripts directly.
- The browsers’ recent move to warn users about insecure login forms on pages that have no HTTPS enabled results in a clever hack of the system that circumvents this issue in some browsers. Some developers found out that the warning is only triggered for password fields, so they changed the password field to a text field and set a bullet point font-family for that input so it looks like a password field. Of course this hack won’t work for long but it’s a clever trick that shows what’s possible on the web.
Web Performance
- The Best Request Is No Request, Revisited is a new article by Stefan Baumgartner about HTTP/2 that explains what you can do with HTTP/2 right now and what did only change theoretically but not yet practically.
- Samuel Parkinson explains what happens when you visit ft.com, an in-depth insight that starts with the DNS, and continues the journey through the complete request workflow of the Financial Times.
JavaScript
- Achieving container queries with modern available tools in JavaScript? Ali Alaa shares how we can do that with MutationObeserver.
Go beyond…
- This article disturbed me quite a bit, and I think this is an important fact that we should be aware of when we talk about Bitcoin: Bitcoin mining is now consuming more electricity than 159 countries including Ireland and it’s getting worse rapidly.
- Jeremy Nagel scrutinizes the lack of initiative by programmers to solve real problems. He says that “right now, entrepreneurs are trying to fix things that aren’t broken” while at the same time so many things are that could be fixed with technology—health care, education, food waste, climate change, and much more.
- Scott Berkun explains why the right change often feels wrong. If you can relate to it, I recommend to read this article as it lets you understand why we feel that way and why it’s also natural to humans that this is the case.
Anselm