Hey,
My dear readers, this will be the last edition of the weekly web reading list in 2017. I’ll be back with new content in 2018 and hope you can have some rest, some calmer times than usual and find time for yourself, for those you love and for the things you like to do but never find time to. All the best!
—Anselm
News
- Google Chrome will comply with the Better Ads Standard starting February 15th, 2018 and here is what that means for you.
- Chrome 63/64 will bring developers an ability to predict whether playback will be smooth and power efficient. It also will pause autoplayed videos that are in the background and have no audio tracks.
- The Safari Technology Preview Release 46 brings some very interesting news: First of all it has full Service Workers support, brings a smart security warning if a user should fill credit card data or passwords on non-secure websites. Also important to know is that Safari’s UserAgent string from now on is not going to change anymore: They froze it to reduce web compatibility risk and to prevent its use for fingerprinting. For images, they now support
decoding="async"attributes, a feature Chrome recently implemented as well.
Generic
- Matt Hinchliffe wrote a nice article about how at the Financial Times website they built the new search engine with Elastic Search and why they didn’t go with a third-party solution.
- Chris Heilman wrote a thoughtful, impactful article about the real value of net neutrality and why most of the recent examples why we need it is not the key point. Having the web as an educative, enabling place for everyone is an important factor many of us took advantage on: We learnt by using a neutral web that made a lot of information that would cost a lot more money otherwise (using print or other channels) available to us and let us decide what to read, what to consume.
JavaScript
- Addy Osmani wrote about the Cost of JavaScript which analyzes the impact of JavaScript, compares it to the same byte size of images and how we can improve performance with that knowledge.
Go beyond…
- Chances are high that humanity will not see that the Arctic will be frozen again as it was years and decades ago.
Anselm