Hey,
This morning I woke up and after a slow start with some muscle-relaxing exercise and some reading I felt the need to publish some notes on topics I have thought a lot about already. One note is about dealing with Slack notifications and the second one about using acronyms is a generally bad idea. If you have thoughts about it, reply to me here or on Twitter or share the word to colleagues. I wish everyone here a great weekend, especially after you’ve read all the amazing browser news.
News
- Firefox 58 landed this week and again marks big improvements to the app’s performance, will throttle timers in background-tabs, brings
font-displayas CSS property, bringsIntl.PluralRules, the WebVR API is enabled by default on macOS now, and WebAssembly has gotten the amazing streaming compiler. - Safari 11.1 is shipping with iOS 11.3 and macOS 10.13.4. It is also available in older macOS 10.12.6 and 10.11.6 and brings Service Worker, the Payment Request API including Apple Pay,
HTMLImageElement.decode(), File and Directory Entries API, Beacon API, Video as an Image asset in<img>elements, support for Encrypted Media Extensions in Safari on iOS, support forallow="camera"in WebRTC and Media Capture, CSSfont-displayproperty to control flash of unstyled text with webfonts, and the Web App Manifest. Security-wise it adds support for Subresource Integrity, Website Not Secure Warnings, a freezed Safari User-Agent string. I think this marks a pretty big milestone showing Apple is putting a lot of effort into Safari being kept up to date.
Privacy
- DuckDuckGo is a pretty good alternative to the big giant’s search engines, focused on users’ privacy. Now they published a free browser extension that combines a tracker blocker with useful information for users such as the encryption level and includes the TOSDR database as well.
Accessibility
CSS
- We already heard a couple of times about Houdini in browsers, a way to add our own CSS functionality via JavaScript. Now Surma shares how the CSS Paint API works which will be available first in Chrome 65. Effectively, this brings us a lot of possibilities only available in graphics or SVG to CSS.
Work & Life
- Annie Atherton shares her different morning routines and which ones she prefers. For me, the interesting bit is that we strive to find the one, ultimate thing to do while I immedately after reading this article thought that doing one different of these each day would result in a pretty good week. Make each day different by starting it differently seems like a great idea I at least occasionally follow.
Go beyond…
- Mike Gifford on Office Waste Reduction, a rare topic we talk about yet it’d be so simple to improve the situation and would help us for a future we still want to live in.
Anselm