Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress.
Visit infrequently.org → RSS feedOn Hacker News Oct 2010 – Oct 2025
Web & Frontend 11Tech Industry & Business 10Society, Policy & Culture 2Career & Management 2Systems & Performance 1Software Engineering 1
New web services are being built to a self-defeatingly low UX and performance standard, and existing experiences are now pervasively re-developed on unspeakably slow, JS-taxed stacks. At a business level, this is a disaster, raising the question: why are new teams buying into stacks that have failed so often before?
Apple bent the knee for months, leaving many commentators to ask why. But the reasons are not mysterious: Apple wants things that only the government can provide, things that will defend and extend its power to extract rents, rather than innovate. Namely, selective exemption from tariffs and an end to the spectre of…