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Ladybird: A new cross-platform browser project
This post describes the Ladybird browser, based on the LibWeb and LibJS engines from SerenityOS.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 34 posts.
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A look at search engines with their own indexes (2021)
A cursory review of all the non-metasearch, indexing search engines I have been able to find.
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Reverse Engineering TikTok's VM Obfuscation
TikTok has a reputation for its aggressive data collection. The platform has implemented various methods to make it difficult for reverse-engineers to understand exactly what data is being collected and how it is being used.
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Apple is not defending browser engine choice
Some folks claim that Apple's mandated inadequacy for browsers and their engines is somehow beneficial to the cause of ensuring a diverse pool of web engines. Nothing could be farther from the truth, but to understand why, we need to understand how browsers are funded. With that understanding, we can see that not only…
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What is the small web? (2020)
Updated June 19th, 2023 Sorry, your browser doesn't support embedded videos. But that doesn’t mean you can’t watch it! You can download Small Is Beautiful #23 directly, and watch it with your favourite video player. Small Is Beautiful (Oct, 2022): What is the Small Web and why do we need it? Today, I want to introduce…
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An interactive guide to Flexbox
When we truly learn the secrets of the Flexbox layout mode, we can build absolutely incredible things. Fluid layouts that stretch and shrink without arbitrary breakpoints. In this action-packed interactive tutorial, we'll pop the hood on the Flexbox algorithm and learn how to do remarkable things with it. ✨
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U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow
This is part 1. Part 2: update : U+237C ⍼ angzarr; Part 3: Monotype Mathematical Sorts Part 4: U+237C ⍼ is (also) S9576 ⍼
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When network is faster than browser cache (2020)
We assume that browser caches are near-instantaneous, but data shows that retrieving an object from cache can take hundreds of milliseconds!
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AVIF has landed (2020)
AVIF is the first browser image format we've had in 10 years. Let's see how it performs…
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A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page
What is surprising is that a 14kB page can load much faster than a 15kB page — maybe 612ms faster — while the difference between a 15kB and a 16kB page is trivial.
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See what JavaScript commands get injected through an in-app browser
I work with U.S. law firms as a non-testifying technical consulting expert on matters involving the Apple platform and iOS apps. Learn more about my litigation consulting.
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Inspecting Web Views in macOS
I recently received a tantalizing email from a reader I’ve never met: Sam Henri-Gold . Sam showed me how you can key in a couple write commands in the macOS…
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WebGPU – All of the cores, none of the canvas
WebGPU is an upcoming Web API that gives you low-level, general-purpose access GPUs.
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Advice for the next dozen Rust GUIs
A few times a week, someone asks on the #gui-and-ui channel on the Rust Discord, “what is the best UI toolkit for my application?” Unfortunately there is still no clear answer to this question. Generally the top contenders are egui, Iced, and Druid, with Slint looking promising as well, but web-based approaches such…
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Design of This Website (2021)
Meta page describing Gwern.net, the self-documenting website’s implementation and experiments for better ‘semantic zoom’ of hypertext; technical decisions using Markdown and static hosting.
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Push Notifications, WebXR, and better PWA support coming to iOS
New APIs, capabilities, bugs, and challenges for Safari and PWAs running in iOS 15.4 and iPadOS 15.4, including Web Push Notifications, WebXR
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Shortest URLs on the Internet
What’s the shortest URL for which content is served on the internet? There are quite a few single-letter second-level domains that are used in very short URLs, such as Google’s http://g.co or Facebook’s https://m.me. But we can go shorter than this: there’s nothing stopping TLD registry operators serving A records at…
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Xilem: An Architecture for UI in Rust
Rust is an appealing language for building user interfaces for a variety of reasons, especially the promise of delivering both performance and safety. However, finding a good architecture is challenging. Architectures that work well in other languages generally don’t adapt well to Rust, mostly because they rely on…
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Instagram can track anything you do on any website in their in-app browser
I work with U.S. law firms as a non-testifying technical consulting expert on matters involving the Apple platform and iOS apps. Learn more about my litigation consulting.
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The HTTP crash course nobody asked for
HTTP does a pretty good job staying out of everyone’s way. If you’re reading this article, there’s a solid chance it was delivered to you over HTTP. Even if you’re reading this from an RSS reader o...
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Breaking up with JavaScript front ends
What features would be in that spec? Partial page updates? Animated transitions? Layered interactions?
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The most satisfying checkbox
The Art of Game Feel (a.k.a Juice) in Product Design
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Horrible edge cases when dealing with music
Personal blog of Julien (jvoisin) Voisin
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Moving a macOS window by clicking anywhere on it
Today I learned that, since macOS High Sierra onwards, you can move a window by starting to drag anywhere on it.
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Retrieving your browsing history through a CAPTCHA
Web developer and cybersecurity researcher
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Short URLs: Why and How
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
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How “See a Satellite Tonight” Works
See A Satellite Tonight is my most successful side project so far, with 5 million users since launch in 2019. It's been entirely a solo project, and I've used it as a proving ground for a bunch of tech that I wanted to learn. It took dozens of APIs and services to put together the experience I wanted: The front page…
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Speeding up this site by 50x (2014)
I've seen all these studies that show how a 100ms improvement in page load time has a significant effect on page views, conversion rate, etc., but I'd never actually tried to optimize my site. This blog is a static Octopress site, hosted on GitHub Pages. Static sites are supposed to be fast, and GitHub Pages uses…