Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,615 posts.

Web & Frontend
Any year
4597

ImperialViolet

When a browser connects to an HTTPS site it receives signed certificates which allow it to verify that it's really connecting to the domain that it should be connecting to. In those certificates are pointers to services, run by the Certificate Authorities (CAs) that issued the certificate, that allow the browser to…

4600

Firefox and Chromium

Firefox is sometimes recommended as a supposedly more secure browser because of its parent company's privacy practices. This article explains why this notion is not true and enumerates a number of security weaknesses in Firefox's security model when compared to Chromium. In particular, it covers the less granular…

4603

The protocol-relative URL

Update 2014.12.17: Now that SSL is encouraged for everyone and doesn’t have performance concerns , this technique is now an anti-pattern . If the asset you need is available on SSL, then always use the https:// asset.

4604

The Web’s the Place

I’ve been following some discussions about the future of software applications, and a phrase that came up in my dinner with Robb Beal has been echoing in my mind. What it comes down to is this: if you want to develop software, you can build for the Web and/or Unix and/or OSS platforms; or alternatively, you can be a…

4606

Subresource Integrity Addressable Caching

A small number of popular JavaScript frameworks and libraries account for a substantial portion of the network, battery, and time budgets of users of the contemporary Web. Many applications include these libraries even if they only use a small portion of the functionality they provide. Large improvements seem possible…

4608

jQuery file size

Note: The gzipped and Zopflinated file sizes refer to the total byte size of the file after compressing it using gzip or Zopfli with the default settings . For gzip, this boils down to gzip -6 file.js — the default compression level is 6 on a scale from 1 (fastest, but less compression) to 9 (slowest, but best…

4610

ImperialViolet

Thomas Ptacek laid out a number of arguments against DNSSEC recently (and in a follow up ). We don't fully agree on everything, but it did prompt me to write why, even if you assume DNSSEC, DANE (the standard for speaking about the intersection of TLS and DNSSEC) is not a foregone conclusion in web browsers.