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Web & Frontend

The most popular blog posts about web & frontend on Hacker News. 306 posts.

2021
6

Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

Supposedly today we have a lot of browsers to choose from - Google Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, etc. Having choices is a good thing, right? Nobody wants to relive the time of almost complete Internet Explorer domination again. Unfortunately our choices are significantly fewer than…

10

The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

I've told this story at conferences - but due to the general situation I thought I'd retell it here. A few years ago I was doing policy research in a housing benefits office in London. They are singularly unlovely places. The walls are brightened up with posters offering helpful services for people fleeing domestic…

17

I no longer trust The Great Suspender

I know a number of folks use The Great Suspender to automatically suspend inactive browser tabs in Chrome. Apparently recent versions of this extension have been taken over by a shady anonymous entity and is now flagged by Microsoft as malware . Notably the most recent version of the extension (v7.1.8) has added…

20

Apps Getting Worse

Too often, a popular consumer app unexpectedly gets worse: Some combination of harder to use, missing features, and slower. At a time in history where software is significantly eating the world, this is nonsensical. It’s also damaging to the lives of the people who depend on these products.

21

RSS is wonderful

Inspired by Web Rings from the 90s, I created a tool for serendipitous discovery of blogs called RSS Discovery Engine. Similar to how web rings work, I make the assumption that interesting blogs will tend to link to other related blogs, and therefore, linked blogs are likely to also be interesting.

26

What's Inside the EU Green Pass QR Code?

Here in Austria, you need to be either vaccinated against, tested negative for, or have recovered from COVID-19 to go to the pub (or pretty much everywhere) right now. If you don't want to carry around your paperwork proving one of those, you can alternatively show your Green Pass QR code to be let in.