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Web & Frontend

The most popular blog posts about web & frontend on Hacker News. 499 posts.

2025
421

Chrome Returns 206 when the Server Returns 403

Chrome Returns 206 when the Server Returns 403 Postmortem It is a feature not a bug! I got detailed explanation from chrome developers which is very helpful. You may find the complete response in the bug ticket. Also this blog post draws a lot of attention after I post it on Hackers News. You may find comments here…

422

Just Use HTML

I’ve worked on so many projects recently that were more complicated than they needed to be because they used JavaScript to generate HTML. JavaScript is… Slower to load Slower to run More prone to breaking Harder to read and reason about Doesn’t actually look like the final output It’s inferior to just using HTML in…

425

Switching to BunnyCDN in Less Than 2 Hours

Update, 2025-04-16: I wrote a follow-up post after about a month of usage, and you can read that here. Given some recent, uh, instability in US politics, and given that everyone likes an underdog, I’ve been looking at European alternatives to my current hosting situation, which is Cloudflare. After looking through…

426

Local First Htmx

Overview Part 2 is now ready There is a common refrain on the internet that things have gotten worse and are continuing to get worse. There is a proliferation of horrible jumpy loading ads on every website, every search engine throws a crappy AI summary in front of your search result, every site/webapp seems to have…

432

Why some DVLA digital services don't work at night

Every few months or so, somebody asks on social media why a particular DVLA digital service is turned off over night. Rather than answering it every time, I’ve decided to write this post, so I can point people at it in future. It’s a great case study to show why making government services digitally native can be quite…

438

Migrating to React Native's new architecture

Shopify successfully migrated two of its largest apps, Shopify Mobile and Shopify Point of Sale (POS) to React Native's New Architecture while maintaining weekly releases and serving millions of merchants. This migration involved a complex codebase with hundreds of screens and native modules, extensive custom…

440

Finding Dead Websites

As some of the work planned for Marginalia Search this year has been progressing a bit faster than anticipated, there was time to implement an unplanned change. This post details the implementation of a system for detecting when servers are online, to avoid serving dead links and improve data quality, and for…

449

It’s OK to block ads (2015)

Over the past couple of months, the practice of ad blocking has received heightened ethical scrutiny. (1,2,3,4) If you’re unfamiliar with the term, “ad blocking” refers to software—usually web browser plug-ins, but increasingly mobile apps—that stop most ads from appearing when you use websites or apps that would…