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Web & Frontend

The most popular blog posts about web & frontend on Hacker News. 8,469 posts.

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7144

De-Anonymization via Clickjacking in 2019

This blog post is about my journey to understand the current practice of de-anonymization via the clickjacking technique whereby a malicious website is able to uncover the identity of a visitor, including his full name and possibly other personal information. I don’t present any new information here that isn’t already…

7150

SpiderMonkey is on a diet

One thing I’ve learnt while working for Mozilla is that a web browser can be characterized as a JavaScript execution environment that happens to have some multimedia capabilities. In particular, if you look at Firefox’s about:memory page, the JS engine is very often the component responsible for consuming the most…

7156

Dapps

A friend asked me at breakfast this week “what gets you excited in crypto these days?” I answered “Dapps.” If the second half of 2016 and all of 2017 was about raising capital to fund development efforts (and speculating on all of that), then it sure feels like 2018 is the year we start getting […]

7157

JavaScript private class fields considered harmful

Today I mourn. What am I mourning? Encapsulation. At least in my projects. As a library author, I’ve decided to avoid private class fields from now on and gradually refactor them out of my existing libraries. Why did I make such a drastic decision? It all started a few days ago, when I was building a Vue 3 app that…

7161

Why Web Pages Suck

Everyone complains about web pages that suck, but the reality is that it is advertisers who call the shots. This should, at a minimum, put Facebook’s Instant Articles and Apple’s News a…

7169

Please Stop “Fixing” Font Smoothing (2012)

I wrote two posts on the topic of WebKit font smoothing before, but unfortunately the situation has grown worse since then. In allowing the designer to pick their own font smoothing mode with the -webkit-font-smoothing CSS property, WebKit developers have opened up an opportunity for typographic abuse, namely, the…