Best of 2020

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2020. 541 posts.

Web & Frontend
121

Why Did Mozilla Remove XUL Add-Ons?

TL;DR: Firefox used to have a great extension mechanism based on the XUL and XPCOM. This mechanism served us well for a long time. However, it came at an ever-growing cost in terms of maintenance for both Firefox developers and add-on developers. On one side, this growing cost progressively killed any effort to make…

134

Firefox 79

Firefox 79 offers a new Promise method, more secure target=_blank links, logical assignment operators, tooling improvements for better JavaScript debugging, and many other updates of interest to web developers. In ...

143

The Failed Promise of Web Components

Web Components had so much potential to empower HTML to do more, and make web development more accessible to non-programmers and easier for programmers. Remember how exciting it was every time we got new shiny HTML elements that actually do stuff ? Remember how exciting it was to be able to do sliders, color pickers…

149

HTTP/2 Push is dead

One of the hot features that came with HTTP/2 was PUSH frames. The main idea is that if the server can predict what requests a client might want to make, the server can preemptively send request/response pairs to the client and warm its cache.