I could not agree more with PPK on this: Native apps and websites shouldn’t be in competition. Each has its pros and cons.

If the user doesn’t want your icon on his home screen, if the user wants a just-in-time interaction, it’s the web they want — not because of any inherent technological superiority, but because it’s hassle-free. Go there, read, forget. No junk left on your phone.

Most businesses don’t stand a chance of ending up on the users’ home screens. So they need the web — but not a web that emulates native to no particular purpose.

Paul Kotler shares some of his struggles as a technology user with both autism and apraxia, including those you may not have considered:

For me, every step forward in making things lighter and smaller is a new obstacle. Often, the buttons I need to hit are too small, the screen too sensitive, or the glare off the screen too distracting to allow me to make use of my device. Updates to operating systems or apps that create slight changes to the size and position of buttons throw me off for days. While these changes might go unnoticed by a typical user, I endure a relearning process that slows me down and makes it more difficult to communicate.

I could not agree more:

This is about getting other web professionals to better understand our field. To be correct in what they say about the past, when trying to educate others. To not make false statements, based on lack of knowledge or direct experience, which lead to wrong assumptions and misinformed decisions about code and architectures.

This project—from a Swedish student—seeks to address the issue of the dominance of “whiteness” online by asking you to share pictures of non-white hands in order to make them more visible in Google Image Search. Admittedly, it’s a drop in the bucket when it comes to increasing the visibility of colored people online, but as Ovid famously said: “Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence” (Gutta cavat lapidem, non vi, sed saepe cadendo).

New research from Columbia University and Mozilla reveals that Firefox’s “Tracking Protection” privacy tech has an added benefit of speeding up the web:

Since Firefox does not download and render content from tracking domains, Tracking Protection also enjoys performance benefits of a 44% median reduction in page load time and 39% reduction in data usage in the Alexa top 200 news sites.

Testing on Windows phones can be tough. Tools like Adobe’s Edge Inspect don’t support it (yet… I hope that changes at some point) and if you aren’t a Visual Studio user, emulating a Windows phone can also be a challenge. Thankfully, Daniel Herken has put together this no-nonsense guide for testing Windows devices.

The brilliant James Edwards recounts the trials and tribulations of trying to make an accessible version of “Show Password” functionality.

Write a web app once, deploy it as a hosted app to Android, iOS, Chrome OS, Firefox OS, and Windows. And it follows the W3C standard for web apps. It’s almost too easy.

In this brief post, Jeffrey Zeldman reminds us of the importance of simplicity by deftly showing us where we’ve gotten ourselves:

[D]riven by fear that apps would make the web irrelevant, we began relying on frameworks that made even the simplest website act and feel like a mind-blowing application. Serving reams of code we didn’t need because, hell, it came with the frameworks, and abandoning principles like progressive enhancement because, hell, everybody uses JavaScript, we soon fell in love with high-resolution, full-screen background images, then fell even harder when those images quadrupled in weight thanks to Retina. And still the little article memorializing the little 5K contest sat online, its lessons forgotten in an arms race wherein the average home page now weighs over 2MB. Put that in your Edge network and smoke it.

When I joined Microsoft, I had to go through “privacy training”. I was all meh about it, but then I took the course and realized just how much Microsoft cares about privacy. The training was thorough and insightful; it’s not an overstatement to say it truly blew my mind a little. I wish more companies cared as much. In fact, I wish every startup had to go through similar training before they could collect any user data.

Anyway, this new initiative seems pretty cool and I am proud to see Microsoft leading the charge in securing your files online, all the time.