The server-side Presto rendering engine that drives Opera Mini has gotten a major upgrade, introducing some great new features including

• flexbox
• rem units, and
• a bit of ECMAScript 5.

HTML5 input types are on the docket. They won’t be displayed properly in clients until they get an upgrade, but the parse is aware of them now and they will fall back to “text” inputs until the client roll-out happens.

This is a fantastic overview of the various analytics reporting options available for developers along with a list of pros and cons for each. Highly recommended reading!

A great post from Taylor Feliz on why outdated browsers, in general, are more of a problem than Internet Explorer, specifically. He also ends with a great call to action:

[L]et’s develop websites that are cross browser and supported by all major browsers as our job as web developers require it. It is not our job to decide what browser is cool or not; we have to provide an accessible and working website to all users because cross browser development is as or more important that even a responsive design.

I never even saw this proposal, but how cool would it be to set snap points for scrolling content in CSS?!

This is a fantastic tool from the one and only Tim Kadlec. It helps you get a better understanding of how much it costs users to view a web page in different countries around the world.

This page, for instance, costs nothing in the UK and India and only 2¢ in the U.S.

It’s a tough pill to swallow, but it’s true:

Pages that are empty without JS: dead to history (archive-org), unreliable for search results (despite any search engine claims of JS support, check it yourself), and thus ignorable. No need to waste time reading or responding.

…

Because in 10 years nothing you built today that depends on JS for the content will be available, visible, or archived anywhere on the web.

All your fancy front-end-JS-required frameworks are dead to history, a mere evolutionary blip in web app development practices. Perhaps they provided interesting ephemeral prototypes, nothing more.

This megapost contains notes, slides, and a screencast version of Christian Heilmann’s MunichJS talk. There are lots of great bits in here. This section particularly resonated with me:

The fundamental truth of the web is that the user controls the experience. That’s what makes the web work: you write your code for the Silicon Valley dweller on a 8 core state-of-the-art mobile device with an evergreen and very capable browser on a fast wireless connection and much money to spend. The same code, however, should work for the person who saved up their money to have a half hour in an internet cafe in an emerging country on a Windows XP machine with an old Firefox connected with a very slow and flaky connection. Or the person whose physical condition makes them incapable to see, speak, hear or use a mouse.

Our job is not to tell that person off to keep up with the times and upgrade their hardware. Our job is to use our smarts to write intelligent solutions. Intelligent solutions that test which of their parts can execute and only give those to that person. Web technologies are designed to be flexible and adaptive, and if we don’t understand that, we shouldn’t pretend that we are web developers.

Amen!

This could be useful for anyone really, as as accessibility tech, it’s pretty amazing.

Signals transmitted by Bluetooth beacons are picked up by a smartphone, and in conjunction with ustwo’s indoor positioning technology, the Wayfindr app is able to locate itself and give the user audible instructions.

A scary fiction:

With perfect algorithmic efficiency, Facebook found you a beautiful wife who was practically guaranteed to produce a sickly child. Nothing too bad, mind you, but just ill enough to make you spend a little bit more than you would otherwise.

…

There’s no malice here. No human ever decided to profit from your misery. The constant A/B testing with billions of reactions just so happened to engineer a situation to help you breed a better human. More profitable human.

View content minus the jargon. ’Nuff said.