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.
So Google will not ship a version of Chrome newer than 42 for Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0). Queue the wailing and gnashing of teeth or just adopt progressive enhancement and move on. Browser and device proliferation is not a problem, myopic development practices are.
This is a treasure trove of software development resources—Web and otherwise—compiled by Jeff Petty.
Chris Coyier put together a nice overview of ways to reduce user frustration when dealing with dropdown and flyout menus because, you know, some people still use a mouse.
srcset and sizes Under Control
Matt Wilcox walks through his methodical process for managing srcset and sizes. It’s a good read an will be helpful for keeping you from being unnecessarily verbose (or getting to granular).
Matt Asay does a great job dispelling some of the myths frequently spouted in the Web vs. native debate. It’s definitely worth a read.
Charles Morris wrote a lengthy post about the germination of Microsoft’s new browser rendering engine. If you ever wondered where babies browsers come from, this is full of insights.
On a side note, this is one of the most exciting aspects of the new browser (and new Microsoft) for me:
Our mission to create a Web that “just works” won’t be successful without your help.
My old friend Jason Garber—who I, sadly, haven’t seen in probably a decade—came up with a great list of “professional self-improvement tips for anyone working on the Web today”. I’ll give you the synopses, but you should do yourself a favor and read the full post for the background:
I would absolutely echo these to anyone looking to become (or improve as) a web professional.
Astute observations (as always) from Tim Kadlec. I’ll let Tim set the scene:
Over the past year I conducted performance audits on a handful of sites that all used client-side MVC’s, typically Angular but not always. Each site had their own optimizations that needed to take place to improve performance. Yet a pattern emerged: client-side MVC’s were the major bottleneck for each. It slowed down the initial rendering of the page (particularly on mobile) and it limited our ability to optimize the critical path.
Obviously Tim knows what he’s talking about.
He goes on to bring in the voices of the Filament Group and PPK (both of whom I’ve linked to previously for the same reasons): lots of smart people have come to the conclusion that relying on client-side generation of web pages is a bad idea. Tim goes so far as to say “if your client-side MVC framework does not support server-side rendering, that is a bug” and I can’t help but agree.
His post is great, you should read it. Frankly, I wish I’d written it.