Dave Rupert:
But in the past we had browser disparity as a mechanism for delaying bad ideas from becoming ubiquitous so they could be hashed out in a Web Standards body. Some of the best ideas we have today, like CSS Grid, were pioneered in one browser (IE10) and then polished in a Working Group. If V1 of
-ms-gridwas now the de facto standard, we’d have some regrets.
John Gruber:
There have always been bad Mac apps. But they seldom achieved any level of popularity because Mac users, collectively, rejected them.
On the news of Edge switching to the Chromium engine, Tim Kadlec writes:
We need Google to keep pushing the web forward. But it’s critical that we have other voices, with different viewpoints, to maintain some sense of balance. Monocultures don’t benefit anyone.
Hear, hear.
Michiel de Boer:
It is believed that the most seen photo is this Windows XP background. And I’m convinced that the most viewed shape is the mouse cursor.
Peter Welch, back in April 2014:
Websites that are glorified shopping carts with maybe three dynamic pages are maintained by teams of people around the clock, because the truth is everything is breaking all the time, everywhere, for everyone.
Every once in a while I feel a need to reread this 2014 gem. Thanks to Jeremy Keith for reminding me.
Lily Hay Newman, for Wired:
Google's Chrome browser turns 10 today, and in its short life it has introduced a lot of radical changes to the web. From popularizing auto-updates to aggressively promoting HTTPS web encryption, the Chrome security team likes to grapple with big, conceptual problems. That reach and influence can be divisive, though, and as Chrome looks ahead to its next 10 years, the team is mulling its most controversial initiative yet: fundamentally rethinking URLs across the web.
Ethan Marcotte:
Lately, I’ve been reflecting on some of the language I use to talk about accessibility—or, more specifically, to talk about the people I’m designing for. Like, I’ve spoken in the past about “screen reader users” or “users who navigate primarily by keyboard.” (Heck, maybe you have too.) And I’ve been wondering if that language is problematic, since it implicitly treats those groups as monoliths: as though every single person using a given piece of assistive technology would browse, behave, and think exactly the same. In other words, if two different people visit your site with the same speaking browser, each of those people will have their own expectations of how a website should work, and how information will be arranged.
Ken Kocienda recounts the process of designing the iPhone keyboard:
I started to think about improvements, and to help me keep my keyboard goal literally in sight as I sat in my office, I measured and cut out a small piece of paper, about 2 inches wide by 1.3 inches tall, a little smaller than half the size of a credit card turned on end. I pinned up this little slip of paper on the bulletin board next to my desk. I looked at it often. This was all the screen real estate I had available for my keyboard.