Bruce Lawson's personal site

• In memory of Opera pioneer Per Hedbor – the main developer behind the Opera Mini servers.
• Lowering memory usage in Opera and Blink with Heap compaction – how we made Opera’s Blink-based products use a lot less memory
• Web Page Test now allows you to check how fast your site loads (and what it looks like) in Opera Mini’s Extreme Mode (e.g., the maximum compression). Choose “Dulles, VA USA (IE 8-11,Chrome,Firefox,Android,iOS 9)” as the test location, and select a device with Opera Mini in the browser drop down list. A big thank you to Patrick Meenan for adding this.
• The death of the natives? A progressive shift for apps, web & marketers – a report on biz benefits of PWAs (suitable for non-techy boss types)
• Opera and Progressive Web Apps – video interview with l’il ol’ me. In a suit!
• Lack of internet connectivity is biggest fear of Indians while travelling – “13.8% people are willing to go without food for an entire day for a lag-free internet connection.”
• Photographer Files $1 Billion Suit Against Getty for Licensing Her Public Domain Images
• Is there such a thing as ‘bore out’? – A French man is suing his employers for 300K Euros for for being “killed professionally through boredom”.
• The buzz: how the vibrator came to be – “In 19th-century Britain, women suffering from chronic anxiety prescribed pelvic finger massage. Doctors found this tedious and time-consuming, so they invented something to do the job for them” (Safe for work)

• Research with blind users on mobile devices by gov.uk
• Responsive images: Smaller page sizes with the picture element and WebP – stats on how Mike Babb reduced page weight by 70% for smaller devices, using responsive images
• Apple Pay on the Web – Apple to W3C: “I anticipate that we as a Working Group can and will make the Payment Request API into a solid, cross-browser framework for payments”
• Serverless Data Sync in Web Apps with Bit Torrent – cool article by Paul Kinlan
• Progressive Web Apps in Nigeria and Kenya: a Double Interview – lots of stats about how much data costs, and how much is saved by PWAs
• Making progressive web apps even better: ambient badging and “pop into browser�� – Opera Labs build shows you when a site is a PWA, and a mechanism to expose the current URL
• The Web App “Discovery Problem” by Remy Sharp
• The Progress of Web Apps – PWAs on Windows, by Jacob Rossi
• PWAify – “Experimental project to convert your PWA (Progressive Web App) into a cross-platform Electron app. Brings PWAs to your desktop.”
• The Right Way To Ask Users For iOS Permissions (or any permissions, really)
• Using the HTML lang attribute by Léonie Watson. Here’s a 7 second demo by Patrick Lauke of a screenreader reading French text without, then with, the correct lang attribute.
• Over the edge? – Opera’s power saver mode extends battery life 43 mins longer than Microsoft Edge and 1 hr 1 min longer than Chrome
• Ad blocking, web push notifications, site settings come to Opera for Android (the Chromium-based full browser)
• Velocity Conference talk about Opera and ad blocking – my talk with video and slides
• Some Advice for Companies Fighting Ad Blockers
• Free Wi-Fi has Soweto surfing in the streets – “Our aim is to make the internet available to everyone, regardless of their background”
• Meanwhile… China’s Great Firewall is Harming Innovation, [Chinese] Scholars Say “”Our nation’s mind is caged,�� say Hu Xingdou, an economics professor”
• The Best and Worst Internet Experience in the World – MIT Tech Review report on the Web in China. “Among the country’s roughly 690 million Internet users, 620 million now go online using a mobile device. “
• The Philippines is Now the Fastest Growing Smartphone Market in ASEAN – 20% YoY growth; local vendors dominant
• ways ASEAN can accelerate its digital revolution
• Myanmar’s digital revolution BBC radio’s vignette on smartphone use in Myanmar, where SIM costs went from $2000 to $1.50
• Why mobile money is a game-changer for African entrepreneurs – “mobile money is slowly moving beyond the person-to-person arena into the business-to-business and business-to-consumer spaces”
• Pornhub launches explicit audio for the visually impaired
• The Web is for everyone � new documentary on its invention
• Heavy Metal and Natural Language Processing – What are the “most metal” words to use in songs?

I’ve been wondering why I feel so personally affronted by the recent UK referendum result that means we’ll leave the EU. Of course, it’ll make my job harder; by the end of this year, I will have had easy, visa-free access to France, Germany, Denmark, Poland, Romania, Netherlands, Spain, Greece and Norway. That could end. (Or not �� who knows? There is no plan, just uncertainty).

I’m unhappy that the pressing matters of government will take a backseat to rewriting laws, treaties and standards that we’ll abandon. I’m angry that friends of mine who live and work here now find their status uncertain: the front-runner for Tory PM, Theresa May, refused to guarantee the right to remain for EU people who came before the vote. I’m furious that my daughter’s plans to go to an overseas university are now thwarted.

But mostly, I want to take my country back. I believed that I lived in a country that was a bit weird, detached geographically from continental Europe and therefore a little aloof, but by-and-large liberal and tolerant; a nation of sea-farers who, almost by definition, tended to think internationally; a nation of pragmatists who wouldn’t shoot their own economy down in flames for a dogma of immigrantphobia (the babysteps of the dogma that our grandparents fought against).

It seems I don’t live in that country.

If the vote had been more overwhelmingly in favour of exit, I’d conclude that the country I thought I lived in was a fiction, mutually constructed by the liberal, border-hopping people I call colleagues and friends. But the vote was so close (48% to 52%) that I realise the country I believed in was shared by almost half the population of the UK. It really feels that we live in a divided nation.

Soon, it will really divide. Scotland will leave; why would they stay? The Scots overwhelmingly rejected Westminster Tories and Brexit. To “save the UK”, the Brexiters are breaking it up, and leaving a rump state with a faltering economy and a great schism in the population. I want to take my country back, and I see no way to do it.