Bruce Lawson's personal site

This reading list is brought to you courtesy of Vivaldi browser (subject of this very thorough independent review, including an interview with Yours Truly!) who pay me a respectable salary and don’t moan when I read stuff I’m interested in.

• The rebellion will be federated – “I will be thinking: what do the Big Tech billionaires and kleptocrats wish I would do? And then I will do the OPPOSITE” says Elena Rossini
• Browser Choice Alliance – “Vivaldi joins other browsers in forming the Browser Choice Alliance to campaign against Microsoft preferencing its Edge browser on Windows”
• Interop and Hard Problems – “Let’s talk about priorities, technical debt and hard problems in the Web Platform…”< says Brian Kardell
• Intent to Experiment: Reference Target for Cross-root ARIA – “a feature to enable using IDREF attributes such as `for` and `aria-labelledby` to refer to elements inside a component’s shadow DOM, while maintaining encapsulation of the internal details of the shadow DOM. The main goal of this feature is to enable ARIA to work across shadow root boundaries.”
• GSMA: The State of Mobile Internet Connectivity 2024 (93pp PDF)
• How US Dept of Justice’s cure for Google could inflict collateral damage – “Remedies should be refined with an eye toward broad platform rights and responsibilities”. Quotes Open Web Advocacy.
• OpenCore Legacy Patcher allows you to install modern MacOS on machines that Apple has stopped supporting
• Analysis of 30 Popular (Paid) Android VPNs – “I rigorously tested the 30 most popular paid VPN apps in the Google Play store, which have more than 732 million total installs worldwide. Most were completely safe and private but some had significant security and privacy flaws.”
• Anyone Can Buy Data Tracking US Soldiers and Spies to Nuclear Vaults and Brothels in Germany – “More than 3 billion phone coordinates collected by a US data broker expose the detailed movements of US military and intelligence workers in Germany—and the Pentagon is powerless to stop it.”
• Ban tracking and personalised advertising – the Chaos Computer Club calls for European Commission to propose legislation that would ban personalised surveillance advertising. “The advertising industry already has sustainable, proven concepts for effective online advertising that do not require targeted tracking and personalisation (e.g. contextual advertising)”.
• In-House Counsel Starter Pack: Boilerplate Antitrust Affirmative Defenses – my fave: “THIRTEENTH AFFIRMATIVE DEFENSE (Defamation): Filing lawsuits against lawbreakers is mean and irreparably hurts our corporate feelings.”
• LICENSE.TXT (YouTube, needs sound)

The Reading List is supported by Vivaldi browser, who give me a reasonable salary yet don’t beat me around the head when I read interesting stuff when I should be bolting the networking stack onto browser engines. We recently released a brand new Vivaldi for desktops and mobile with new UI, UX and sexy features – give it a spin, and see how we’re fighting for a better web.

• Link o’ the week! JavaScript dos and donts by Mu-An Chiou
• iOS age restriction blocks all browsers except Safari, breaks choice screen – whoever would have expected Apple to be cunningly trying to evade its legal obligations, again? I’m shocked. And stunned.
• New to the web platform in October by Rachel Andrew
• New CSS that can actually be used in 2024 – “The amount of CSS novelty in the last two to four years has been staggering. Multiple innovations have been released and are now supported in all modern browsers, and some of them fundamentally change how to make websites”. This short article is a useful overview for those who haven’t been following along with all the details.
• More options for styling <details> – really useful to be able to use grid or flex layouts, style the marker more easily and animate the opening/ closing of disclosure widgets.
• Ecosia and Qwant, two European search engines, join forces on an index to shrink reliance on Big Tech – “The pair is also open to other European firms joining in with their push for more tech stack sovereignty — at least as fellow customers for the search index, as they plan to license access via an API”
• An exploration of examples showing masonry as both a part of CSS Grid and as its own display type – a really good article by Ahmad Shadeed, that concludes “Making it part of CSS grid will at least guarantee that the layout will work, but without the masonry stuff… At the end of the day, masonry is a grid.”
• How a BBC navigation bar component broke depending on which external monitor it was on – amazing detective work!
• The social web – “There’s no doom scrolling in an RSS feed. That is the web I’m arguing for. A web that is intentional, where what you consume is curated by you and you alone, where connections with others happen because you made the conscious effort to connect.”
• European alternatives for digital products – :We help you find European alternatives for digital service and products, like cloud services and SaaS products.”
• Unofficial guide to the <button> element by Hey Don’t Pickering
• Find your font -“Test and preview fonts in real-time for all your design needs. Choose the perfect typeface with ease.”
• Your CSS reset should be layered by Mayank
• Add content to the margins of web pages when printed using CSS – splendid to see work resuming on printing from web (to paper, PDFs etc)
• Mind The (Remediation) Gap – “Please, please, please, do not rely on these frameworks until you understand the basics of HTML and CSS. Because at the end of the day, there’s only so much that accessibility consultants can do to help if developers lose sight of the “front-end” in “front-end development.”
• Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone – “Timezones are weird. But only finitely so. Here’s the exact conceptual model you should have of them.”
• Igalia and WebKit: status update and plans (2024) – Your chums at @igalia@floss.social are the 2nd most prolific committers to WebKit (after Apple) including WebKit for Android and a new SVG engine!
• Apple facing near-£3bn UK lawsuit over cloud storage ‘monopoly’ – an amazing surprise
• Microsoft Edge is trying to forcefully get your Chrome tabs again – another amazing surprise: Microsoft are doing dodgy browserjacking again! It’s high time the EU stepped in and reversed its decision not to designate Edge as a regulated Core Platform Service, even though it meets the quantitative criteria to for designation.
• W3C@30: W3C and me – Léonie Watson. “In this talk, Léonie reflects on the past 30 years, especially her many encounters with the W3C. She concludes that the true accomplishment isn’t the standards and specifications, but the incredible people of the Web community she has had the privilege to work with.”
• You Can Now See the Code That Helped End Apartheid -Joh n Graham-Cumming, who happens to be Cloudflare’s CTO, cracked a 30-year-old encrypted file that had a role in rewriting South Africa’s history.
• Your air fryer might be spying on you, new report warns – and smart TVs are even hungrier for our data – “Which? found that the three fryers it tested all wanted to “record audio on the user’s phone, for no specified reason” … the companion Xiaomi app for its air fryer hooked it up to “trackers from Facebook, Pangle (the ad network of TikTok for Business), and Chinese tech giant Tencent (depending on the location of the user). That was alongside knowing its owner’s precise location.”
• Elevator control panels – “Designers of user interfaces: The elevator industry needs you! Behold the evidence”

(Last Updated on 18 November 2024)

In this podcast series, I interview people from across different communities and industries who, in their own way, are fighting for a better web. In this episode, my guest is Evan Prodromou, Research Director of the newly-launched Social Web Foundation. We discuss interconnected social networks and ActivityPub, the open standard that Evan co-authored which enables cross-platform connections, how this tech reshapes online interactions, and the Foundation’s work to support digital rights and diversity. We also go into key topics like privacy, content control, and the importance of diverse voices in social media.

As this is my blog, I’m assuming you are strong-stomached enough to tolerate seeing my face on YouTube – but if not, the audio and transcript is available on the Vivaldi blog, with links to all the podcasty places.

(Last Updated on 18 November 2024)

With all the excitement of the launch of Vivaldi 7 and speaking to 750 people in Utrecht, I somehow forgot to post the second episode of my For A Better Web podcast, in which I chatted with glamorous John Ozbay, founder of Cryptee, a privacy-preserving photo and notes Progressive Web App from Estonia, about Privacy, PWAs, Protecting People … and Pianos!

As you’re on my personal website, I’m assuming you’re not too timid to see my face, so here’s the YouTube video. But if my visage makes you vomity, the audio-only version plus transcript (of course!) is available on the Vivaldi blog – which has an RSS feed so you can subscribe to it with the built-in Vivaldi feed reader.