This reading list is courtesy of Vivaldi browser, who pay me decent money to fight for a better web and don’t moan at me for reading all this stuff. If you prefer to keep browsing human, without planet-burning plagiarism-filled Generative AI inserting itself between you and the Web, Vivaldi has you covered.
Masonry: Watching a CSS Feature Evolve– “At the end of the day, standards get shaped by a mix of politics, technical trade-offs, and developer feedback. Consensus is messy, and it’s rarely about one side “winning.””
Keep Android Open – “In August 2025, Google announced that starting next year, it will no longer be possible to develop apps for the Android platform without first registering centrally with Google.” What this means for your rights, and how you can help.
Mediabunny – “A JavaScript library for reading, writing, and converting video and audio files. Directly in the browser, and faster than anybunny else.”
Austria’s Ministry of Economy takes decisive steps toward digital sovereignty – “Within just four months between Proof of Concept and rollout, the ministry went live with a secure Nextcloud environment, operated on its own infrastructure in Austria and designed to meet strict transparency and compliance requirements.”
FFmpeg Receives $100K in Funding from India’s FLOSS/fund Initiative – FFmpeg is set to receive $100,000 from FLOSS/fund, a program launched by Indian stockbroking firm Zerodha to give back to the ecosystem that made its success possible. The team noted that, while welcome, this funding “does not solve the funding problems behind FFmpeg and Open Source in general.”
The Human Only Public License – “while nobody cares about robots.txt, people care about licenses. There are automated tools to find and check software licenses and raise alarms if ‘bad’ ones are used. And I can guarantee that HOPL will brightly flash red.”
The first ever banner ad: why did it work so well? – 31 years ago this week, on 27 October 1994, the first ever banner ad went live (on hotwired.com). For over four months, 44% of those who saw it clicked on it. An article by the person who wrote that banner.
In May 2021, Dr Rachael Kent, Senior Lecturer in Digital Economy & Society Education in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London, led a class action against Apple on behalf of 19.6 million UK consumers.
The complaint alleges that Apple abuses its dominant position through exclusion of any other app stores from iOS devices and the 30% surcharge that it imposes on apps that require payment at the point of download, subscription payments, or allow for in-app purchases (but not for “physical goods or services that will be consumed outside of the app”, for Reasons).
Yesterday (23 October 2025) the Competition Appeal Tribunal handed down its unanimous judgement:
In our view, [Apple’s] restrictions cannot sensibly be justified as being necessary or proportionate to deliver the benefits which Apple puts forward as flowing from its objective of an integrated and centralised system.
On the contrary, the competition which would exist absent the restrictions is in our view much more likely to deliver the benefits that consumers want, in the form and at the price point they want them.
The case was not heard in a vacuum; the Competition and Markets Authority gave evidence:
We also had the benefit of written observations from the Competition and Markets Authority (the
“CMA”), and oral opening and closing remarks from Mr Julian Gregory on behalf of the CMA. We found that very helpful and we are grateful for the CMA’s input.
and other regulatory regimes were studied:
The regulatory interventions in the EU, the Netherlands and South Korea all suggest that there is a perfectly workable outcome where iOS app distribution services and iOS in-app payments services are open to competition, without material impact on the services Apple provides.
Apple’s history was referenced:
From the earlier days of the iPhone, it appeared that this “walled garden” was a stated aim of Apple in the development of its iOS ecosystem. In an oft-quoted email in 20104, Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, stated that the strategy of the company was to “tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem”, so as to “make [the] Apple ecosystem even more sticky”.
Mr Jobs stated during the March 2008 launch event that Apple did not intend to make money from the App Store and that he hoped (but was unsure) that the Commission would cover the costs of running the App Store.
Apple tried its usual shtick that it monopolises services on iOS solely in order to protect the privacy and security of its customers. The Tribunal saw through this:
Apple has failed to establish that any performance, security or privacy benefits were attributable specifically to the restrictions it has imposed in relation to iOS app distribution and iOS in-app payments.
There is no reason why Apple cannot promote the choice it offers to users to transact through the App Store, with whatever enhanced protection Apple said it is able to deliver, as a means of differentiation. It is not necessary to remove user choice altogether to make that case.
In short, the restrictions relating to iOS app distribution are not necessary to provide iOS device users with the benefits which Apple said they are intended to promote and not proportionate to the objective of delivering those benefits.
In relation to the iOS in-app payment restrictions, Apple maintained similar arguments about security and privacy. In our judgement, these are unfounded…
As a monopolist in the market for iOS in-app payment services, it is not for Apple to seek to exclude potential market participants on the basis that users need to be protected from the perceived risks of using those alternative providers.
The Tribunal ordered damages to be paid, which is the difference between the calculated legitimate commission Apple should have charged, and the 30% it actually charged. It decided that 50% of that extra cost was passed on by developers to consumers, so all consumers who bought apps etc will be eligible for some level of payout. Interest of 8% is also payable. The amount wasn’t determined, but Dr Kent had asked for £1.5 billion.
Apple, of course, is very iSad about this, and will appeal. Of course it will; it will litigate everything, as it has a colossal legal budget and any delay is profit to a monopolist.
As I wring out another handkerchief, and hold an umbrella to shield Useless Dog from my torrent of sympathetic tears, I can’t help but think, “perhaps Apple should have just competed fairly, and not decided to be monopolistic arse-weasels”.
But it’s been an even bigger week for Dr Rachael Kent, who’s done a great service, fighting for tech consumers against monopolistic arse-weasels. She wrote
This isn’t just a win against the richest company in the world – it’s a win for consumers, for competition, and for the principle that no corporation, however powerful, is above the law.
Dr Kent, next time you’re in Birmingham, there’s a lamb and spinach balti and 7 pints of Guinness for you, on me and Vivaldi.
It’s a mere 4 years, 3 months and 22 days since a weird Australian developer and his brother contacted me to ask if I would be interested in speaking to UK competition regulators about Apple’s continuing holding back the Web (which I’d long been moaning about on Twitter). Today, the UK has finally designated Apple (and Google) strategic market status in mobile platforms because of their substantial and entrenched market power.
The fight isn’t over; now, the regulator will embark on a round of consulting about what remedies (if any) need to be ordered, to make Apple (and to a lesser extent, Google) behave themselves.
Apple will litgate this all the way, I’m sure. Yesterday, Apple took the EU to court, to argue that it’s “really mean” and “totally, like, not fair” to expect it to allow “stinky competitors” to access certain functions on iOS. Luckily, the Free Software Foundation Europe was on hand to argue on behalf of users.
So, I allow myself a brief pat on the back, and congratulate my erstwhile comrades at Open Web Advocacy, and all the other developers and associations who have helped get us here. I’m also grateful to Vivaldi browser who, since June last year, have employed me to look beautiful, and also to do this work (previously, I was self-funding).
This reading list is courtesy of Vivaldi browser, who pay me decent money to fight for a better web and don’t moan at me for reading all this stuff. If you prefer to keep browsing human, without planet-burning plagiarism-fulled Generative AI inserting itself between you and the Web, Vivaldi has you covered.
Link o’the Month: The App Store Was Always Authoritarian – “Apple is loaning its monopoly on iOS software to yet another authoritarian regime without a fight, painting a stark contrast: when profits are on the line, Cupertino will gaslight democratic regulators and defy pro-user laws with all the $1600/hr lawyers Harvard can graduate” says Big Al, absolutely correctly and with fancier words and less swearing than I would use to make the same points.
DOJ shelves ADA rulemaking on digital accessibility – “In a surprising regulatory rollback, the Department of Justice has withdrawn two key rulemaking efforts under the Americans with Disabilities Act, including long-awaited rules on digital accessibility.” – ha! That’ll show the Wokes!
Interop Feature Ranking – my old chum (and newly-mortal enemy, since he joined Firefox) Jank Architect, asks you to rank the web platform proposals you care about, giving us data we can use when reviewing which proposals should be taken on for 2026.
Incremental Font Transfer – IFT is a new standard to incrementally transfer a font from server to client, so reduced perceived latency, especially useful for large fonts like Chinese, Japanese, Korean etc
Open Social – a nice explanation, with pictures, of how the new open social protocols work and why they’re more ‘webby’
How tech powers immigration enforcement – “These technologies are in part aiding President Trump’s mass deportation plans, among the administration’s expansion of social media surveillance and data analytics.”
Evaluating the Impact of AI on the Labor Market: Current State of Affairs – “our metrics indicate that the broader labor market has not experienced a discernible disruption since ChatGPT’s release 33 months ago, undercutting fears that AI automation is currently eroding the demand for cognitive labor across the economy”
The Children Who Power Silicon Valley’s AI Dreams – “Congolese children mine cobalt for $2/day while 95% of Africa’s AI researchers can’t afford the GPUs their data trains… This is digital colonialism, measured in gigabytes and GPU hours.”
Last week, I went to New York, to attend Smashing Conference. I’ll be honest and admit that I was very nervous because of recent cases of USA incarcerating British, Irish, German and Canadian tourists, and my passport shows I was born in what is now Yemen. (Aden was a British Crown Colony when I was born, but I don’t fancy my chances discussing post-Suez British Colonial history while being waterboarded in Guantanamo.)
As it turned out, everything was fine; a charming border guard looked at my passport for two minutes while asking why I was there and when I was leaving, then gave me a smile as she wished me “a great time”.
New York doesn’t appear to have succumbed to the new order in the USA yet. In the venue, New World Stages in the Hell’s Kitchen neighbourhood, new signage proudly proclaimed that DEI is alive and well:
This time, I wasn’t speaking, but was attending as a representative of the Browser Choice Alliance, a coalition of browsers dedicated to the principle that consumers should have the right to use their browser of choice on Windows devices.
Amusingly, the conference was co-sponsored by Microsoft, so I got a chance to meet Patrick Brosset from the Edge team, who is a jolly good chap. (My beef is with Microsoft management, not the folks like Patrick who work on Interoperability.)
The conference was full of deep tech talks; I especially learned a great deal from Stephanie Eckles and Miriam Suzannes’ talks. Here’s a picture of me fanboying them at the Speakers/ Sponsors/ Crew after-drinks:
A talk on the UX of Dashboards was far more interesting than I expected from its title, and I really liked the talk from the ‘mystery speaker’, Yiying Lu, on creating the Twitter Fail Whale, the Unicode dumpling & boba tea emoji, and other amazing stories.
So I learned a lot, caught up with old friends (and Charis), and spoke to dozens of American developers about how the open web depends on free choice of web browsers.. As a bonus, I didn’t get detained, shot, or converted to some mad premillennialist rapture religion.
Today is Windows 10 Apocalypse Day in many countries; Microsoft will no longer provide security updates, meaning that the legendarily secure operating system will become increasingly vulnerable to hacks. For some reason, Microsoft would like the owners of the 400 million PCs currently running Windows 10 to buy new Windows 11 PCs, and discard their current laptops to be sent to poison children in the global south.
But you don’t have to do that. Your Windows 10 machine can carry on living an even better life, using Zorin OS, which is a free operating system called Linux, but tweaked to look and feel like classic Windows.
I recently converted my 80 year old mum’s PC from Win 10 to Zorin, and after a 10 minute intro to using it, she’s had no problems at all (she had been running Libre Office previously, rather than Microsoft Office, so there was less of a learning curve, but Libre Office is pretty easy to get used to after Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc).
Please note, there are many flavours of Linux (AKA ‘distros’). I’m not suggesting that any are somehow lesser quality. Manjaro Linux, for example, is reputedly excellent and comes with Vivaldi browser as default. I’m not a Linux aficionado, but wanted to rejuvenate an old machine for my mum. My reading suggested Zorin would be a candidate for an out of the box experience that would feel familiar to a Windows user, and my mum liked it when she tried it, so that parental tech support ticket was closed. YMMV – Your Mum May Vary.
You’ll need something to back up any personal files that aren’t already backed up to OneDrive/ Google Drive or Docs/ Dropbox/ Amazon etc, and one USB stick with 4GB or more to install Zorin from. This USB stick doesn’t need to be empty, but it will be over-written. Then, download Zorin Core (which is free, forever), and follow the installation instructions. (If you want, you can try it out without overwriting your existing system, but it will be a lot slower running off your USB drive, and once you remove the stick, Zorin is gone from your machine.)
If you have more than one machine to upgrade to Zorin, you can just install those from the previously-created USB drive.
Once you’ve set up Zorin, you’ll see a desktop reminiscent of classic Windows. The bottom left Zorin button is analogous to the Windows Start button. Customisation is done through the Zorin Appearance option:
There are options to further tweak the desktop theme:
You can also add shortcuts to the desktop (I like to have the Rubbish Bin on the desktop):
Libre Office, a PDF Reader, and some utilities are already preinstalled. From the start menu, you can install additional software from the Zorin store. Choose Software:
Do you use the Web? Do you like personalised, private and powerful browsing from a European alternative to Big Tech? Of course you do! From the (hard-to-find) search magnifying glass on the top left, search for Vivaldi:
Click the blue “install” button, then open it once it’s installed.
Open applications show their icon in the dock/ taskbar / dash; right-click on it and you can choose “Pin to dash” to keep the icon there at all times:
And now you have a fully-functioning PC running a free Operating System and browser that won’t nag you, nudge you to store all your files elsewhere, won’t spy on you, or sell your data to advertisers, or use your personal data to train an “Artificial Intelligence”.
What’s not to love (unless you’re a Microsoft board member or an e-waste smuggler)?
