Bruce Lawson's personal site

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. We build a browser that’s cream of the crop, not a stream of the Slop.

• Naked Power: Apple and Google’s mobile duopoly is held together with chewing gum, twine, and moral vacuity – Apple and Google’s quisling era unearths the lies they’ve told to justify monopoly power over software for the most consequential computing platforms of our lives. If the app stores can’t move against Musk/Grok, they should not be trusted with any of the powers they demand: Big Al nails it, as usual.
• Opening and Closing Dialogs Without JavaScript Using HTML Invoker Commands
• Death to Scroll Fade – David Bushell shows why it’s evil
• Technological dependence on American software and cloud services: an assessment of the economic consequences in Europe – “European Union companies’ annual purchases of cloud software services that benefit the US economy amount to €264 billion … If the EU were able to produce 15% of services it currently purchases from the US in 2035, this would result in 463,000 additional jobs in the EU.” (May 2025)
• Should EU give preference to European products in public procurement? My chum Ursula seeks your opinion before 26 Jan
• Accessible faux-nested interactive controls – flippin’ elegant shizzle from Eric ‘n’ Andy
• The datalist element on iOS 26 “is all fucked up on iOS. Again”, reports Jeremy Keith
• JPEG-XL Image Support Returns To Latest Chrome / Chromium Code – presumably because the PDF Association will add support for JXL image format to the PDF spec
• Microsoft Gave FBI BitLocker Encryption Keys, Exposing Privacy Flaw – Privacy? In *this* A.I. economy?
• New Social Web Working Group at W3C – “One Community Group document that will be moving into the Working Group is LOLA…. LOLA lets users move from one ActivityPub server to another while retaining all their social connections, their content, and their reactions. It’s a great improvement for data portability on the social web.”
• MacPaw Pulls Plug on Setapp Mobile iOS Store, Citing ‘Still-Evolving and Complex Business Terms’ for Alternative EU Marketplaces – Apple’s Core Technology Fee is doing what it was designed to do: deter competitors
• Ribera stresses EU’s ‘constitutional obligation’ to uphold its digital rules – “We have no doubt about the importance of showing that we are here to ensure the enforcement of the law,” said EU’s Competition Chief, facing down US attacks on DMA
• Introducing the <geolocation> HTML element – Wave goodbye to more tedious JS boilerplate code. As far as I’m concerned, UI stuff should all be declarative. Save JS for business logic (or React, if you want an incredibly slow site to annoy users or you’re showcasing your new loading spinner designs)
• Apple will pay Google for Gemini to power Siri and ‘Apple Intelligence’. The Verge speculates on What Apple and Google’s Gemini deal means for both companies. For consumers: HURRAH CHOICE
• The return of Mr Fist – Chatting Fireside with Bruce Lawson – Steve Faulkner and I chat bollocks for an hour
• New Tesla feature to automatically create explicit images of pedestrians it passes on the street

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. We’ve just released Vivaldi 7.7 for desktop and mobile, with features requested by our users instead of planet-burning plagiarism-filled Generative AI.

• Masonry Layout is Now grid-lanes
• Airbus to migrate critical apps to a sovereign Euro cloud – Airbus is preparing to tender a major contract to migrate mission-critical workloads to a digitally sovereign European cloud – but estimates only an 80/20 chance of finding a suitable provider
• related: Getting off US tech: a guide – Personally, I’m not comfortable framing it as “dropping US tech services”. It’s not about nationalism, or boycotting specific nations for me; it’s about controlling your own data (or your nation controlling its own data) rather than it being strip-mined by TechBros.
• 4 CSS Features Every Front-End Developer Should Know In 2026 by Adam Argyll
• Web dependencies are broken. Can we fix them? asks Lea Verou
• Extracting books from production language models ^[PDF] – “We extract nearly all of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone from jailbroken Claude…substantial proportions of the book from Gemini 2.5 Pro and Grok 3 and notably do not need to jailbreak them to do so”
• EasySpeak Voice control for Linux desktops – Fully local, no cloud, Wayland-native, free and open source
• 5 accessibility checks to run on every component by Hidde the hunk from Holland
• Windows 11’s “Share with Copilot” Wants AI to See Your App Windows – “It sounds useful, but it also raises real privacy questions, especially since it shows up enabled by default.”
• European Open Digital Ecosystem Strategy – The EU is working on what is in essence a new Open Source strategy for Europe, and the call for evidence is now open. If you’re a European hippie communist, you can provide input.
• the Delayed Message Timing API – “Making complex web apps faster”
• The Secret Life of Custom Elements by Brian from the Internet
• [Range] Multi-handle necessity and scalability guidelines (3+ Thumbs) – That nice Brecht De Ruyte of the Open UI group (that gave HTML new fancy <select>, not the AI snakeoil merchants) wants your use-cases for multi-handle range controls
• The Curious Case of the Shallow Session SPAs by Big Al
• Microsoft Scales Back AI Goals Because Almost Nobody Is Using Copilot – “its momentum has stalled, and like everyone else, it’s not making much money from its AI products. That’s because no one is buying them, and that is because very few people actually find them useful”
• Apple wins partial reversal of sanctions in Epic Games antitrust lawsuit – The three-judge panel the lower court’s ruling that barred Apple from charging fees on purchases off the AppStore giving Apple a chance to make a claim to a reasonable commission on those
• Should we turn the internet off? – Guardian readers give their answers.
• Court in Zwolle rules couple not married after ChatGPT-written ceremony

Because I’m so the rock ‘n’ roll, I’ve been reading the summary of responses to the first review of the Digital Markets Act. There were “450 contributions submitted by a broad range of interested parties, including small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), gatekeepers, civil society organisations, academics, and individual citizens”.

The report contains many surprises. Some of them might shock you.

Several respondents argued that fines so far have been too slow to deter non-compliance while penalties for repeat non-compliances should be higher.

But – surprise!

Gatekeepers, in contrast, argued for proportionate fines, based on EU revenues only and only for deliberate or repeated violations.

The summary continues:

Business users, SMEs, civil society, and some legal experts expressed concerns that public summaries of compliance reports lack sufficient detail, are not independently verified, and do not provide meaningful information for assessing outcomes.

But – surprise!

Gatekeepers on the other hand emphasised the significant resources invested in compliance but argued that overly prescriptive reporting expectations could limit flexibility

Many respondents reported early positive effects of the DMA:

more consistent browser and app-choice opportunities, the ability to uninstall default applications, the emergence of alternative app marketplace options on Apple’s iOS, more freedom regarding app distribution … and new data portability solutions …

many respondents agreed that, to contribute to achieving the DMA’s objective of fairer and more contestable digital markets, enforcement of the DMA needs to be sustained, effective and well-resourced

But – surprise!

Gatekeepers and several respondents affiliated to gatekeepers voiced a number a criticisms notably regarding negative impact on innovation and user experience, as well as concerns that implementation of certain obligations is disproportionate.

TL;DR: most people think DMA is starting to work, and want more.

But – surprise! – massive corporations with profits as large as small nations, derived from years of monopolistic rent extraction, are Very Sad. Obeying laws is tricky, and can cost almost as much as their Chief Counsel’s mahogany desk. And how can they guarantee your comfort and security if they can’t control what is (allegedly) your machine?

(Ben Schroeter, Booking.com’s Director of Economic Policy & Strategic Engagement used an “A.I.” to analyse the responses in DMA Article 53 Review: Mapping the Fault Lines.)

Farewell, 2025. It was my first full year working at Vivaldi, which will never make me rich but allows me to work with great people, do interesting things, and not worry that my soul is rotting. I only spoke at a couple of conferences: CSS Day in Amsterdam, and was an MC at the excellent Birmingham grassroots TechMids, organised by the newly-enobled Dr Tom Goodman.

Work travel becomes increasingly hellish as I age, but I went to Brussels to bother Regulators about Microsoft a couple of times by train (57 times nicer than flying, even if it takes slightly longer), and went to Oslol to see my chums in Vivaldi HQ. I went to New York for a whole three days (!), which will be my last US trip under the current regime. I also squeezed in a brief holiday in Türkiye.

Work wise, as my friends and erstwhile colleagues wrote in Open Web Advocacy 2025 in Review,

A lot happened in 2025 for browsers and web apps with new investigations, laws, and court cases across the EU, Japan, the US, Australia, and the UK… Apple is now barred from blocking third-party browser engines on iOS in 28 countries, soon likely 30. However, it continues to resist real competition.

I’ve also been helping Vivaldi take the fight to Microsoft as a member of the Browser Choice Alliance, and we’re certainly seeing some success, at least in the European Union.

Personally, I released my third album with the cruellest months, called On the Air, which you should definitely listen to and buy for a mere £5.

In other, very personal, news, I had a colonoscopy, which was unfun (but not painful). You can read all about my colonoscopy fun, should you be facing one of these any time.

2026 will be an “exciting” year, I think. Across Europe, people and organisations are becoming disenchanted with relying on Big Tech. Within just four months between Proof of Concept and rollout, Austria’s Federal Ministry for Economy, Energy and Tourism went live with a secure Nextcloud environment, operated on its own infrastructure in Austria and designed to meet strict transparency and compliance requirements. Germany’s Schleswig-Holstein migrated to Open Source Email Systems. MEPs have written to its President to demand digital sovereignty in the EU Parliament, citing a range of European alternatives, including Vivaldi.

Danmark Skifter [Denmark shifts] is a national campaign from from January 1 to March 20, 2026, in which thousands of Danes will “take back control of their digital lives – not alone, but together”. European alternatives lists “European alternatives for digital service and products, like cloud services and SaaS products”. I moved my 80 year old mum from Windows to Linux.

Most Big Tech happens to be in the USA, and its current administration is unlikely to be delighted by pesky European communists wanting autonomy. The US Government has already sanctioned a former EU commissioner and four Europeans over EU legislation to curb online hate speech. Big Tech firms are affronted that their Manifest Web Destiny is being challenged; expect Apple to become especially litigious.

Of course, I will fight on as I have been doing, both before and during my employment with Vivaldi. I’ll work with other browsers and civil society organisations, to keep the web open, and free,

My personal resolutions: I shall also try to lose some of my middle-aged paunchiness, and drink less beer (I suspect that there might be a link between the two). I shall also try to release my fourth album, and remain utterly gorgeous.