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 a Vivaldi desktop snapshot, with a new onboarding step for people who have visual impairments, require keyboard-only access or use assistive technologies. Feedback would be most welcome.
Link o’ the week: Request for developer feedback: focusgroup – “The focusgroup HTML attribute is a proposed declarative way to add keyboard arrow-key navigation to composite widgets such as toolbars, tablists, menus, listboxes, etc. without writing any roving-tabindex JavaScript. One attribute replaces hundreds of lines of boilerplate.” – This is exciting,so kudos to the Microsoft Edge team and the Open UI Group for their work on this. Darwin knows, I give Microsoft a lot of grief for their management’s antics, but I have a whole lotta love for their web platform team.
The Enshittificator – a short Norwegian documentary about the life of an Enshittificator, and how the Internet and AI has enhanced his productivity.
Claude is an Electron App because we’ve lost native – “API-wise, native apps lost to web apps a long time ago. Native APIs are terrible to use, and OS vendors use everything in their power to make you not want to develop native apps for their platform”. (Ignore the reference to everyone’s favourite way to target 100 Iranian schoolgirls for shredding.)
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 7.8 for mobile, with even more personalistion and zero “A.I.”, because it’s cream of the crop, not a stream of the Slop.
Addicted to the algorithm: how Big Tech lobbies to keep us hooked on social media “As the EU prepares the Digital Fairness Act (DFA) to tackle the addictive nature of social media design, big tech companies are coming together to aggressively protect their business models. With Trumpists and far-right allies likely to join the chorus against the DFA, the Commission’s own drive for deregulation at all costs is not helping the chances of strong legislation.”
TL;DR: If Apple decides to kick you in the face, it must give you 5 minutes notice. And if you think it was too hard a kick, you can complain to Apple, which will investigate Apple. If the CMA believes Apple routinely gives you less than 5 minutes notice, or routinely kicks you too hard, and Apple’s thorough and impartial investigation of Apple finds no good reason, CMA will consider thinking about contemplating beginning a process to give Apple a really, really strong telling-off.
that, after careful consideration, we think could address our concerns in relation to these matters quickly, effectively and proportionately. This is on the basis that the proposed commitments include robust transparency and oversight measures, so that the CMA and other stakeholders can monitor how Apple and Google are delivering on the commitments and their effectiveness.
Five years after the CMA began investigating competition in the mobile ecosystem, this feels pretty weak to me.
Tom Smith, who is a competition lawyer at Geradin Partners and a former CMA director (so is 76 times cleverer than me) wrote
the CMA isn’t actually proposing any formal conduct requirements at all. They are proposing to accept non-binding commitments from Google and Apple that they will run a fairer app review process and be fairer in how they rank apps in the app stores. Oh, and Apple is promising to consider interoperability requests fairly and objectively 😉 🤞 …
It’s also deeply misleading for the CMA to describe these promises as “commitments”, which is a word with actual legal meaning (and legal enforceability) in the pro-competitive interventions process and in competition enforcement cases under the Competition Act.
Our immediate focus in this area will be on considering improvements to the process by which app developers can request interoperable access to key functionality within Apple’s mobile operating systems (Category 1). Whilst the aim would not be to create a default interoperability requirement, it would aim to ensure that Apple’s decisions in respect of interoperability requests are fair, transparent and objective.
Quite why the CMA does not aim to create a default interoperability requirement is beyond my small brain to fathom. But even within this very lightweight framing, Apple’s commitments are hugely underwhelming. From their document:
Apple will launch a dedicated interoperability feedback channel for developers to submit interoperability requests to Apple…
The feedback channel will be available to developers that are members in good standing of the Developer Program and whose account membership with the Developer Program is registered in the UK (“Eligible Developers”).
If your customers are in UK, but your developers aren’t, bad luck – no interop for you!
Vivaldi browser (who I work for) has a Developer Program enterprise account that is global, and registered in Norway, as that’s where we’re headquartered. We have many UK users, but presumably we couldn’t request interoperability with an iOS service, and neither could a browser based in San Francisco, or Mountain View. To the best of my knowledge, the only UK-based browsers are my colleagues in the Browser Choice Alliance, Wavebox and Waterfox, which are both desktop browsers.
(CMA says elsewhere in its Other work planned for 2026 “We expect to progress work in relation to Apple concerning browsers (removal of the WebKit restriction) as well as interoperable access to functionality for connected devices”. But that’s only expected, and no further details are available.)
However, assume you are a UK developer and want to interoperate with an iOS service – for example, AirDrop. Apple says,
Apple will make clear the kinds of requests that are eligible for consideration under the feedback channel, namely requests for access to equivalent system and hardware functionality used by Apple services or accessories.
So far, so good: if an Apple service or Apple accessory (e.g. watch) can access some iOS function, you should be able to do so too. But (you knew there would be a “but”, didn’t you?):
Apple will assess eligible requests against the following set of criteria: (i) expected user and developer uptake; (ii) alignment with Apple’s platform priorities; (iii) potential implementation costs; (iv) potential impact on user experience, performance/battery, security, safety, privacy, integrity, and accessibility; and (v) potential impact on Apple’s intellectual property rights.
Hang on: Apple can deny a competitor access to an existing iOS service, if it decides there won’t be enough user uptake? Then why did it implement it in the first place? If access to a feature, that Apple has already implemented and uses in its own products, doesn’t align “with Apple’s platform priorities”, why did they add that feature to their platform? Who judges “impact on user experience”? What does “integrity” mean? (It’s in pretty short supply in Cupertino these days.)
Receiving a request through the feedback channel will not create any obligation or expectation that Apple will commit to building a specific requested feature … which will remain at Apple’s discretion in line with its commercial strategy and priorities.
Apple’s commercial strategy has always been to maintain its monopoly, and its priorities haven’t changed since Saint Steve wrote in 2010
Tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem
So if Apple denies your request to access AirDrop (or whatever) because allowing you to compete isn’t “in line with its commercial strategy and priorities”, that’s OK, according to commitments which the CMA thinks “could address our concerns”?
We will move quickly to bring forward conduct requirements, including considering whether more stringent measures are necessary, if these commitments are not adhered to or we find they are proving ineffective. For example, if we find Apple is routinely declining interoperability requests without good reason, this will inform our pipeline of wider work – and we could bring forward specific interoperability requirements.
There are far stricter requirements for Apple in the EU, yet Apple is jizzing out European lawsuits left right and centre to avoid competition. So in UK, I expect a few months (years?) of Apple wriggling to avoid allowing meaningful iOS competition, until CMA receives so many complaints that it begins a ponderous investigation to impose some actual conduct requirements. And all that time, UK app developers suffer, UK consumers get less choice, and Apple is laughing all the way to the bank. Any delay is a victory, for a monopolist.
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.
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.”
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)
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.
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”
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
The Performance Inequality Gap, 2026 – “median mobile page is now 70 times larger than the total storage of the computer that landed men on the moon … The result is a web that increasingly punishes the poor for their bad luck while paying developers huge salaries to deliver business-undermining results” writes Big Al Russell
requestPictureInPicture() (PiP / PinP) does not work in Home Screen Web Apps (PWA) on iOS/iPadOS – “Multiple developers have independently reported this issue over the past four years … This significantly degrades the value proposition of Home Screen web apps compared to the same experience in Safari on the same device, PWAs on other platforms where PiP works in standalone mode”. It’s almost as if Apple want to hobble PWAs just enough to make them unviable, but functional enough to claim to regulators that there is a distribution channel outside the App Store and the Apple Tax!
Where Do the Children Play? On the need for a world without us -“Western children are almost comically sheltered. But in digital space, they’re entirely beyond our command; and increasingly, that’s where children spend most of their time. You don’t need me to tell you about the dire consequences of that shift. Why do our children spend more time in Fortnite than forests? Usually, we blame the change on tech companies … I want to suggest an alternative: digital space is the only place left where children can grow up without us”
Remove Windows AI – “The current 25H2 build of Windows 11 and future builds will include increasingly more AI features and components. This script aims to remove ALL of these features to improve user experience, privacy and security.”
The world needs social sovereignty – “By making the news and truth contingent on advertising budgets we’ve created an environment where any narrative can win, as long as the storyteller is willing to pay … The promise of the fediverse is the promise of a better way forward: free from ads and manipulative algorithms”
So Long and Thanks for All the Applets – So farewell, Java Applets: “The entire java.applet package has been removed from JDK 26, which will release in March 2026.”
Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer – a WordPress plugin designed to combat link rot. It automatically scans your post contentto detect outbound links, checks the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for an archived version and creates a snapshot if one isn’t available. When a linked page disappears, the plugin helps preserve your user experience by redirecting visitors to a reliable archived version.
SVG Cickjacking – “Clickjacking is a classic attack that consists of covering up an iframe of some other website in an attempt to trick the user into unintentionally interacting with it. It works great if you need to trick someone into pressing a button or two, but for anything more complicated it’s kind of unrealistic. I’ve discovered a new technique that turns classic clickjacking on its head and enables the creation of complex interactive clickjacking attacks, as well as multiple forms of data exfiltration.”
Top Lobbyists 2025 – Huge congrats to Apple, ACT/ The App Association, AWS, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, who are named in The Hill’s “Top lobbyists of 2025”, along with other loved and trusted brands like Philip Morris, ExxonMobil, Boeing, Occidental Petroleum, Lockheed Martin, and McDonalds.
Masonry: Things You Won’t Need A Library For Anymore – a nice overview of things that you don’t need JS for, if you’ve been out of Web Platform World for more than 15 mins (eg, in Framework Limbo or Full Stack Purgatory), and a look at CSS Masonry from glamorous Patrick “Edge” Brosset
WebGPU is now supported in major browsers – “This significant milestone results from years of extensive collaborative development by the W3C GPU for the Web Working Group, with contributions from companies including Apple, Google, Intel, Microsoft, and Mozilla.”
A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size – Anthropic: “as few as 250 malicious documents can produce a “backdoor” vulnerability in a large language model—regardless of model size or training data volume.”
I was excited to see that the proposed new Web Install API has entered Origin Trial in Chromium. It kind of works in Chromium Canary, but is most complete in Microsoft Edge beta (or, if you’re reading this after December 2025, starting with version 143). This makes sense, as the work has been done by the Edge team in Microsoft.
The reason I was excited is because I read the Web install API explainer when it was announced a few months ago:
The Web Install API provides a way to democratise and decentralise web application acquisition, by enabling “do-it-yourself” end users and developers to have control over the application discovery and distribution process. It provides the tools needed to allow a web site to install a web app. This means end users have the option to more easily discover new applications and experiences that they can acquire with reduced friction.
The current way of acquiring a web app may involve search, navigation, proprietary protocols, proprietary app banners, and multiple other workarounds. This can be confusing for end users that must learn how to acquire apps in every different platform, with even different browsers handling the acquisition process differently.
The web platform doesn’t have a built-in way to facilitate app discovery and distribution, the Web Install API aims to fix this.
Let’s dive in. As someone who doesn’t habitually use Edge, it took me a while to find the beta – download it from the Insider Channel. You’ll need to go to chrome://flags and enable Web App Installation API and then restart the browser.
There’s a nice demo page called Edge Demos, laid out with CSS Masonry (Rachel Remix), which can be installed as a standalone Web App. Clicking the Install button shows a normal (browser-generated) permission dialog:
Install Edge Demos app
Publisher: microsoftedge.github.io
Use this site often? Install the app which:
• Opens in a focused window
• Has quick access options like pin to Dock
• Syncs across multiple devices
Clicking ‘install’ opens a new window, in which the site is installed stand-alone:
As the site is itself an “App store”, I can install another app with a similar UX (although it’s not clear to me why the ‘use this site often?’ wording has changed):
And this too opens full-window, with no browser chrome:
Each of these installed apps shows up as a separate app when I do cmd+tab (on a Mac)
If you try to install an app that’s already installed in Edge, it knows this and shows a dialog “Open with…” or “Not now” (note to Microsoft: “no” is a perfectly good English word). I don’t know how you uninstall an app; on a Mac, they’re stored in Applications > Edge Beta Apps, but when I deleted them and re-started the browser, they were still installed. This doesn’t worry me; this isn’t on the open web, and it’s an origin trial of the API, not the UI.
The Webkitephant in the room
Of course, there’s a big question about Apple, who try their best to hide installation of Web Apps on iOS (and last year, even tried to kill all PWAs in the EU).
iOS also has its own proprietary MarketplaceKit which “enables alternative app marketplaces to install the apps they distribute to peoples’ devices”, but only in the European Union, and you must go cap-in-hand to Apple to ask for entitlement, provide Apple a stand-by letter of credit in the amount of €1,000,000 from a financial institution (or be a member of good standing in the Apple Developer Program for two continuous years or more, and have an app that had more than one million first annual installs on iOS in the EU), and pay Apple €0.50 for each first annual install of their marketplace app.
However, Diego González, the glamorous PM for PWAs on the Edge team, said on Mastodon
in scope of the W3C WebApps WG, Firefox, Safari and Chromium agreed to work on ‘current document’ installation. There’s discussion on a declarative way of enabling this as well, so there is cross-vendor progress
I notice that in the explainer, one of the people thanked for input is Marcos Cáceres. Marcos is a glamorous and jolly good chap who is now at Apple, but previously worked with me at Opera on W3C Widgets (a precursor to Web Apps) and then later on the W3C Web App Manifest spec that, along with Service Worker, powers lots of lovely PWAs today. He’s someone who has worked for years to make Web Apps work well (even at Apple; along with Microsoft, he was one of the editors of the Badging API spec). So I’m cautiously hopeful.
now this means to start we’d only get ability to install the same page you’re browsing, but the cross-site install is something that continues discussion on WICG.
In the meantime, in Chromium we are committed to enabling and experimenting with ‘background-document’ installations.
I admit I’m not known for complimenting Microsoft’s management and their browser tactics at the Operating System level, but I have huge respect for chums on the Edge team for their standards work. I hope the origin trials are successful, so that the Web Install API and <install> element come to the web platform and all browsers, including on iOS where, so far, there is still a WebKit monopoly.
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 users rather than planet-burning plagiarism-filled Generative AI.
The EU made Apple adopt new Wi-Fi standards, and now Android can support AirDrop – “If I had to guess why neither of Google’s Quick Share posts mentions Wi-Fi interoperability standards or the DMA… it may be that Google doesn’t want to explicitly credit or praise the DMA. …For its part, Apple recently called for the DMA to be repealed entirely”. Interop, drop by (air)drop
The EU has let US tech giants run riot. Diluting our data law will only entrench their power – “Europe is hurtling toward digital vassalage… Enforcing Europe’s data rules would not only protect our democracies and children from nasty algorithms, it would also disrupt big tech’s cascading monopolies across Europe. Crucially for Europe’s competitiveness, this is what would create the space for European tech SMEs and startups to scale up everywhere in Europe.”
Apple Loses Landmark U.K. Lawsuit Over App Store Commissions – Gruber saying extraordinary truths about Apple’s losing strategy of thumbing its nose at regulators over the App Store: “”Apple has approached all this regulatory conflict from a perspective that they’re right, and the regulators are wrong … However Apple thinks all of this should work out is not the way it is working out.”
Recall for Linux – “Are you forced to work with Linux? Do you miss the convenience of Microsoft spying on you and keeping track of everything? Fear not!”
Wheel running in the wild – “If wheel running is indeed caused by captive housing, wild mice are not expected to use a running wheel in nature. This however, to our knowledge, has never been tested. Here, we show that when running wheels are placed in nature, they are frequently used by wild mice, also when no extrinsic reward is provided. … Wheel movement not caused by mice was caused by shrews, rats, snails, slugs or frogs”
