Crikey, it’s been ages since I posted a reading list, so here’s every tab I had saved in my “Reading List” Vivaldi workspace. Apologies if some have been posted before!
Marginalia – a search engine that prioritizes non-commercial content, no AI, no tracking, open-source. “The goal is to bring you the sort of grass fed, free range HTML your grandma used to write”
Hyoeraudio Lite – Installable PWA lightweight transcript editor for creating, editing and correcting machine‑generated transcripts — then turning them into captions, edited media and interactive transcripts, by Mark Boas
The Goldilocks customizable select height – ” I realised there’s a sizing ‘pattern’ that’s almost always the-one-you-want, but it took me a long time to figure out how to do it in CSS” writes Web Standards hunk Jank Architect
County With 37 Data Centers Asks Schools to ‘Conserve Electricity’ – “Henrico County is a major hub for data centers in Virginia. Its officials said it expects a 25% rise in electricity costs next year, and advised workers to close the blinds and turn off their computers to make up for it.”
US Supreme Court just blew up EU-US Data Transfers– “US Supreme Court decided the US Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) may not be independent anymore. Since 2000, the EU has relied on the “independent” FTC as the enforcer of EU-US deals on personal data. According to EU treaty law, such oversight must be independent. In the current EU-US deal, the European Commission relies on the independent FTC 259 (!) times”.
NFC access on iOS – CMA call for evidence – “We are continuing to work on the full design of any potential intervention to ensure fair and reasonable NFC access on iOS”
Google and Apple’s Anti-DMA Lobbying Strategy Goes All-in on Security and Privacy – As the EU starts to press Big Tech to open their operating systems to competitors’ services, you’ll hear a lot more handwringing from them about privacy and security. Most is FUD. Look at their record for privacy and security, especially of their own single-platform (“native”) apps and app stores.
The Slow Death of the Power User – “This is the result of two decades of deliberate, calculated effort by the largest technology companies on earth to turn users into consumers, instruments into appliances, and technical literacy into a niche hobby for weirdos.”
How AI reduces the world to stereotypes – Rest of World analyzed 3,000 AI images (“an Indian person,” “a house in Mexico,” “a plate of Nigerian food”, etc) to see how image generators visualize different countries and cultures.
Ad infinitum – “Google didn’t talk about ads in the I/O keynote. Everything they announced is the new ad system. One that, in the eyes of Google, no longer needs the open web as an intermediary … Google is betting its entire future on a world where people eagerly hand over their emails, their files, their habits, and their trust – to an AI system that will quietly auction off their attention, word by word, to the highest bidder.”
Six Characters – What the PNR locator on your boarding pass actually contains, and why the fare calculation line on your e-ticket is written in a currency that does not exist.
How sheep and solar power work together at the Volkswagen Chattanooga factory – “Adaptive grazing with sheep is an efficient and cost-effective way to control vegetation and minimize erosion risks on utility scale solar facilities … To help keep the sheep safe, Silicon Ranch Corp. employs “guard” donkeys to alert the sheep of any threatening wildlife.”
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 7.9, with even more personalistion and zero “A.I.”, because it’s cream of the crop, not a stream of the Slop.
The end of responsive images – As another perp behind the ungainly responsive images syntax, I too feel Matttt Marquis’ pain, and say yay sizes=”auto” for lazyloaded images.
Roving Tabindex – A simple dependency-free HTML web component that implements the roving tabindex pattern for building accessible menus and grids
Talking of which… Google’s Prompt API – No web standard should require you to agree to an advertising company’s “terms of use”, says glamorous Matttt Marquis.
Under the hood of MDN’s new frontend – in which it is revealed that using React to serve essentially static content “accumulated quite a lot of technical debt”, and is better replaced by … Web Components and CSS, AKA “the web platform”. And also the revolutionary new concept of “Shipping only what’s required”.
How Many Bites at the Apple? – Gene Burrus, who headed up Microsoft legal after the landmark IE browser monopoly case, writes “Apple has again asked the Supreme Court in the United States to excuse its engagement in unfair methods of competition and contempt of court”
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 7.9, with even more personalistion and zero “A.I.”, because it’s cream of the crop, not a stream of the Slop.
HTML in canvas – “There’s a new WICG proposal that lets you render real, interactive HTML elements into a <canvas>. including WebGL and WebGPU contexts. I spent a few days building demos with it.”
Amazon is cutting off support for older Kindles – but don’t worry! Bountiful beneficent Bezos is “encouraging” you to buy a new one with a 20% discount, so just drop your old one in a canal, or hoik it at a baby eagle, or bash an otter to death with it. Or, if you’re really evil, you could jailbreak it so you can continue to read books you already own on a device you already own.
I Decompiled the White House’s New App – “The official White House Android app has a cookie/paywall bypass injector, tracks your GPS every 4.5 minutes, and loads JavaScript from some guy’s GitHub Pages”
The AI Great Leap Forward by Han Lee. “In 1958, Mao ordered every village in China to produce steel. Farmers melted down their cooking pots in backyard furnaces and reported spectacular numbers. The steel was useless. The crops rotted. Thirty million people starved.In 2026, every other company is having top down mandate on AI transformation.”
Meanwhile… Inside the far-right network targeting Europe’s digital rules – “The Trump administration and a network of far-right think tanks are increasingly targeting the EU’s digital regulations and rules on content moderation. Far-right MEPs have taken over these narratives, while tech companies are hoping to exploit the opportunity.”
North Carolina Man Pleads Guilty To Music Streaming Fraud Aided By Artificial Intelligence – He used Slop-generators to create hundreds of thousands of “songs”, and bots to stream those slongs billions of times, collecting $8m in royalties. It’s the perfect metaphor for late-stage capitalism: burning forests to generate fake songs to stream by robots that can’t hear, endlessly, while artists starve.
Google Just Patented The End Of Your Website – “a system that evaluates your company’s landing page in real time and, if it decides the page won’t perform well enough for a specific user, replaces it with an AI-generated version assembled on the fly. The user never sees what your team built, they see what Google’s machine learning model thinks they should see instead.”
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.”
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.