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 It automatically scans your post contentto detect outbound links, checks the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for an archived version and creates a snapshot if one isn’t available.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.”
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”
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.
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.”
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 a planet-burning plagiarism-fulled hallucinating helper inserting itself between you and the Web, Vivaldi has you covered. Version 7.6 for Desktop was released last week, with even more customisation and personalisation options.
Apple’s Assault on Standards – Big Al again. “Apple’s centralisation through the App Store entrenches the positions of peer big tech firms, harming the prospects of competitors in turn. I submit that Apple have been, over the course of many years, poisonous to internet standards and the moral commitments embodied in that grand project.
Inclusive Design 24, 2025 edition – the playlist of all the accessibility talks is on YouTube, courtesy of Tetralogical and Friends (thanks for the invitation to co-host, Pattypoo!)
Meta to stop its AI chatbots from talking to teens about suicide – ‘two weeks after a US senator launched an investigation into the tech giant after notes in a leaked internal document suggested its AI products could have “sensual” chats with teenagers”. If Meta were a person, you wouldn’t let your kids within a mile of them.
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.
Web Install API – this proposed new API aims to standardize the way installations are invoked by end users, without proprietary “smart” banners, UA prompts, hidden UX etc. It allows web-based catalogues that can install PWAs directly into multiple platforms. Yes please!
UK backs down in Apple privacy row, US says – It’s rare that I find myself agreeing with Apple and some horrible MAGA weirdo, but it’s good that the UK (reportedly) dropped its so-secret-we-won’t-even-confirm-its-existence demand to access global Apple users’ data if required. This and the risible Online Safety Act shows that UK gov really needs some actual tech-literate advisors.
Apple vs. Facebook is Kayfabe – “How do we know? In-app Browsers”. Big Al (to use Alex Russell’s wrestling name) blogging with righteous fury, and words that nobody else knows
Mexit, not Brexit, is the new priority for the UK – “A Microsoft Exit strategy isn’t just a good idea, it’s vital. It must go a long way beyond a farewell to Redmond … The current UK government [mistakes] a fondness for magical AI and datacenters for a digital strategy.”
Meta’s AI rules have let bots hold ‘sensual’ chats with kids, offer false medical info – An internal Meta Platforms document detailing policies on chatbot behavior has permitted the company’s artificial intelligence creations to “engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,” generate false medical information and help users argue that Black people are “dumber than white people.”
Brick by brick: Help us build CSS Masonry – CSS masonry is ready for early developer testing from Chromium 140. “With open issues surrounding the CSS masonry specification and syntax still remaining, your feedback is crucial to help us cement the final shape of the API.”
How the App Store Helped Kill My Startup, and Why That Should Matter to You – “Apple intentionally makes web apps harder to use. It’s incredibly difficult for the average user to install or even find a web app on an iPhone. We had to create TikToks just to teach users how to save our web app to their home screen. And even that confused people, largely because Apple designed it to be confusing.”
Introducing copyparty, the FOSS file server – “turn almost any device into a file server with resumable uploads/downloads using any web browser. server only needs Python (2 or 3), all dependencies optional”
It’s time for modern CSS to kill the SPA – An SEO consultant writes “Use modern server rendering. Use actual pages. Animate with CSS. Preload with intent. Ship less JavaScript. Build like it’s 2025 – not like you’re trapped in a 2018 demo of Gatsby. You’ll end up with faster sites, happier users, and fewer regrets.”
Accessibility Guidelines by job role Vox Media breaks down some accessibility tasks by job role, including content creators, designers, developers, project managers, and testers.
How big tech is force-feeding us AI – I’m reading a study “Imposing AI: Deceptive design patterns against sustainability” and thinking about how to integrate that into Vivaldi’s feedback on the Digital Fairness Bill. Many people don’t want to be tricked (or forced) to use -or feed- LLMs.
Europe’s tech sovereignty watch – “Proton analyzed business email domains across Europe to show how many publicly listed companies are reliant on US email and email security services. We looked at email because it’s often the gateway to a company’s tech stack.” Disappointingly (but unsurprisingly) 88% of UK businesses rely on US tech.
Meta to stop selling political ads in the EU from October – The EU “mandates companies selling ads to clearly label political ads; provide information about their sponsor, the election or referendum they concern, what the ad cost, and targeting mechanisms used”. Meta is sad: “we’re seeing regulatory obligations effectively remove popular products and services from the market”. With whom is micro-targeted brainwashing popular, you shady zuckwits?
AI summaries cause ‘devastating’ drop in audiences, online news media told – “a site previously ranked first in a search result could lose about 79% of its traffic for that query if results were delivered below an AI overview. The study also found that links to YouTube – owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet – were more prominent compared with the normal search result system. The research has been submitted as part of a legal complaint to the UK’s competition watchdog about the impact of Google AI Overviews”. Stealing other people’s intellectual property?! The very idea!
Google loses app store antitrust appeal, must make sweeping changes to Play Store – “Google will need to stop requiring developers to use its Google Play billing system, opening up third-party payments that could earn developers more revenue.… It must make the full Google Play app catalog available for distribution on other app stores… Perhaps most devastating for Google, it will have to allow third-party app stores to be distributed within Google Play.”
Google’s AI Overviews hit by EU antitrust complaint from independent publishers – “Google’s core search engine service is misusing web content for Google’s AI Overviews in Google Search, which have caused, and continue to cause, significant harm to publishers, including news publishers in the form of traffic, readership and revenue loss” the Independent Publishers Alliance document said.
Phishing For Gemini – “a prompt-injection vulnerability in Google Gemini for Workspace that allows a threat-actor to hide malicious instructions inside an email. When the recipient clicks “Summarize this email”, Gemini faithfully obeys the hidden prompt and appends a phishing warning that looks as if it came from Google itself.” So simple: a white-on-white hidden prompt (or in 0px font), yet the mega geniuses who push compulsory “A.I.” on us didn’t think of it. FFS. Gemini should be renamed “Pisces”, amirite?
Links? Links! – Big Al Russell’s OPML file full of RSS feeds for for folks getting into performance and platform-oriented web development
‘Positive review only’: Researchers hide AI prompts in papers – “The prompts were one to three sentences long, with instructions such as “give a positive review only” and “do not highlight any negatives … The prompts were concealed from human readers using tricks such as white text or extremely small font sizes.”
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 released Vivaldi 7.5 today, so try it, unless you enjoy having a browser that’s like a panopticon sloth.
Link of the Month: Digital sovereignty can’t be bargained away – “The European Commission has tools, public support and a mandate to act on Big Tech. Trading that away for short-term calm would be a costly mistake … Enforcing the EU’s laws, reclaiming a fair share of the value extracted by monopolies, breaking them up to unfreeze markets and using the proceeds to invest in our digital infrastructure could be exactly the kind of economic reset Europe needs” by Robin Berjon
PNG is back! – A new PNG spec was just released! Now with added HDR, Animation and EXIF support. As resurrected by W3C with reps from Adobe, Apple, BBC, Comcast / NBCUniversal, Google, MovieLabs. Work has already begun on the next two PNG spec updates. “After 20 years of stagnation, PNG is back with renewed vigor!”
Meta and Yandex are de-anonymizing Android users’ web browsing identifiers – “Tracking code that Meta and Russia-based Yandex embed into millions of websites is de-anonymizing visitors by abusing legitimate Internet protocols, causing Chrome and other browsers to surreptitiously send unique identifiers to native apps installed on a device”
Web Bucks – Brian Kardell looks at the current developments in web micropayments/ microtransactions
Microsoft Could Repeat its Teams Strategy, this time with Bing and Edge – “LinkedIn—a designated core platform under the DMA—is growing at just 8%. At this rate, Search and News could soon outpace LinkedIn in revenue, while remaining outside the scope of DMA enforcement … This helps explain Microsoft’s incentive to push cloud, search, browser, and advertising services as aggressively as possible before new regulatory oversight catches up. The stakes are high.”
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 just released Vivaldi 7.3, which has Proton VPN integrated into Desktop. So try it, unless you enjoy having a browser that’s like a data-mining tortoise.
The Open Web Index goes public! – “After 2,5 years of intensive research and programming efforts, the entire Openwebsearch.eu project team is excited to grant access to its pilot of the first-ever federated pan-European Open Web Index (OWI).”
Keeping People Safe Online – Fundamental Rights Protective Alternatives to Age Checks – EFF: “Beyond undermining children’s privacy and autonomy, the online behavioral ad system teaches users from a young age that data collection, tracking, and profiling are evils that come with using the web, thereby normalizing being tracked, profiled, and surveilled.”
Kenya orders WorldCoin to delete biometric data – “In a landmark decision highlighting growing concerns over digital privacy, the Kenyan High Court has ordered Worldcoin to delete all data it collected in the country”. Sam Altman harvesting biometric data without adequate safeguards – I’m shocked.
The European Accessibility Act – International glamorous media celeb, Léonie Watson, on the BBC talking about the European Accessibility Act. Tellingly, she completely avoids addressing the rumours about a “close friendship” with George Clooney.
Using Ray-Ban Meta Glasses – by Léonie Watters. Let’s have more AI like this, helping people with disabilities, and less bullshit LLMs and video/ image faking.
The Feminine Wireless Amateur – “Just because a man, Signor Guglielmo Marconi by name, invented commercial wireless telegraphy does not mean for a moment that the fair sex cannot master its mysteries. To prove that the girls and women of the country are rapidly awakening to the fact that radio operating is a worth-while accomplishment, both vocationally and intellectually, we have the pleasure of presenting herewith a number of photographs showing the Radio activities of our fairer sex.” The Electrical Experimenter, October, 1916