Timo Tijhof @krinkle@mastodon.technology
Dutch geek in London ♥️ free open-source software.
Principal software engineer at Wikimedia Foundation, QUnit lead maintainer. Interested in: Wikipedia, web performance, web standards, user-interface design, digital privacy and security. He/him.
Linguistics alt: @krinkle at polyglot.city.
Joined Nov 2019
"Why we are not adding AVIF support (yet)" by Dejan Pelzel.
The founder of BunnyCDN shares their technical analysis and what needs improving first.
Nutshell:
- Terrible server encoding perf, unsuitable for on-demand, even with disproportionate resources. (Better algos?)
- Slow to decode/render. (Better algo, hardware support?)
- No progressive render, not even basic linear. (All or nothing.)
Bandwidth isn't everything :)
#webperf #webp #av1 #avif #bunnycdn
https://bunnycdn.com/blog/lets-talk-avif-and-why-we-are-not-adding-support-just-yet/
"Electron alternatives?" by Dimitri Witkowski
The author of KeeWeb offers a fresh and nuanced perspective. Personally, I find download/update size reason enough to switch to Ultralight-UX, #NeutralinoJS, or Tauri, etc.
But, popular opinion against Electron is driven by RAM use and slowness, which evidently aren't caused by #Electron but by poor engineering atop of it...
KeeWeb is fast and uses 150-200M, with or without Electron.
Has anyone read World Wide Waste? (Gerry McGovern's book) I haven't yet, and curious what others think about it.
"Easy to design, hard to use"
A conversation with Chris Coyier and Gerry McGovern:
> If web developers made cars, you'd put the pedal to the metal on them and go at 40 miles an hour, maximum speed. We think we're designing Ferraris, but we're designing tractors.
#podcasts #webperf #usability #webdesign #design #webperf #ux #uxfail
https://www.thisishcd.com/episode/chris-coyier-easy-to-design-hard-to-use
Emitting WiFi signals from a RAM chip
Catalin Cimpanu, reporting for ZDNet:
"""
Academics from an Israeli university have published new research today detailing a technique to convert a RAM card into an impromptu wireless emitter and transmit sensitive data from non-networked air-gapped computers that [have] no WiFi card.
"""
It's fairly low-bandwidth (upto 100 bytes/second), but amazing nonetheless and actually spans several meters.
"Color: From Hexcodes to Eyeballs" by Jamie Wong
I found this article via the Ben, Ben and Blue podcast (episode 14: Color), in which they discuss human perception of color at the biological and neurological level, how color combinations are processed by eye cones, and how what some people can see is rather limited and twisted by the particulars of our brains. #podcasts #STEM
"Emergency" by Chris Taylor.
A geeky fan fiction on web performance. Featuring, among others: Dr Lea Verou, Jen Simmons, and Dr Lawson - the HTML love-doctor.
"""
Listen up people, we have a patient in a serious condition here. 12 year old e-commerce website, recently undergone a redesign – and [...]
"""
In the winter of '89, long post
"The Website Obesity Crisis" by Maciej Cegłowski
Approachable and funny talk on the state of performance, UX design, and overpriced clouds.
I was humbled by the fresh and optimistic approach to it all. I've fought this crisis for a long time, but never seen it laid out so well and so clearly. Great refresher if nothing else!
> "Complexity is a bug lamp for smart people."
#webdesign #design #webperf #ux #uxfail #k8s #MaciejCeglowski #MaciejCegłowski H/T @pbanks
"Profiling live Wikipedia traffic with near-zero overhead"
> Each day of Wikipedia backend traffic yields about 3 million stack trace samples, as collected by Excimer, a new a low-overhead sampling profiler for PHP.
I wrote all about it in this year's Performance Calendar:
👉 https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2020/profiling-php-in-production-at-scale/
"Industry response to #JavaScript in 1995" by Chris Brandrick.
DEC (Compaq) captured it well, hinting at the Electron-apocalypse:
> “JavaScript will unleash a new wave of creativity and transform the Internet in ways no one can predict. It will demand increased system performance.”
Others are little more than ads:
> CORP looks forward to putting RANDOM TECH into THING and enable people BUY AMAZING THING. At CORP we care about HEY WHY HAVEN'T YOU BOUGHT OUR THING.
By operating system for November 2020:
* 29.8%: Android
* 27.7%: Windows
* 25.0%: iOS
* (9.8%: Other)
* 6.8%: macOS
* 0.5%: Linux (incl. Ubuntu)
* 0.4%: Chrome OS
References:
* Explore the data:
** https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/
** Query on stats.wikimedia.org: https://w.wiki/ozJ
* Raw data:
** https://analytics.wikimedia.org/published/datasets/periodic/reports/metrics/browser/
** https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/AQS/Pageviews
Wikipedia.org and sister project stats for November 2020:
* 49%: Chrome, Chrome Mobile
* 24%: Safari, Mobile Safari
* 5.0%: Firefox, Firefox Mobile
* 2.6%: Samsung Internet
* 2.4%: Edge
* 2.2%: Google app
* 1.8%: Chrome Mobile iOS
* 1.1%: Internet Explorer
* 0.77%: Opera
100% = 16.7 billion page views (desktop+mobile web, no apps, no bots)
A collegue of mine ran into this some interesting code behaviour today. I encountered this before, but didn't realize it was still a thing. Fun times!
Can you guess what caused the string to become an integer?
Nice to see Weblate continue to grow!
They're getting a lot of things right. There's a big hunger for this. Not much else to say except.. #YourSoftwareYourLanguage #l10n #i18n
https://weblate.org/en/news/archive/weblate-even-more-open-now/
"How life works in Antarctica" by Wendover
Mini-docu on how it is to live (and work) at our South Pole. Some takeaways:
- Network speeds are limited to 38 kbit/s (!) most of the day. Almost on par with 90s telephone dial-up.
- Rescue operations are harder than for the ISS in outer space. They're cut off 9 months a year.
- It remains the only covid-free continent.
Nebula: https://watchnebula.com/videos/wendover-productions-how-living-at-the-south-pole-works
YT: https://youtu.be/ZAEydOjNWyQ
"Europe vs USA Broadband Performance (2020 Report)"
From FairInternetReport:
> American internet users have had a very good 2020: […] median Internet speeds doubled [from] 17.34mbps in 2019 to 33.16mbps in 2020 […] increased 91%.
>
> US average broadband speeds overtook western EU countries […] for the first time in 5 years.
>
> The US stills lags behind many European and developed nations […]
> Italy continues to have the worst internet in the EU, […]
https://fairinternetreport.com/research/usa-vs-europe-internet-speed-analysis
"The History of Mozilla Firefox" by Smartyflix.
Learned some new details. I didn't know Gecko started as a Netscape experiment to create a new engine, which led to the formation of Mozilla and its open-sourcing. Once ready, Netscape adopted Mozilla and Gecko.
Even the independent Mozilla Foundation overlapped for years with Netscape integrating upstream Mozilla releases.
https://tilvids.com/videos/watch/294b946e-c0f9-4da0-8307-9512ef309755
"The Infamous Case of the 'Mute' Button" by Raluca Budiu (Nielsen-Norman)
This makes a good case for how to, and how not to, design toggle buttons in digital user interfaces.
The debate of "current state" vs "next state" left me confused over the years. I didn't believe there could be an intuitive solution (besides picking something and being consistent within your environment), but.. this article has me convinced there's an objectively better way.
Dutch geek in London ♥️ free open-source software.
Principal software engineer at Wikimedia Foundation, QUnit lead maintainer. Interested in: Wikipedia, web performance, web standards, user-interface design, digital privacy and security. He/him.
Linguistics alt: @krinkle at polyglot.city.
Joined Nov 2019
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