@slightlyoff@toot.cafe
@slightlyoff@toot.cafe avatar

slightlyoff

@slightlyoff@toot.cafe

Trying to make the web work for everyone.

https://infrequently.org/about-me/

Still not speaking for my employer, lo these many years.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

slightlyoff, to random
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Every product manager should have a sticker on their laptops to the effect of "growth is a function of reputation, and reputation is the integral of quality"

slightlyoff, to random
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The handwavey sales pitch for React was that "DOM is slow" (it's not; never was).

This was always a bad summary of a real issue: when you don't understand which DOM APIs induce the costs of layout, it's easy to find yourself with "weird" performance, and DOM API names don't make that clear.

But React didn't solve the problem, it only made it look solved until a codebase gets large enough, simultaneously depriving teams of the experience they need to diagnose and solve these issues.

slightlyoff, to random
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My hottest take might be that "state management" isn't a real class of either problem or solutions. Instead, it seems to cover a confusion of:

  • intra-component data propagation
  • a bad way to reinvent events and broadcast channels
  • a missing data synchronization layer

Each of these have distinct solutions, and "state management" tools do none of them credibly.

slightlyoff,
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If your app ended up serializing multiple MB of JSON in local storage because of your "state management" tool, I've got bad news for you.

cferdinandi, to random
@cferdinandi@mastodon.social avatar

I remember when Alex Russell used to work on Chrome and was ragging on Apple about privacy while being DEEPLY insistent that the browser he was building wasn't just a spy tool for Google.

https://hachyderm.io/@cyberlyra/112527385868664727

slightlyoff,
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@nickchomey @cferdinandi 👋

What you're seeing in that leak is stuff that wasn't (to the best of my knowledge) available to Googlers outside of "HIP" (High-sensitivity Intellectual Property) areas...which is to say, not me.

But two things can be true at once: Google can be dissembling about ranking and Apple's privacy kayfabe can be suss af.

Cultural rot is not an exclusive good.

ricmac, to random
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

Gmail changed the web platform in 2004 — are we about to see a similar shift in web development thanks to Microsoft Edge and its new 'HTML-first/JavaScript-second' approach? Less React, more Web Components — what's not to like! Hat-tips @slightlyoff & @brucelawson for the explanations on Mastodon (but note that I'm the only one to blame for the Gmail comparison). https://thenewstack.io/from-react-to-html-first-microsoft-edge-debuts-webui-2-0/

slightlyoff,
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@brucelawson @ricmac I would also say "thank the team": Mohamed Mansour, Atul Katti, Akrosh Ghandi, Lisa Klnik, Yvonne Smith, Hitesh Kanwathirtha, Chris Holt + the FAST team, etc. I'm just management overhead.

That said, the important part isn't the tech, it's caring about users at the margins. What really radicalized the team is using the product on the sorts of low-end devices that 35+% of our users are on today.

Taking their side is what is driving positive change.

slightlyoff, to random
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One of the teams I've been working with to climb the performance management maturity ladder is...Edge!?!

We build a lot of the browser out of web "stuff" these days (think bookmarks, history, downloads, settings, new-tab-page, etc.), and moving away from React to a modern Web Components + HTML-first architecture has had a huge benefit for users, particularly folks on low-end hardware:

https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2024/05/28/an-even-faster-microsoft-edge/

slightlyoff,
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This is building on the same open source, FAST-based design system ("Fluent Web Components v3"):

https://github.com/microsoft/fluentui/tree/master/packages/web-components

But the framework isn't what makes the difference; actually looking and caring about the performance is what has enabled this work to deliver 40-75% wins.

slightlyoff, to random
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I'd missed this post, but it's a great encapsulation of why I spent so much time on web packaging, Isolated Web Apps, and PWAs. The web isn't worse, even for complex scenarios; in many cases all that's missing is understanding and a little bit of imagination:

https://emilymstark.com/2024/02/09/e2ee-on-the-web-is-the-web-really-that-bad.html

slightlyoff, to random
@slightlyoff@toot.cafe avatar

This might be Peak $work Posting (complete with LI link!), but it really is exciting: Microsoft just launched the Fabric design system that works across Angular and React apps...because it's Web Components underneath!

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jasonfalk_fabricux-microsoftfabric-designsystem-activity-7199802763717853185-nnTV

Fabric is building on Fluent Web Components v3, which is the same set of FAST-based web components that we're rebuilding Edge's WebUIs on too. Legacy React and Angular apps get many of the benefits and we all get to share. Hot damn!

slightlyoff,
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Teams that adopt these components in Angular and React apps get a lot of the runtime performance benefits of moving to Web Components: style isolation via Shadow DOM, shallower Light DOM, and cheaper styling via Constructable Stylesheets. At the size of our apps, this is a BFD.

This isn't the whole enchilada, perf-wise -- for that, teams need to move to an HTML-first approach + "raw" Web Components, like we're doing in Edge -- but one investment is now delivering wins for all consumers.

slightlyoff,
@slightlyoff@toot.cafe avatar

The Fabric preview site is here:

https://aka.ms/fabricux

And you can poke at the underlying FWCv3 components (which are compatible with the Fluent v2 design language) here:

https://github.com/microsoft/fluentui/tree/master/packages/web-components

They're marked as being in Beta, but we're rolling them out in Edge today. YMMV.

slightlyoff,
@slightlyoff@toot.cafe avatar

@paulrobertlloyd A few weeks back I spent ~30 minutes trying to explain the relationships between the frontend technologies technologies, design systems, and versions thereof to folks who are actively using some of them.

It took three whiteboards. Had to use panorama mode to capture a photo.

slightlyoff, to random
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Late-stage tech has sorted a basket of otherwise equally talented nerds by who could talk to people with money, not by who could talk to people that have problems that need solving.

slightlyoff, to random
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Tremendous news out of the UK!

https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/23/pro-competition-rules-for-big-tech-make-it-through-uks-pre-election-wash-up/

Wouldn't have happened if not for the continuing efforts of @owa and in-kind contributions from Apple's legal team. Nothing pulls people together like a megacorp acting like an absolute bully:

https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apple-loses-on-appeal/

slightlyoff,
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@owa Please, nobody tell Cupertino that acting like smug, entitled, dissembling, legalistic pricks to every developer and regulator has consequences.

slightlyoff, to random
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A lot is going around right now about how we can achieve a better web, and I'm here for all of it.

What the optimists are not doing is enunciating how we got to the Bad Place. In addition to calls for thoughtful folks to rededicate themselves to fundamentals, I think we need a lexicon to describe, identify, and eliminate the shysterism of the JS-industrial-complex decade.

We're lacking in language for what failed, which makes me fear that what works will be co-opted all over again.

slightlyoff, to random
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If it's part of your build process or shipped bundle, no part of those dependencies are ever "unowned"; they're only temporarily disavowed.

IOW, all the code that can hand you a bad day is yours, no matter the up-front price.

slightlyoff, to random
@slightlyoff@toot.cafe avatar

Setting up a new Samsung TV that @phae liked, and the horror show that is the privacy UI cannot be overstated. There's no on-device way to opt-out of collection. None.

Instead, you get told to visit a URL (but not taken to it in the built-in Samsung Internet browser) for CCPA requests. That website is here:

https://www.samsung.com/us/privacy/rights/

And as a CA resident, it makes me apoplectic that it simply *fails *at a required login step. This cannot be spirit, or letter, of the law compliant:

slightlyoff,
@slightlyoff@toot.cafe avatar

@phae Hey @Samsung; y'all know this is unacceptable and likely illegal, right?

slightlyoff,
@slightlyoff@toot.cafe avatar

@phae @Samsung Today in "websites that work better than the Samsung CCPA opt-out flow": California's Secretary of State page for filing a compaint:

https://oag.ca.gov/contact/consumer-complaint-against-business-or-company

slightlyoff, to random
@slightlyoff@toot.cafe avatar

Out with the old, in with the new. Couldn't believe how seamless the Home Assistant OS transition was from a backup. Flawless, including HACS integrations!

scottjehl, to random
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In watching talks this week about all that has recently landed or is on the way right now, I don't recall a time when useful features were standardizing and landing in browsers at anything near the speed we're seeing now. So many JS workarounds are being replaced with simple, often elegant declarative alternatives. Great to see

slightlyoff,
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@scottjehl This is the pace we should always have expected. It's happening now because of @owa and friends.

slightlyoff, to random
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I'd ask the last ecosystem thinker to turn off the lights when they leave Mt. View, but most of them were already laid off:

https://www.platformer.news/google-io-ai-search-sundar-pichai/

slightlyoff, to random
@slightlyoff@toot.cafe avatar

This is shockingly on point re: React.

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/react-electron-llms-labour-arbitrage/

/via @baldur

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