"... the website loads in a special browser built into the app, rather than your phone’s default browser. In 2022, privacy researcher Felix Krause found that Meta injects special “keylogging” JavaScript onto the website you’re visiting that allows the company to monitor everything you type and tap on, including passwords. Other apps including TikTok do the same thing."
Recently I found this developer who has published dozens of small, useful extensions for firefox. Nothing groundbreaking that I know of but everything looks to have been made with care to efficiency and minimal permissions to do one thing well. Each has its own github repo where the developer responds to issues....
Update: https://social.veltens.org/@angelo/110643298577042397 Now all #twitter t.co links are blocked by twitter login. All #links we ever shared via twitter can not be followed anymore without signing in to twitter, no matter where in the #WWW they point to. Twitter put a gate in front of our links by "shortening" them and now they locked the gate. We never should have given them such power. #gatedcommunities#fediverse#web
Many yearn for the "good old days" of the web. We could have those good old days back — or something even better — and if anything, it would be easier now than it ever was.
If you've ever found yourself missing the "good old days" of the #web, what is it that you miss? (Interpret "it" broadly: specific websites? types of activities? feelings? etc.) And approximately when were those good old days?
No wrong answers — I'm working on an article and wanted to get some outside thoughts.
Random Website: You need to set up #2FA with your phone number!
Me: Why?
Website: In case we get hacked!
Me: I don't really care, no one even knows about this account and it doesn't have my personal information.
Website: You misunderstand, it's so that in case we get hacked, we HAVE your information to leak to the hackers. They worked hard and deserve it! Also we sell your account to ad companies but they're not interested unless they can tie it to a real person.
"While more of the #web is becoming accessible to people with low-end connections, more of the web is becoming inaccessible to people with low-end devices even if they have high-end connections."
Own Your Web is a newsletter for anyone who wants to design, build, create, and publish on the Web.
Whether you want to get started with your own personal website or level up as a designer, developer, or independent creator working with the ever-changing material of the Web, this little email is for you. 💚✊
"30 years ago this week…something called the World Wide Web launched into the public domain…#CERN owned Berners-Lee's invention and…had the option to license [it] out…for profit. But Berners-Lee believed that keeping the web as open as possible would help it grow…[He] eventually convinced CERN to release the World Wide Web into the #PublicDomain without any #patents or fees."
“Would you like to use the browser by Company X, or the browser by the company that survives on half-a-billion dollars a year from Company X, or the browser by the company that gets paid an estimated $20 billion a year by Company X even though it can survive without it?”
We desperately need a web browser by an independent organisation funded by EU taxpayer money and maintained for the common good.
Hello Fediverse friends! My partner, who has total 16 years of experience in software in an impressive array of various technologies, is looking for new opportunities. What he's looking for:
Today I built a silly webpage by hand in a couple of hours. (I’m not going to tell you what it was, except that it was frivolous af.)
I started out by looking for a template, but everything I found was way too involved, so I ended up writing the HTML and CSS from scratch, throwing it in a cloud-hosted directory, and nudging the DNS settings to point there.
This turned out to be a ridiculously nostalgic experience. I built a lot of weird little websites like this when I was about eleven years old, saving the HTML of sites that I liked so that I could access them when the phone line was being used by someone else, and changing pieces around to figure out how it all fit together.
It struck me that:
a) by this measure I’ve been doing web dev for almost a quarter-century now 😳
b) there is nothing stopping me from making websites this way. I can still write HTML and yeet it out there if I want to, no matter what it’s for. Pages load quickly. It’s not fancy. It works. Underneath it all, the web is still there.
If you feel so inclined, I can highly recommend seizing an afternoon, taking a silly webpage idea, and having a play.
Second time I run into a developer on itch.io who doesn't know what a #web server is and thinks they need to code a #NodeJS app to serve static files.
This is terrifying. It's the future Google wants to build, with their HTTP 2.0 and Wasm: a future when even the basics are horribly hard and not even developers know how the web works because it's all a black box.
In an age of LLMs, is it time to reconsider human-edited web directories?
Back in the early-to-mid '90s, one of the main ways of finding anything on the web was to browse through a web directory.
These directories generally had a list of categories on their front page. News/Sport/Entertainment/Arts/Technology/Fashion/etc.
Each of those categories had subcategories, and sub-subcategories that you clicked through until you got to a list of websites. These lists were maintained by actual humans.
Typically, these directories also had a limited web search that would crawl through the pages of websites listed in the directory.
Lycos, Excite, and of course Yahoo all offered web directories of this sort.
(EDIT: I initially also mentioned AltaVista. It did offer a web directory by the late '90s, but this was something it tacked on much later.)
By the late '90s, the standard narrative goes, the web got too big to index websites manually.
Google promised the world its algorithms would weed out the spam automatically.
And for a time, it worked.
But then SEO and SEM became a multi-billion-dollar industry. The spambots proliferated. Google itself began promoting its own content and advertisers above search results.
And now with LLMs, the industrial-scale spamming of the web is likely to grow exponentially.
My question is, if a lot of the web is turning to crap, do we even want to search the entire web anymore?
Do we really want to search every single website on the web?
Or just those that aren't filled with LLM-generated SEO spam?
Or just those that don't feature 200 tracking scripts, and passive-aggressive privacy warnings, and paywalls, and popovers, and newsletters, and increasingly obnoxious banner ads, and dark patterns to prevent you cancelling your "free trial" subscription?
At some point, does it become more desirable to go back to search engines that only crawl pages on human-curated lists of trustworthy, quality websites?
And is it time to begin considering what a modern version of those early web directories might look like?
"something deeply important about the early web has been lost, almost certainly unintentionally, along the way: the ability to view the source of the page, make sense of what it is doing and, most importantly, to learn from it."
This isn't just wistful nostalgia. Technologies like htmx (and web components) democratize learning and building. That matters (or should) to everyone.
Now that Safari 17.4 is available, what other new web technology — HTML, CSS, JS, Web API, media support, etc — would you like to see supported in Safari next?
What’s most needed?
What will you use it for?
Or how will it help your team serve your users?
Tell me a story…
.@w3c WCAG should not be developed/designed for the benefit of #accessibility testing vendors. It is there to improve the user experience of disabled people.
You wouldn’t have McDonald’s teaching your kids about nutrition or Philip Morris teaching them about maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Why are you happy having a surveillance capitalist like Google or Facebook teaching them about technology?
If you use firefox, check out these 55 single-function addons to improve life (all same dev; not me)
Recently I found this developer who has published dozens of small, useful extensions for firefox. Nothing groundbreaking that I know of but everything looks to have been made with care to efficiency and minimal permissions to do one thing well. Each has its own github repo where the developer responds to issues....
FCC chair: Speed standard of 25Mbps down, 3Mbps up isn’t good enough anymore (arstechnica.com)
Chair proposes 100Mbps national standard and an evaluation of broadband prices.