December 1, 2021

Web in November - Newsletter by Agney

Hello Holiday Season 🎉

Google Search -site:pinterest.com -site:quora.com

Google has been a very integral part of Web history and it doesn’t seem like it’s going away any time soon. But there are part of the search that doesn’t bode well with developers.

The obvious case AMP, forcing webpages onto Google’s domain and rules, they load websites faster for mobile users (some times) but at what cost. Last week, Twitter dropped support for AMP and does not redirect users to AMP specific sites. Hopefully more sites follow the suite.

The second is not their cause but to certain sites that show up in search results – These sites require authentication to see basic content but shows up everywhere in search results. Mainly Pinterest and Quora, if you don’t have an account on either of these sites, you know what I’m talking about.

• How Pinterest utterly ruined photo search on the internet
• Quora and Google Might be in a Hidden War
• Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

Microsoft on the Edge

I don’t want to throw shade on just one company today, so here’s some on Microsoft. It’s true that they have regained some confidence of developers with work on TypeScript and VSCode. Microsoft then sunsetted Internet Explorer (the former nightmare of web developers) and created a browser based on Chromium. But then, sometimes Edge reaches a bit more than it deserves.

• Microsoft Edge’s new ‘Buy now, pay later’ feature is the definition of bloatware
• Microsoft blocks EdgeDeflector to force Windows 11 users into Edge – The links in Windows UI always opens up to Microsoft Edge whatever your default browser choice is. While someone discovered a way to redirect (deflect) it to another browser, Microsoft interruped to block that too. Not to mention the You already have Edge messages littered all over the UI.

Releases

• Remix - Remix – The brand new JavaScript full stack framework by Ryan Florence and Michael Jackson (creators of React Router) has been open sourced. There are parts of it that doesn’t live up to the life changing experience that is promised on the hype train but it’s relying on the platform to make the best experiences is certainly an approach that deserves praise.
• React Router 6 - The new version of React Router is here and it’s the smartest ever. There are breaking changes though.
• React Location - Tanner Linsley (TanStack) has some of the best react libraries out there and the new addition to the stack is a router, some competition up for React Router now.
• User Flows in Lighthouse - Lighthouse was traditionally used to measure first time page loads. They are now adding a feature to measure user flows. Now you can trigger synthetic user interactions with it.

Tutorials

• Etsy’s Journey to TypeScript - Etsy has been around for 16 years and fair to say the codebase has gone through some changes. The team has adopted TypeScript and discuss their strategy so far.
• Smaller Faster Asciinema - Asciinema is an application to record your code journeys. They recently migrated their codebase and claims to have achieved a 4x smallre, 50x faster application. They share their learnings with Rust and SolidJS in this blog post.
• Parallax Powered by CSS Custom Properties - If you have visited the website of Kent C Dodds, you would have noticed a parallax animated graphic that’s the centerpiece. Jhey Thompkins explains how it’s build with CSS custom properties.
• The new responsive design - Google Chrome Developers - Changes in CSS, container queries, new responsive design challanges and CSS features all together in one go with Una Kravets, Google’s CSS expert.
• Why our build got 15x slower with Webpack 5 - Tines team upgraded their build to Webpack 5 and noticed that their build times are actually slower. You would think this would stop with a configuration change but it goes way deeper into the code.

In the Spotlight 🔦

With the release of Vue 3 and introduction of new paradigms, the default recommendation libraries of Vue have changed.

The transition hasn’t been smooth and Evan You’s explanation for these new defaults is also worth a read.

• Evan You’s reply for Ecosystem churn on Reddit

In Other News

• Coa Malicious Release - I will never get tired of talking about malicious packages on NPM. Just Kidding! I’m always tired to talk about this, but there was a malicious package released in name of Coa and broke major frameworks. But atleast the malware programmer had not checked multiple OS and broke code on a few, sometimes fragmentation works wonders.
• How Stripe Built a Writing Culture - A very strong part of working on a remote team across timezones is how you write. This explains how Stripe team manages writing - which they are very good at, just look at Increment Magazine to find out.

Looking Forward

• 24 Pull Requests - Contribute to Open Source this 🎄
• Hour of Code - Let’s get more people coding
• Advent of Code
• Web Performance Calendar
• Advent of CSS