Weekend Reading: Happy 20th birthday to Firefox, and the BBC’s In Our Time podcast
Recently two things that are very significant to me in quite different ways turned 20.
At the very first conference I helped run, just over 20 years ago, Firefox was still in Beta. We gave a bunch of software to our audience that we thought they would benefit from on DVDs (it might have even been some sort of data CD) including Firefox.
For those who believed in the importance of the open Web, as we and our audience did, the arrival of Firefox was a hugely important moment. Apple had shipped Safari for the Mac the year before, and reignited at least some small hope, in a very barren landscape where Internet Explorer, the then utterly dominant browser, had stagnated for years (on Windows. On the Mac, IE5 had delivered the first modern web browser and shown what a standards based web could look like).
But it was Firefox, and its rapid adoption that shifted the landscape. It pushed Microsoft reinvest in Internet Explorer, and the Web, long moribund, sputter into life once more. The transition from desktop to the smart phone, where platforms locked out alternative browsers (and still essentially do to this day) coupled with the arrival of Chrome, and Google’s enormous resources probably meant the slow demise of Firefox was inevitable.
But the importance of Firefox can never be understated. Without it what would the Web look like? Without a vibrant Web, would the iPhone, whose key point of differentiation at launch was as a full fledged web experience, have been a success?
Firefox just turned 20. Below TechCrunch asks what does its future look like?
And the other 20th anniversary?
During the first COVID lockdown in Sydney in early 2020 my daughters spent their time at their mums place, about an hour away, and several times a week I’d drive down, do shopping, help with their school work. They were long, lonely, strange unsettling drives. I’d become a podcast listener some time before but discovering the BBC podcast In Our Time was a godsend. Each episode, of which there are now 1,000, focusses on one thing in a relatively scholarly way. It might be back holes, or Ethelred the Unready, or the Mahabharata. It accompanied those difficult drives, and many drives since, and I’ll long remember with gratitude the role it played, quietly engaging and reassuring at a time of turmoil, uncertainty, fear. If you’ve not listened I can’t recommend it highly enough.
The same year, 2004, In our Time became the BBC’s first podcast. That was at the beginning of podcasting’s first wave–it took a decade or more for it become the cultural phenomenon it is today. Matt Webb, a former speaker at our conferences was involved in that very first project (the brainchild of another former speaker Dan Hill) and has continued to engage with the podcast. Below he talks about the launch (and more).
So happy 20th to two very significant digital artefacts.
Now on with the reading!
As Firefox turns 20, Mozilla ponders how to restore it to its former glory
Exactly 20 years ago, Mozilla started shipping version 1.0 of its Firefox browser. At the time, you could download it or buy a CD-ROM with a guidebook from Mozilla (or maybe get it on one of those free CDs that would come with many magazines at the time). Born out of the ashes of Netscape, Firefox would go on to gain well over 30% of global market share.
But that was followed by a period of stagnation, and after the arrival of the faster and lighter Google Chrome, Firefox slowly but surely lost market share. It didn’t help that Mozilla, at the time, seemingly prioritized everything but its browser, all while its mobile browser initiatives never quite took off.
Source: As Firefox turns 20, Mozilla ponders how to restore it to its former glory | TechCrunch
Happy birthday to the BBC In Our Time podcast, 20 years old today (Interconnected)
That development time acceleration of 4 days down to 20 minutes… that’s equivalent to about 10 years of Moore’s Law cycles. That is, using generative AI like this is equivalent to computers getting 10 years better overnight. That was a real eye-opening framing for me.
AI isn’t magical, it’s not sentient, it’s not the end of the world nor our saviour; we don’t need to endlessly debate “intelligence” or “reasoning.” It’s just that… computers got 10 years better. The iPhone was first released in 2007. Imagine if it had come out in 1997 instead. We wouldn’t even know what to do with it.
Source: Happy birthday to the BBC In Our Time podcast, 20 years old today (Interconnected)
I actually included this as much for Matt’s take on AI–I highly recommend reading it (and subscribing to his RSS feed. You do use RSS right?)
Overflow Clip
The overflow CSS property is common when building a website. It’s used for different purposes:
- Enable vertical scrolling (e.g., overflow-y: auto)
- Clip the content of a wrapper (e.g., overflow-x: hidden)
Source: Overflow Clip
Another excellent, detailed, interactive article by Ahmad Shadeed.
The 2024 Web Almanac
Our mission is to combine the raw stats and trends of the HTTP Archive with the expertise of the web community. The Web Almanac is a comprehensive report on the state of the web, backed by real data and trusted web experts. The 2024 edition is comprised of 21 chapters spanning aspects of page content, user experience, publishing, and distribution.
Source: The 2024 Web Almanac
After a year’s hiatus the fabulous Web Almanac returns. Experts with deep domain knowledge analyse the HTTP Archive’s data for insights into real world use of Web technologies. So good to see. We’ve had a number of talks associated with the Web Almanac over the last few years.
Binary vector embeddings are so cool
Embeddings let you turn an arbitrary piece of text into a series of numbers that manage to represent the meaning of the content. These embedding vectors can range in dimension from 512 on the shorter end all the way up to 8192 or more. Typically each of the weights in the vector is represented as a 32-bit floating point number.LLMs use embeddings to represent input text, but embeddings can also be used on their own.Embeddings enable you to easily search for pieces of content that have similar meanings by finding the similarity (commonly the cosine similarity) between the points represented by the vectors.
Source: Binary vector embeddings are so cool | Evan Schwartz
Vector embeddings are at the heart of many generative AI and semantic search systems. This gives a succinct high level description then explores the technique of quantization, a way of reducing size (and increasing the performance) at the cost of accuracy. It turns out that cost can be far lower than would be reasonably anticipated.
I’ve been playing with the technology a bit with an eye to improved search on Conffab in future, and built a semantic search engine for all of Taylor Swift’s songs (next I’m interested in how quantization might affect the quality of results.)
State of CSS and State of HTML 2024
As a web developer, there aren’t that many different things you can do to influence the web platform evolution, and taking the time to fill out these surveys is one of them. I know taking time out of your day job is hard, but unlike other means of influencing, this one is a low barrier to entry, and also a great opportunity to learn about new features too.
With that said, let’s jump into my analysis of the results of the State of CSS 2024 and the preliminary results of the State of HTML 2024.Caveat: for both of these surveys, I will only look at the few questions that relate to browser compatibility issues, missing features, and other pain points.
Source: State of CSS and State of HTML 2024
A writeup of the recent State of CSS and State HTML survey results.
How do HTML event handlers work?
HTML event handlers are those onxxx attributes and properties many of us are used to, but do you know how they actually work? If you’re writing custom elements and would like them to have such event handlers, what would you have to do? And what would you possibly be unable to implement? What differences would there be from native event handlers?
Source: How do HTML event handlers work?
One way to deeply understand a technology is to implement it. Here Thomas Broyer looks at how HTML event handlers (like onclick) work.
Stop building components, start building patterns
It seems to be the way that most people start their design system. First, sort out the basics of your foundation layer, including some colors, typography, and maybe some spacing. Then, it’s straight into crafting the perfect button, complete with 14 variants and every state imaginable. It’s tempting, too, as they feel like they’re the parts that will be the most useful. The cards, buttons, form elements, and all the other lovely components make up what most people think of as a ‘design system.’
I think we’re doing it wrong.
Source: Stop building components, start building patterns – Blog – zeroheight
How should you go about developing a design sytems? Don’t rush into components argues Luke Murphy
The Different (and Modern) Ways To Toggle Content
It’s easy to default to what you know. When it comes to toggling content, that might be reaching for display: none or opacity: 0 with some JavaScript sprinkled in. But the web is more “modern” today, so perhaps now is the right time to get a birds-eye view of the different ways to toggle content — which native APIs are actually supported now, their pros and cons, and some things about them that you might not know (such as any pseudo-elements and other non-obvious stuff).
So, let’s spend some time looking at disclosures ( and ), the Dialog API, the Popover API, and more. We’ll look at the right time to use each one depending on your needs. Modal or non-modal? JavaScript or pure HTML/CSS? Not sure? Don’t worry, we’ll go into all that.
Source: The Different (and Modern) Ways To Toggle Content | CSS-Tricks
The modern web platform is full of amazing focussed APIs and features to make things thatised to be painful and advocate straightforward. Disclosing and hiding content is a very old UI pattern. Here the folks at CSS tricks look at modern ways of doing it so you can put away your opacity: 0
for that for ever!
Recent CSS Bookmarks 19: Container Queries — Roma’s Unpolished Posts
In this post, I gathered 15 bookmarks about container queries (and some other queries as well). This time, the order is from the more recent to the older ones. I’m still playing around with how I want to do these bookmarks.
Source: Recent CSS Bookmarks 19: Container Queries — Roma’s Unpolished Posts
We’ve referred to most if not all of these articles in recent times here at Conffab, but a good roundup in one place of articles related to container queries.
OK that ought to keep you occupied for now! See you next week for more.
Great reading, every weekend.
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