Link tags: lockin

Pluralistic: The (open) web is good, actually (13 Nov 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

The web wasn’t inevitable – indeed, it was wildly improbable. Tim Berners Lee’s decision to make a new platform that was patent-free, open and transparent was a complete opposite approach to the strategy of the media companies of the day. They were building walled gardens and silos – the dialup equivalent to apps – organized as “branded communities.” The way I experienced it, the web succeeded because it was so antithetical to the dominant vision for the future of the internet that the big companies couldn’t even be bothered to try to kill it until it was too late.

Companies have been trying to correct that mistake ever since.

A great round-up from Cory, featuring heavy dollops of Anil and Aaron.

[this is aaronland] generative adversarial therapy sessions

Mobile phones and the “app economy”, an environment controlled by exactly two companies and designed to extract a commission from almost every interaction and to promote native and not-portable applications over web applications. But we also see the same behaviour from so-called “native to the web” companies like Facebook who have explicitly monetized reach, access and discovery. Facebook is also the company that gave the world React which is difficult not to understand as deliberate attempt to embrace and extend, to redefine, HTML itself.

Perversely, nearly everything about the mobile/app economy is built on, and designed to use, HTTP precisely because it’s a common and easy to implement standard free and unencumbered by licensing.

jwz: PSA: Do Not Use Services That Hate The Internet

If you’re thinking of signing up to Hive or Post:

If posts in a social media app do not have URLs that can be linked to and viewed in an unauthenticated browser, or if there is no way to make a new post from a browser, then that program is not a part of the World Wide Web in any meaningful way.

Consign that app to oblivion.

Why BaseCamp & Hey.com are Wrong About the Apple App Store

I feel for BaseCamp, I do. But give up on the native app path. Make sure your existing web interface is a good progressive web app and you can end-run around Apple.

What would happen if we allowed blocking 3rd-Party JavaScript as an option?

This would be a fascinating experiment to run in Firefox nightly! This is in response to that post I wrote about third-party scripts.

(It’s fascinating to see how different this response is to the responses from people working at Google.)

Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center Letting You Track the Trackers - The Mozilla Blog

I really like this latest addition in Firefox to show how many tracking scripts are being blocked. I think it’s always good to make the invisible visible (one of the reasons why I like RequestMap so much).

Today’s Firefox Blocks Third-Party Tracking Cookies and Cryptomining by Default - The Mozilla Blog

If you haven’t done so already, you should really switch to Firefox.

Then encourage your friends and family to switch to Firefox too.

Design tools are holding us back

My main concern about this new generation of tools is that they require a specific toolchain in order to function. “If you just use this version of React and just use this styling library and configure things in exactly this way, your designers can play around with coded components.” It worries me that teams would end up choosing (and subsequently holding onto) specific tools not because they’re the best choices for our users but because the designers’ and developers’ workflow depends on a specific toolchain to work properly.

Complexity Explorables

A cornucopia of interactive visualisations. You control the horizontal. You control the vertical. Networks, flocking, emergence, diffusion …it’s all here.

Who has the fastest website in F1? - JakeArchibald.com

I think I physically winced on more than one occassion as I read through Jake’s report here.

He makes an interesting observation at the end:

However, none of the teams used any of the big modern frameworks. They’re mostly Wordpress & Drupal, with a lot of jQuery. It makes me feel like I’ve been in a bubble in terms of the technologies that make up the bulk of the web.

Yes! This! Contrary to what you might think reading through the latest and greatest tips and tricks from the front-end community, the vast majority of sites out there on the web are not being built with React, Vue, webpack or any other “modern” tools.

Pi-hole®: A black hole for Internet advertisements

This looks like a terrific use of a Raspberry Pi—blocking adtech surveillance at the network level.

Wouldn’t it be great if the clichéd going-home-for-Christmas/Thanksgiving to fix the printer/wifi included setting up one of these?

There’s an article about Pi-hole in Business Week where the creators offer some advice for those who equate any kind of online advertising with ubiquitous surveillance:

For publishers struggling to survive even with maximum ad surveillance, the Pi-hole team recommends a renewed focus on subscriptions, affiliate links, and curated endorsements for products and services that might truly interest users, similar to the way podcast hosts may talk about how much they personally enjoy a sponsor’s products. There’s nothing wrong with pitching people stuff they might enjoy, the team says. It’s just the constant, ever-intensifying surveillance that needs to stop.

Murmuration

Procedurally generated murmurations of starlings.

Chrome’s default ad blocker strengthens Google’s data-driven advertising platforms

From a consumer’s point of view, less intrusive ad formats are of course desirable. Google’s approach is therefore basically heading in the right direction. From a privacy perspective, however, the “Better Ads” are no less aggressive than previous forms of advertising. Highly targeted ads based on detailed user profiles work subtle. They replace aggressive visuals with targeted manipulation.

Why it’s tricky to measure Server-side Rendering performance

A good analysis, but my takeaway was that the article could equally be called Why it’s tricky to measure Client-side Rendering performance. In a nutshell, just looking at metrics can be misleading.

Pre-classified metrics are a good signal for measuring performance. At the end of the day though, they may not properly reflect your site’s performance story. Profile each possibility and give it the eye test.

And it’s always worth bearing this in mind:

The best way to prioritize content by building a static site. Ask yourself if the content needs JavaScript.

The Problem With AMP | 80x24

The largest complaint by far is that the URLs for AMP links differ from the canonical URLs for the same content, making sharing difficult. The current URLs are a mess.

This is something that the Google gang are aware of, and they say they’re working on a fix. But this post points out some other misgivings with AMP, like its governance policy:

This keeps the AMP HTML specification squarely in the hands of Google, who will be able to take it in any direction that they see fit without input from the community at large. This guise of openness is perhaps even worse than the Apple News Format, which at the very least does not pretend to be an open standard.

If it weren’t for retargeting, we might not have ad blocking

The more I reflect on the current practices of the online advertising industry, the more I think that ad-blocking is a moral imperative.

Making bad ads sad. Rad! - O’Reilly Media

A great talk from Bruce on the digital self-defence that ad-blockers provide. I think it’s great that Opera are building ad-blocking straight into the browser.

Reasons to Use Ad-Blockers – Coyote Tracks

If you think people using ad blockers are just anti-ad or want to freeload on publishers, you’re completely missing the point. The online advertising industry has been abusing users for 20 years now, and we’re sick of it.

Will 2016 be the year web advertisers realise we don’t want to be monitored?

Ethan Zuckerman:

This is advertising we’re talking about, the industry founded on the hallucination that people secretly appreciate being tracked, analysed and told what to buy. Advertisers, and the technology companies that cater to them, are responding to ad blocking the only way they know how: doubling down on their fantasy that viewers will suddenly love advertising just as soon as ads are so all-knowing that they anticipate one’s every need and desire.

Blocked! - O’Reilly Radar

Following on from that Wired article I linked to about disabling JavaScript, Simon St. Laurent brings in another factor—content blockers on iOS:

Apple offers its users the power to turn off much of the Web: fonts, styles, scripts, and more.

He rightly points out that the answer to building a robust, resilient web has been here all along:

Turning off web fonts, CSS, and images will frustrate designers and limit user interface possibilities, but turning off JavaScript might mean that we have to reconsider the architecture of our applications. Without JavaScript, the Web returns to its foundations of HTTP requests returning pages, with links and form submissions as the backbone of application structure.