tbolt
Excerpt from Resilient Web Design
Really great new web book from Jeremy Keith, I loved this part:
Despite JavaScript’s fragile error‐handling model, web designers became more reliant on JavaScript over time. In 2015, NASA relaunched its website as a web app. If you wanted to read the latest news of the agency’s space exploration efforts, you first had to download and execute three megabytes of JavaScript. This content—text and images—could have been delivered in the HTML, but the developers decided to use Ajax to retrieve this data instead. Until all that JavaScript was loaded, parsed, and executed, visitors to the site were left staring at a black background. Perhaps this was intended as a demonstration of the vast lonely emptiness of space.
Mozilla Won
There has been some back and forth between Mozilla and Chrome in regards to browser market share. While Chrome has signifigantly higher market share, I found this HN comment spot on:
But I don’t think Mozilla lost.
I worked for Mozilla for a few years, after seeing John Lily (CEO at the time) speak. It was right after Chrome started getting popular, and a smug person in the crowd asked him about how he felt about Chrome.
John’s response was awesome. “This is the web that we wanted. We exist not because we want everyone to use Firefox, but because we wanted people to have a choice” Firefox was a response to a world of “best viewed in IE” badges, and it changed the browser landscape.
Now, we have options. Chrome is great, but so are Safari, Edge, Brave, Opera and Firefox. There’s a lot of options out there, and they’re all standards compliment. And that’s thanks to Mozilla.
So, in my mind, Mozilla won. It’s a non-profit, and it forced us into an open web. We got the world they wanted. Maybe the world is a bit Chrome-heavy currently, but at least it’s a standards compliment world.
I hope Mozilla sees that. I hope they take credit, and move on to what’s next: privacy and net neutrality. Our privacy is under attack, and Mozilla is one of the few companies that can (and would want to) help. I know, I know. Nobody cares about privacy. Nobody cared about web standards, either, but Mozilla bundled it into an attractive package and it worked. It’s time for Mozilla to declare victory, high five the Chrome team, and move on to the next big challenge.
We really need someone to fight for our privacy and neutrality. And I really believe that this could be Mozilla’s swan song.
Worst Operating System Feature
From a Quora thread:
Windows 95 had a counter that added up every millisecond since the operating system was started. The counter would add up to 2^31 in a little less than 25 days, and the next millisecond, the operating system would crash due to overflow of the counter. In reality, however, that probably never happened, because Windows 95 could never run for almost 25 days without crashing for another reason.
Microsoft’s Google Docs Competitor
I find this fascinating:
Microsoft built a competitor to Google Docs in 1997. MS Office used its political clout to kill the project.https://t.co/sW4fEow7Fa pic.twitter.com/uvPRJbI3OD
— Dan Luu (@danluu) October 24, 2016
Samsung Automatically Airbrushing Selfies
Wow Samsung. When you get a brand new phone and go to take a selfie and realise that the default setting on the front camera is automatically on “Beauty level 8” which evidently means: seriously airbrushed face. This means everyone who gets a new Samsung phone and flicks the front camera on is automatically being told “Hi, we’re Samsung and we think you look way better when we automatically airbrush your selfies for you
Not surprising, but still somewhat disturbing that it’s the default setting.
When Bad Design Kills
Over the weekend Anton Yelchin, the 27-year-old actor known for playing Chekov in the recent Star Trek movies, was killed in what was referred to as “a freak accident” in his Los Angeles driveway. But was it really “freak?” It seems to us that lousy design may have played a role.
Yelchin was found crushed between his car, a 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee, and the security gate at the end of his driveway. It appears that Yelchin had exited his car and walked behind it, perhaps to close the gate, and apparently believed the transmission was in “Park.” Instead it appears it was actually in “Reverse” or “Neutral” and the car rolled down his steep driveway, killing him.
Watch the video. It’s insane how much more effort is required for the shifter. Let alone the dramatic lack of precision and feedback.
Information Architects Inc. “On Icons”
Great Article by iA on icons and their widespread use and misuse. Loved this quote in particular:
Design is not a natural science. It’s a practice that benefits from science and measurement, yet the full quality of a design cannot be objectively assessed in theory. User tests and analytics do not replace your designers, but verify their assumptions. There is more in a product than the designer can premeditate and there is more in a design than we can measure. This “more” can only be reached when we talk to humans working with it.