Jeremy Keith's Blog, page 41

Browsers

I mentioned recently that there might be quite a difference in tone between my links and my journal here on my website:

���Sfunny, when I look back at older journal entries they���re often written out of frustration, usually when something in the dev world is bugging me. But when I look back at all the links I���ve bookmarked the vibe is much more enthusiastic, like I���m excitedly pointing at something and saying ���Check this out!��� I feel like sentiment analyses of those two sections of my site would yield two different results.

My journal entries have been even more specifically negative of late. I���ve been bitchin��� and moanin��� about web browsers. But at least I���m an equal-opportunities bitcher and moaner.

Mozilla, I complained about your Facebook Container extension for Firefox.Apple, I complained about the ridiculous way Safari���s update cycle is tied to operating system.Google, I complained about the way a breaking change was rolled out in Chrome (and the implications for future breaking changes).Microsoft, you got off lightly. But please consider any of my criticisms of Chrome to apply to Edge too, seeing as they���re basically the same now.

I wish my journal weren���t so negative, but my mithering behaviour has been been encouraged. On more than one occasion, someone I know at a browser company has taken me aside to let me know that I should blog about any complaints I might have with their browser. It sounds counterintuitive, I know. But these blog posts can give engineers some ammunition to get those issues prioritised and fixed.

So my message to you is this: if there���s something about a web browser that you���re not happy with (or, indeed, if there���s something you���re really happy with), take the time to write it down and publish it.

Publish it on your website. You could post your gripes on Twitter but whinging on Jack���s website is just pissing in the wind. And I suspect you also might put a bit more thought into a blog post on your own site.

I know it���s a clich�� to say that browser makers want to hear from developers���and I���m often cynical about it myself���but they really do want to know what we think. Share your thoughts. I���ll probably end up linking to what you write.

Foundations

There was quite a kerfuffle recently about a feature being removed from Google Chrome. To be honest, the details don���t really matter for the point I want to make, but for the record, this was about removing alert and confirm dialogs from cross-origin iframes (and eventually everywhere else too).

It���s always tricky to remove a long-established feature from web browsers, but in this case there were significant security and performance reasons. The problem was how the change was communicated. It kind of wasn���t. So the first that people found out about it about was when things suddenly stopped working (like CodePen embeds).

The Chrome team responded quickly and the change has now been pushed back to next year. Hopefully there will be significant communication before that to let site owners know about the upcoming breakage.

So all���s well that ends well and we���ve all learned a valuable lesson about the importance of communication.

Or have we?

While this was going on, Emily Stark tweeted a more general point about breakage on the web:

Breaking changes happen often on the web, and as a developer it’s good practice to test against early release channels of major browsers to learn about any compatibility issues upfront.

Yikes! To me, this appears wrong on almost every level.

First of all, breaking changes don���t happen often on the web. They are���and should be���rare. If that were to change, the web would suffer massively in terms of predictability.

Secondly, the onus is not on web developers to keep track of older features in danger of being deprecated. That���s on the browser makers. I sincerely hope we���re not expected to consult a site called canistilluse.com.

I wasn���t the only one surprised by this message.

Simon says:

No, no, no, no! One of the best things about developing for the web is that, as a rule, browsers don’t break old code. Expecting every website and application to have an active team of developers maintaining it at all times is not how the web should work!

Edward Faulkner:

Most organizations and individuals do not have the resources to properly test and debug their website against Chrome canary every six weeks. Anybody who published a spec-compliant website should be able to trust that it will keep working.

Evan You:

This statement seriously undermines my trust in Google as steward for the web platform. When did we go from “never break the web” to “yes we will break the web often and you should be prepared for it”?!

It���s worth pointing out that the original tweet was not an official Google announcement. As Emily says right there on her Twitter account:

Opinions are my own.

Still, I was shaken to see such a cavalier attitude towards breaking changes on the World Wide Web. I know that removing dangerous old features is inevitable, but it should also be exceptional. It should not be taken lightly, and it should certainly not be expected to be an everyday part of web development.

It���s almost miraculous that I can visit the first web page ever published in a modern web browser and it still works. Let���s not become desensitised to how magical that is. I know it���s hard work to push the web forward, constantly add new features, while also maintaining backward compatibility, but it sure is worth it! We have collectively banked three decades worth of trust in the web as a stable place to build a home. Let���s not blow it.

If you published a website ten or twenty years ago, and you didn���t use any proprietary technology but only stuck to web standards, you should rightly expect that site to still work today …and still work ten and twenty years from now.

There was something else that bothered me about that tweet and it���s not something that I saw mentioned in the responses. There was an unspoken assumption that the web is built by professional web developers. That gave me a cold chill.

The web has made great strides in providing more and more powerful features that can be wielded in learnable, declarative, forgiving languages like HTML and CSS. With a bit of learning, anyone can make web pages complete with form validation, lazily-loaded responsive images, and beautiful grids that kick in on larger screens. The barrier to entry for all of those features has lowered over time���they used to require JavaScript or complex hacks. And with free(!) services like Netlify, you could literally drag a folder of web pages from your computer into a browser window and boom!, you���ve published to the entire world.

But the common narrative in the web development community���and amongst browser makers too apparently���is that web development has become more complex; so complex, in fact, that only an elite priesthood are capable of making websites today.

Absolute bollocks.

You can choose to make it really complicated. Convince yourself that ���the modern web��� is inherently complex and convoluted. But then look at what makes it complex and convoluted: toolchains, build tools, pipelines, frameworks, libraries, and abstractions. Please try to remember that none of those things are required to make a website.

This is for everyone. Not just for everyone to consume, but for everyone to make.

Updating Safari

Safari has been subjected to a lot of ire recently. Most of that ire has been aimed at the proposed changes to the navigation bar in Safari on iOS���moving it from a fixed top position to a floaty bottom position right over the content you���re trying to interact with.

Courage.

It remains to be seen whether this change will actually ship. That���s why it���s in beta���to gather all the web���s hot takes first.

But while this very visible change is dominating the discussion, invisible changes can be even more important. Or in the case of Safari, the lack of changes.

Compared to other browsers, Safari lags far behind when it comes to shipping features. I���m not necessarily talking about cutting-edge features either. These are often standards that have been out for years. This creates a gap���albeit an invisible one���between Safari and other browsers.

Jorge Arango has noticed this gap:

I use Safari as my primary browser on all my devices. I like how Safari integrates with the rest of the OS, its speed, and privacy features. But, alas, I increasingly have issues rendering websites and applications on Safari.

That���s the perspective of an end-user. Developers who have to deal with the gap in features are more, um, strident in their opinions. Perry Sun wrote For developers, Apple���s Safari is crap and outdated:

Don���t get me wrong, Safari is very good web browser, delivering fast performance and solid privacy features.

But at the same time, the lack of support for key web technologies and APIs has been both perplexing and annoying at the same time.

Alas, that post also indulges in speculation about Apple���s motives which always feels a bit too much like a conspiracy theory to me. Baldur Bjarnason has more to say on that topic in his post Kremlinology and the motivational fallacy when blogging about Apple. He also points to a good example of critiquing Safari without speculating about motives: Dave���s post One-offs and low-expectations with Safari, which documents all the annoying paper cuts inflicted by Safari���s ���quirks.���

Another deep dive that avoids speculating about motives comes from Tim Perry: Safari isn’t protecting the web, it’s killing it. I don���t agree with everything in it. I think that Apple���and Mozilla���s���objections to some device APIs are informed by a real concern about privacy and security. But I agree with his point that it���s not enough to just object; you���ve got to offer an alternative vision too.

That same post has a litany of uncontroversial features that shipped in Safari looong after they shipped in other browsers:

Again: these are not contentious features shipping by only Chrome, they’re features with wide support and no clear objections, but Safari is still not shipping them until years later. They’re also not shiny irrelevant features that “bloat the web” in any sense: each example I’ve included above primarily improving core webpage UX and performance. Safari is slowing that down progress here.

But perhaps most damning of all is how Safari deals with bugs.

A recent release of Safari shipped with a really bad Local Storage bug. The bug was fixed within a day. Yay! But the fix won���t ship until …who knows?

This is because browser updates are tied to operating system updates. Yes, this is just like the 90s when Microsoft claimed that Internet Explorer was intrinsically linked to Windows (a tactic that didn���t work out too well for them in the subsequent court case).

I don���t get it. I���m pretty sure that other Apple products ship updates and fixes independentally of OS releases. I���m sure I���ve received software updates for Keynote, Garage Band, and other pieces of software made by Apple.

And yet, of all the applications that need a speedy update cycle���a user agent for the World Wide Web���Apple���s version is needlessly delayed by the release cycle of the entire operating system.

I don���t want to speculate on why this might be. I don���t know the technical details. But I suspect that the root cause might not be technical in nature. Apple have always tied their browser updates to OS releases. If Google���s cardinal sin is avoiding anything ���Not Invented Here���, Apple���s downfall is ���We���ve always done it this way.���

Evergreen browsers update in the background, usually at regular intervals. Firefox is an evergreen browser. Chrome is an evergreen browser. Edge is an evergreen browser.

Safari is not an evergreen browser.

That���s frustrating when it comes to new features. It���s unforgivable when it comes to bugs.

At least on Apple���s desktop computers, users have the choice to switch to a different browser. But on Apple���s mobile devices, users have no choice but to use Safari���s rendering engine, bugs and all.

As I wrote when I had to deal with one of Safari���s bugs:

I wish that Apple would allow other rendering engines to be installed on iOS devices. But if that���s a hell-freezing-over prospect, I wish that Safari updates weren���t tied to operating system updates.

A Few Notes on A Few Notes on The Culture

When I post a link, I do it for two reasons.

First of all, it���s me pointing at something and saying ���Check this out!���

Secondly, it���s a way for me to stash something away that I might want to return to. I tag all my links so when I need to find one again, I just need to think ���Now what would past me have tagged it with?��� Then I type the appropriate URL: adactio.com/links/tags/whatever

There are some links that I return to again and again.

Back in 2008, I linked to a document called A Few Notes on The Culture. It���s a copy of a post by Iain M Banks to a newsgroup back in 1994.

Alas, that link is dead. Linkrot, innit?

But in 2013 I linked to the same document on a different domain. That link still works even though I believe it was first published around twenty(!) years ago (view source for some pre-CSS markup nostalgia).

Anyway, A Few Notes On The Culture is a fascinating look at the world-building of Iain M Banks���s Culture novels. He talks about the in-world engineering, education, biology, and belief system of his imagined utopia. The part that sticks in my mind is when he talks about economics:

Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces.

The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what-works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is ��� without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset ��� intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual immaturity and ��� through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others ��� a kind of synthetic evil.

Those three paragraphs might be the most succinct critique of unfettered capitalism I���ve come across. The invisible hand as a paperclip maximiser.

Like I said, it���s a fascinating document. In fact I realised that I should probably store a copy of it for myself.

I have a section of my site called ���extras��� where I dump miscellaneous stuff. Most of it is unlinked. It���s mostly for my own benefit. That���s where I���ve put my copy of A Few Notes On The Culture.

Here���s a funny thing …for all the times that I���ve revisited the link, I never knew anything about the site is was hosted on���vavatch.co.uk���so this most recent time, I did a bit of clicking around. Clearly it���s the personal website of a sci-fi-loving college student from the early 2000s. But what came as a revelation to me was that the site belonged to …Adrian Hon!

I���m impressed that he kept his old website up even after moving over to the domain mssv.net, founding Six To Start, and writing A History Of The Future In 100 Objects. That���s a great snackable book, by the way. Well worth a read.

Facebook Container for Firefox

Firefox has a nifty extension���made by Mozilla���called Facebook Container. It does two things.

First of all, it sandboxes any of your activity while you���re on the facebook.com domain. The tab you���re in is isolated from all others.

Secondly, when you visit a site that loads a tracker from Facebook, the extension alerts you to its presence. For example, if a page has a share widget that would post to Facebook, a little fence icon appears over the widget warning you that Facebook will be able to track that activity.

It���s a nifty extension that I���ve been using for quite a while. Except now it���s gone completely haywire. That little fence icon is appearing all over the web wherever there���s a form with an email input. See, for example, the newsletter sign-up form in the footer of the Clearleft site. It���s happening on forms over on The Session too despite the rigourous-bordering-on-paranoid security restrictions in place there.

Hovering over the fence icon displays this text:

If you use your real email address here, Facebook may be able to track you.

That is, of course, false. It���s also really damaging. One of the worst things that you can do in the security space is to cry wolf. If a concerned user is told that they can ignore that warning, you���re lessening the impact of all warnings, even serious legitimate ones.

Sometimes false positives are an acceptable price to pay for overall increased security, but in this case, the rate of false positives can only decrease trust.

I tried to find out how to submit a bug report about this but I couldn���t work it out (and I certainly don���t want to file a bug report in a review) so I���m writing this in the hopes that somebody at Mozilla sees it.

What���s really worrying is that this might not be considered a bug. The release notes for the version of the extension that came out last week say:

Email fields will now show a prompt, alerting users about how Facebook can track users by their email address.

Like ���all email fields? That���s ridiculous!

I thought the issue might���ve been fixed in the latest release that came out yesterday. The release notes say:

This release addresses fixes a issue from our last release �����the email field prompt now only displays on sites where Facebook resources have been blocked.

But the behaviour is unfortunately still there, even on sites like The Session or Clearleft that wouldn���t touch Facebook resources with a barge pole. The fence icon continues to pop up all over the web.

I hope this gets sorted soon. I like the Facebook Container extension and I���d like to be able to recommend it to other people. Right now I���d recommed the opposite���don���t install this extension while it���s behaving so overzealously. If the current behaviour continues, I���ll be uninstalling this extension myself.

Update: It looks like a fix is being rolled out. Fingers crossed!

Reader

I���ve written before about how I don���t have notifications on my phone or computer. But that doesn���t stop computer programmes waving at me, trying to attract my attention.

If I have my email client open on my computer there���s a red circle with a number in it telling me how many unread emails I have. It���s the same with Slack. If Slack is running and somebody writes something to me, or @here, or @everyone, then a red circle blinks into existence.

There���s a category of programmes like this that want my attention���email, Slack, calendars. In each case, emptiness is the desired end goal. Seeing an inbox too full of emails or a calendar too full of appointments makes me feel queasy. In theory these programmes are acting on my behalf, working for me, making my life easier. And in many ways they do. They help me keep things organised. But they also need to me to take steps: read that email, go to that appointment, catch up with that Slack message. Sometimes it can feel like the tail is wagging the dog and I���m the one doing the bidding of these pieces of software.

My RSS reader should, in theory, fall into the same category. It shows me the number of unread items, just like email or Slack. But for some reason, it feels different. When I open my RSS reader to catch up on the feeds I���m subscribed to, it doesn���t feel like opening my email client. It feels more like opening a book. And, yes, books are also things to be completed���a bookmark not only marks my current page, it also acts as a progress bar���but books are for pleasure. The pleasure might come from escapism, or stimulation, or the pursuit of knowledge. That���s a very different category to email, calendars, and Slack.

I���ve managed to wire my neurological pathways to put RSS in the books category instead of the productivity category. I���m very glad about that. I would hate if catching up on RSS feeds felt like catching up on email. Maybe that���s why I���m never entirely comfortable with newsletters���if there���s an option to subscribe by RSS instead of email, I���ll always take it.

I have two folders in my RSS reader: blogs and magazines. Reading blog posts feels like catching up with what my friends are up to (even if I don���t actually know the person). Reading magazine articles feels like spending a lazy Sunday catching up with some long-form journalism.

I should update this list of my subscriptions. It���s a bit out of date.

Matt made a nice website explaining RSS. And Nicky Case recently wrote about reviving RSS.

Oh, and if you want to have my words in your RSS reader, I have plenty of options for you.

Hope

My last long-distance trip before we were all grounded by The Situation was to San Francisco at the end of 2019. I attended Indie Web Camp while I was there, which gave me the opportunity to add a little something to my website: an ���on this day��� page.

I���m glad I did. While it���s probably of little interest to anyone else, I enjoy scrolling back to see how the same date unfolded over the years.

���Sfunny, when I look back at older journal entries they���re often written out of frustration, usually when something in the dev world is bugging me. But when I look back at all the links I���ve bookmarked the vibe is much more enthusiastic, like I���m excitedly pointing at something and saying ���Check this out!��� I feel like sentiment analyses of those two sections of my site would yield two different results.

But when I scroll down through my ���on this day��� page, it also feels like descending deeper into the dark waters of linkrot. For each year back in time, the probability of a link still working decreases until there���s nothing but decay.

Sadly this is nothing new. I���ve been lamenting the state of digital preservation for years now. More recently Jonathan Zittrain penned an article in The Atlantic on the topic:

Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity���s knowledge together is coming undone.

In one sense, linkrot is the price we pay for the web���s particular system of hypertext. We don���t have two-way linking, which means there���s no centralised repository of links which would be prohibitively complex to maintain. So when you want to link to something on the web, you just do it. An a element with an href attribute. That���s it. You don���t need to check with the owner of the resource you���re linking to. You don���t need to check with anyone. You have complete freedom to link to any URL you want to.

But it���s that same simple system that makes the act of linking a gamble. If the URL you���ve linked to goes away, you���ll have no way of knowing.

As I scroll down my ���on this day��� page, I come across more and more dead links that have been snapped off from the fabric of the web.

If I stop and think about it, it can get quite dispiriting. Why bother making hyperlinks at all? It���s only a matter of time until those links break.

And yet I still keep linking. I still keep pointing to things and saying ���Check this out!��� even though I know that over a long enough timescale, there���s little chance that the link will hold.

In a sense, every hyperlink on the World Wide Web is little act of hope. Even though I know that when I link to something, it probably won���t last, I still harbour that hope.

If hyperlinks are built on hope, and the web is made of hyperlinks, then in a way, the World Wide Web is quite literally made out of hope.

I like that.

Solarpunk

My talk on sci-fi and me for Beyond Tellerrand���s Stay Curious event was deliberately designed to be broad and expansive. This was in contrast to Steph���s talk which was deliberately narrow and focused on one topic. Specifically, it was all about solarpunk.

I first heard of solarpunk from Justin Pickard back in 2014 at an event I was hosting. He described it as:

individuals and communities harnessing the power of the photovoltaic solar panel to achieve energy-independence.

The sci-fi subgenre of solarpunk, then, is about these communities. The subgenre sets up to be deliberately positive, even utopian, in contrast to most sci-fi.

Most genres ending with the -punk suffix are about aesthetics. You know the way that cyberpunk is laptops, leather and sunglasses, and steampunk is zeppelins and top hats with goggles. Solarpunk is supposedly free of any such ���look.��� That said, all the examples I���ve seen seem to converge on the motto of ���put a tree on it.��� If a depiction of the future looks lush, verdant, fecund and green, chances are it���s solarpunk.

At least, it might be solarpunk. It would have to pass the criteria laid down by the gatekeepers. Solarpunk is manifesto-driven sci-fi. I���m not sure how I feel about that. It���s one thing to apply a category to a piece of writing after it���s been written, but it���s another to start with an agenda-driven category and proceed from there. And as with any kind of classification system, the edges are bound to be fuzzy, leading to endless debates about what���s in and what���s out (see also: UX, UI, service design, content design, product design, front-end development, and most ironically of all, information architecture).

When I met up with Steph to discuss our talk topics and she described the various schools of thought that reside under the umbrella of solarpunk, it reminded me of my college days. You wouldn���t have just one Marxist student group, there���d be multiple Marxist student groups each with their own pillars of identity (Leninist, Trotskyist, anarcho-syndicalist, and so on). From the outside they all looked the same, but woe betide you if you mixed them up. It was exactly the kind of situation that was lampooned in Monty Python���s Life of Brian with its People���s Front of Judea and Judean People���s Front. Steph confirmed that those kind of rifts also exist in solarpunk. It���s just like that bit in Gulliver���s Travels where nations go to war over the correct way to crack an egg.

But there���s general agreement about what broadly constitutes solarpunk. It���s a form of cli-fi (climate fiction) but with an upbeat spin: positive but plausible stories of the future that might feature communities, rewilding, gardening, farming, energy independence, or decentralisation. Centralised authority���in the form of governments and corporations���is not to be trusted.

That���s all well and good but it reminds of another community. Libertarian preppers. Heck, even some of the solarpunk examples feature seasteading (but with more trees).

Politically, preppers and solarpunks couldn���t be further apart. Practically, they seem more similar than either of them would be comfortable with.

Both communities distrust centralisation. For the libertarians, this manifests in a hatred of taxation. For solarpunks, it���s all about getting off the electricity grid. But both want to start their own separate self-sustaining communities.

Independence. Decentralisation. Self-sufficiency.

There���s a fine line between Atlas Shrugged and The Whole Earth Catalog.

Hosting online events

Back in 2014 Vitaly asked me if I���d be the host for Smashing Conference in Freiburg. I jumped at the chance. I thought it would be an easy gig. All of the advantages of speaking at a conference without the troublesome need to actually give a talk.

As it turned out, it was quite a bit of work:

It wasn���t just a matter of introducing each speaker���there was also a little chat with each speaker after their talk, so I had to make sure I was paying close attention to each and every talk, thinking of potential questions and conversation points. After two days of that, I was a bit knackered.

Last month, I hosted an other event, but this time it was online: UX Fest. Doing the post-talk interviews was definitely a little weirder online. It���s not quite the same as literally sitting down with someone. But the online nature of the event did provide one big advantage…

To minimise technical hitches on the day, and to ensure that the talks were properly captioned, all the speakers recorded their talks ahead of time. That meant I had an opportunity to get a sneak peek at the talks and prepare questions accordingly.

UX Fest had a day of talks every Thursday in June. There were four talks per Thursday. I started prepping on the Monday.

First of all, I just watched all the talks and let them wash me over. At this point, I���d often think ���I���m not sure if I can come up with any questions for this one!��� but I���d let the talks sit there in my subsconscious for a while. This was also a time to let connections between talks bubble up.

Then on the Tuesday and Wednesday, I went through the talks more methodically, pausing the video every time I thought of a possible question. After a few rounds of this, I inevitably ended up with plenty of questions, some better than others. So I then re-ordered them in descending levels of quality. That way if I didn���t get to the questions at the bottom of the list, it was no great loss.

In theory, I might not get to any of my questions. That���s because attendees could also ask questions on the day via a chat window. I prioritised those questions over my own. Because it���s not about me.

On some days there was a good mix of audience questions and my own pre-prepared questions. On other days it was mostly my own questions.

Either way, it was important that I didn���t treat the interview like a laundry list of questions to get through. It was meant to be a conversation. So the answer to one question might touch on something that I had made a note of further down the list, in which case I���d run with that. Or the conversation might go in a really interesting direction completely unrelated to the questions or indeed the talk.

Above all, these segments needed to be engaging and entertaining in a personable way, more like a chat show than a post-game press conference. So even though I had done lots of prep for interviewing each speaker, I didn���t want to show my homework. I wanted each interview to feel like a natural flow.

To quote the old saw, this kind of spontaneity takes years of practice.

There was an added complication when two speakers shared an interview slot for a joint Q&A. Not only did I have to think of questions for each speaker, I also had to think of questions that would work for both speakers. And I had to keep track of how much time each person was speaking so that the chat wasn���t dominated by one person more than the other. This was very much like moderating a panel, something that I enjoy very much.

In the end, all of the prep paid off. The conversations flowed smoothly and I was happy with some of the more thought-provoking questions that I had researched ahead of time. The speakers seemed happy too.

Y���know, there are not many things I���m really good at. I���m a mediocre developer, and an even worse designer. I���m okay at writing. But I���m really good at public speaking. And I think I���m pretty darn good at this hosting lark too.

Safari 15

If you download Safari Technology Preview you can test drive features that are on their way in Safari 15. One of those features, announced at Apple���s World Wide Developer Conference, is coloured browser chrome via support for the meta value of ���theme-color.��� Chrome on Android has supported this for a while but I believe Safari is the first desktop browser to add support. They���ve also added support for the media attribute on that meta element to handle ���prefers-color-scheme.���

This is all very welcome, although it does remind me a bit of when Internet Explorer came out with the ability to make coloured scrollbars. I mean, they���re nice features���n���all, but maybe not the most pressing? Safari is still refusing to acknowledge progressive web apps.

That���s not quite true. In her WWDC video Jen demonstrates how you can add a progressive web app like Resilient Web Design to your home screen. I���m chuffed that my little web book made an appearance, but when you see how you add a site to your home screen in iOS, it���s somewhat depressing.

The steps to add a website to your home screen are:

Tap the ���share��� icon. It���s not labelled ���share.��� It���s a square with an arrow coming out of the top of it.A drawer pops up. The option to ���add to home screen��� is nowhere to be seen. You have to pull the drawer up further to see the hidden options.Now you must find ���add to home screen��� in the listCopyAdd to Reading ListAdd BookmarkAdd to FavouritesFind on PageAdd to Home ScreenMarkupPrint

It reminds of this exchange in The Hitchhiker���s Guide To The Galaxy:

���You hadn���t exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them had you? I mean like actually telling anyone or anything.���

���But the plans were on display������

���On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.���

���That���s the display department.���

���With a torch.���

���Ah, well the lights had probably gone.���

���So had the stairs.���

���But look you found the notice didn���t you?���

���Yes,��� said Arthur, ���yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ���Beware of The Leopard.������

Safari���s current ���support��� for adding progressive web apps to the home screen feels like the minimum possible ���just enough to use it as a legal argument if you happen to be litigated against for having a monopoly on app distribution. ���Hey, you can always make a web app!��� It���s true in theory. In practice it���s …suboptimal, to put it mildly.

Still, those coloured tab bars are very nice.

It���s a little bit weird that this stylistic information is handled by HTML rather than CSS. It���s similar to the meta viewport value in that sense. I always that the plan was to migrate that to CSS at some point, but here we are a decade later and it���s still very much part of our boilerplate markup.

Some people have remarked that the coloured browser chrome can make the URL bar look like part of the site so people might expect it to operate like a site-specific search.

I also wonder if it might blur ���the line of death���; that point in the UI where the browser chrome ends and the website begins. Does the unified colour make it easier to spoof browser UI?

Probably not. You can already kind of spoof browser UI by using the right shade of grey. Although the removal any kind of actual line in Safari does give me pause for thought.

I tend not to think of security implications like this by default. My first thought tends to be more about how I can use the feature. It���s only after a while that I think about how bad actors might abuse the same feature. I should probably try to narrow the gap between those thoughts.