Gregory's Server
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9 posts total
Oh hai, London 💂 If you're also around, @owa is hosting a meetup from 6pm on Thurs; see their toot for details and how to register (it's free! But you should, of course, donate if you can):  iOS 17.4 Beta 3 is out and PWAs are still broken in the EU. It's looking like Apple is going to break web apps and try to blame regulators. We can't let that happen, so now's a great time to join @owa and help push back. This timely post has all the background: @owa For more than a week, web developers have held their fire, assuming Apple might have a new (extremely belated) solution in the works, and Cupertino never talks about anything, so why would this be different? That silence has gone from "disappointingly ineffective" to "epic self-own". This is a brazen attempt by Apple to sink the competition and claim they were forced to by those DMA meanies. Time's up. We have to understand silence as an attempt to normalise the indefensible.  @slightlyoff @owa I’m sure they can produce some evidence that usage of PWAs was so low that they can’t justify the engineering work that needs to go into it. Has anyone ever seen a popular PWA that is widely in use on any platform? I understood that even on Android it was just a tiny blip on the radar.
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  @slightlyoff fascinating piece, and post, and confirms everything I've always suspected. But if you ever badmouth JS people will end you. 😂 In 2023, the frontend hiring pro-move is to zero your budget for additive JS and spend it on hiring and/or retraining for modern CSS, HTML, and SVG skills. The problem with modern frontend isn't that people pick React, it's that a huge chunk of the industry has abandoned user-centric values in the name of efficiency, delivering neither good UX nor acceptable DX in the process. Picking React in '23 is merely a symptom of a much deeper rot.
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@slightlyoff 100%. Unfortunately I don't get a choice but to use it at work because it's the "standard".  @slightlyoff @dylanbeattie agreed. Out of curiosity, what’s your favorite? I say this as someone who more or less rage quit front end dev 10 years ago cuz it was a dumpster fire and it’s hardly improved. I see occasional interesting sparks like Elm that try to solve only a single part of the problem. It is *intense* just how badly the JS/React brainworms have infected the frontend community. Every single NYT story page has *both* a 437KiB (1.5MiB unzipped) *and* a 474KiB (1.7MiB) JS file, to display ~50K of text. It isn't ad bloat. It isn't tracking. It's this sort of bunk: The folks over at @owa are doing the most important work on and for the web right now. For several years they've been flat-out, full-time, without pay to make browser competition a reality on the mobile web. Having achieved things I could have only hoped for 2 years ago (DMA mandates engine choice!), they're finally looking to raise a bit of cash to keep going. If you work on the web, supporting them is an absolute no-brainer: Apple's motives are easy to understand over the macOS -> iOS arc, as Apple is now a mobile company that happens to make computers. The A-series -> M-series chips are stunning proof of that. But I digress. When Apple was a niche PC maker, it needed the web as a way to help potential customers de-risk the purchase of luxury computers. While it enjoyed outsized influence, the Mac never had enough share to create a sufficiently large software ecosystem w/o the web. /cc @chriscoyier @tomayac |