webdev – text/plain

View-Source

Chromium offers two ways for an end-user to view the source code of a web page: 1) the Developer Tools, and 2) The longstanding view-source viewer. Of these, the Developer Tools have received almost all of the attention over the last decade, but in this post I want to take a quick look at theContinue reading “View-Source”

Browser Memory Limits

Web browsers are notorious for being memory hogs, but this can be a bit misleading– in most cases, the memory used by the loaded pages accounts for the majority of memory consumption. Unfortunately, some pages are not very good stewards of the system’s memory. One particularly common problem is memory leaks– a site establishes aContinue reading “Browser Memory Limits”

Demystifying Browsers

Last update: November 16, 2021 I started building browser extensions more than 22 years ago, and I started building browsers directly just over 16 years ago. At this point, I think it’s fair to say that I’m entering the grizzled veteran phase of my career. With the Edge team continuing to grow with bright youngContinue reading “Demystifying Browsers”

Same-Site Cookies By Default

The Chrome team is embarking on a clever and bold plan to change the recipe for cookies. It’s one of the most consequential changes to the web platform in almost a decade, but with any luck, users won’t notice anything has changed. But if you’re a web developer, you should start testing your sites andContinue reading “Same-Site Cookies By Default”

Building your .APP website with NameCheap and GitHub Pages–A Visual Guide

I recently bought a few new domain names under the brand new .app top-level-domain (TLD). The .app TLD is awesome because it’s on the HSTSPreload list, meaning that browsers will automatically use only HTTPS for every request on every domain under .app, keeping connections secure and improving performance. I’m not doing anything terribly exciting withContinue reading “Building your .APP website with NameCheap and GitHub Pages–A Visual Guide”

Certificates Matter

Recently, my web host stopped supporting the FrontPage Server Extensions used by Microsoft Expression Web 4 for website publishing (FPSE is now out-of-support). FPSE allowed me to publish to my site over a HTTPS connection, helping keep my password safe and my uploaded files unmodified. Unfortunately, the alternative FTP transport is completely insecure–passwords and dataContinue reading “Certificates Matter”

Zopfli All The Things

I’ve written about Zopfli quite a bit in the past, and even wrote a tool to apply it to PNG files. For fun, I had a look at one of the most optimized pages in the world: Google.com, through the lens of Zopfli. Here are the basic resources delivered by the Google homepage: This breakdownContinue reading “Zopfli All The Things”

UTF-8

Over on HillaryClinton.com, Secretary Clinton reminds us all that it’s charset=utf-8 by demonstrating what happens when you use the bogus charset=utf8: Of course, her site is not the first to make this mistake.