CategoryBrowsers

March 11, 2021 — All of us use web scraping in our everyday lives. It merely describes the process of extracting information from a website. For a lot of web scraping tasks, an HTTP client is enough to extract a page’s data. However, when it comes to dynamic websites, a headless browser sometimes becomes indispensable. In this tutorial, Andreas Altheimer will build a web scraper that can scrape dynamic websites based on Node.js and Puppeteer. Read more…

January 5, 2021 — This article is a response to the Platform Adjacency Theory by Alex Russell, with specific takes on WebUSB and some alternative proposals for a way forward. Read more…

November 18, 2020 — Working with native HTML Form Controls has been such a pain point for web developers, from styling to extending them, the limitations are so great that countless dev hours have been spent recreating them. But why are form controls so difficult to work with?

In this article, Stephanie dives into the past by going back to the beginning of HTML and tracing the evolution of form controls through to the present and the current state of working with them. She shares her thoughts and takes a glimpse at what the future holds for working with these essential pieces of the web. Read more…

November 2, 2020 — There is now a specification for native CSS masonry layout, as part of the Grid Layout spec. In this article, Rachel Andrew will explain the draft spec, with examples that you can try out in Firefox Nightly. While this is a feature you won’t be able to use in production right now, your feedback would be valuable to help make sure it serves the requirements that you have for this kind of layout. So let’s take a look. Read more…

October 15, 2020 — In this tutorial, Chidi Orji is going to show you how to use the Web Worker API to manage time-consuming and UI-blocking tasks in a JavaScript app by building a sample web app that leverages Web Workers. Finally, we’ll end the article by transferring everything to a React application. If you need more insights into this topic, Chidi has included a number of links in the “Further Resources” section to help you get up to speed. Read more…

July 13, 2020 — In this article, Rachel Andrew takes a look at a new effort to crowdfund the costs of implementing browser features. She encourage developers to use, talk about, and raise implementation bugs with browsers to try to get features implemented, however, what if there was a more direct way to do so? What if web developers could get together and fund the development of these features? This article is based on an interview with Brian Kardell, Developer Advocate at Igalia. Read more…

July 7, 2020 — If you are the sort of person who doesn’t like reading about things if you can’t use them now, then this article probably isn’t for you — we have many others for you to enjoy instead! However, if you like to know what is on the way and read more about the things you can play with in a beta version of a browser, read on! Today, Rachel Andrew takes a look at some of the interesting CSS features that are making their way into browsers right now. Read more…

March 19, 2020 — Houdini, an umbrella term for the collection of browser APIs, aims to bring significant improvements to the web development process and the development of CSS standards in general. Frontend developers will be able to extend the CSS with new features using JavaScript, hook into CSS rendering engine and tell the browser how to apply CSS during a render process. Houdini’s browser support is improving and some APIs are available for use today, so it’s a good time to become familiar with them and experiment. We are going to take a look at each part of Houdini, its current browser support and see how they can be used today using progressive enhancement. Read more…

March 9, 2020 — Thanks to some recent changes in browsers, it’s now well worth setting width and height attributes on your images to prevent layout shifts and improve the experience of your site visitors. Barry Polland loves improvements that just work without any effort required of website owners. That is not to ignore the hard work required by the browser developers and standardization teams, of course, but it’s often rolling out to websites that is the real difficulty. The less friction we can add to introduce these improvements, the more likely they will be adopted, and there’s no better friction than none at all! Read more…

March 6, 2020 — Transliteration is a popular way to input non-English characters using an English keyboard. The typical method of implementing this is via keyboard event capturing but there’s no uniform support from mobile browsers. In this article, Sandamal Siripathi explains a new method to eliminate such browser-related problems when developing web apps that use transliteration. Read more…