The end of responsive images - Piccalilli
Hallelujah! Support for sizes="auto" is finally landing in Firefox and Safari! Praise be!
Ben takes us on a journey inside the mind of a browser (Chrome in this case). It’s all about priorities when it comes to the critical path.
Hallelujah! Support for sizes="auto" is finally landing in Firefox and Safari! Praise be!
Web development follows a familiar cycle. First we glue together a solution with whatever we have — JavaScript, image hacks, Flash, anything. Then the platform matures, and CSS or HTML eventually makes that same workaround native. Rounded corners, custom fonts, smooth scrolling, sticky positioning: all of these started as JavaScript-heavy hacks before CSS turned them into a single declaration.
We are in another one of those transition moments. A new wave of long-requested CSS features is finally landing, and many of them are explicitly designed to replace patterns that used to require JavaScript. Not as approximations — as first-class platform primitives that handle the edge cases, run in the right thread, and need zero dependencies.
You might not need (much) JavaScript for these common interface patterns.
While we all love the power and flexibility JS provides, we should also respect it, and our users, by limiting its use to only what it needs to do.
Yes! Client-side JavaScript should do what only client-side JavaScript can do.
A very, very deep dive into like-for-like comparison of JavaScript frameworks. The takeaway:
Nuxt demonstrates that established “big three” frameworks can achieve next-gen performance when properly configured. Vue’s architecture allows competitive mobile web performance while maintaining a mature ecosystem. React and Angular show no path to similar results.
And the real takeaway:
Mobile is the web. These measurements matter because mobile web is the primary internet for billions of people. If your app is accessible via URL, people will use it on phones with cellular connections. Optimizing for desktop and hoping mobile is good enough is backwards. The web is mobile. Build for that reality.
So instead of asking yourself, “How can I write code that does what I want?” Consider asking yourself, “Can I write code that ties together things the browser already does to accomplish what I want (or close enough to it)?”
In which I find a tagline for Web Day Out and a tagline for React.
This line-up just gets better and better! You’ll want to be in Brighton on March 12th, 2026.
Technically, websites can do just about anything that native apps can do. And yet the actual experience of using the web on mobile is worse than ever.
A redesign with modern CSS.
A small-scale conspiracy theory from the innards of Google.