stephen.nyc

Tag: Internet

  • Orion Browser

    Huh, you don’t see a new browser everyday, let alone one that opts for webkit over chromium. I suppose I’m pretty late to this discovery from Kagi. The chrome extension support is pretty neat. It’s a great idea and one that Apple should deeply consider. If Apple allowed cross-platform browser extensions, it would transform the web.

    Orion — a web browser designed from the ground-up. Native WebKit speed, full extension compatibility, and absolute privacy is finally together in one browser that respects you.

    orionbrowser.com

  • UbuWeb Returns

    From the homepage of ubu.web:

    A year ago, we decided to shutter UbuWeb. Not really shutter it, per se, but instead to consider it complete. After nearly 30 years, it felt right. But now, with the political changes in America and elsewhere around the world, we have decided to restart our archiving and regrow Ubu. In a moment when our collective memory is being systematically eradicated, archiving reemerges as a strong form of resistance, a way of preserving crucial, subversive, and marginalized forms of expression. We encourage you to do the same. All rivers lead to the same ocean: find your form of resistance, no matter how small, and go hard. It’s now or never. Together we can prevent the annihilation of the memory of the world.

    Next time you have an hour to yourself. Peruse these archives. Watch, listen, read and learn from others that came before us. The about page says it all:

    Founded in 1996, UbuWeb is a pirate shadow library consisting of hundreds of thousands of freely downloadable avant-garde artifacts. 

  • Wait, Apple supports alternative browser engines on iOS?

    Since the beginning of the iPhone, Apple has resisted opening up it’s operating system in many ways. The App Store being the biggest walled garden, but the lesser known and perhaps more arcane is the browser on your iPhone.

    As of writing, you can install an alternative browser on your iOS device: Google Chrome, Edge, DuckDuckGo etc. But really, under the hood… it’s actually powered by a Safari webview. Which means, it’s running webkit. The real Google Chrome on the other hand runs a Blink-based version of Chromium. Browser vendors render HTML and CSS differently. We’ve known this for a while. Surely you’ve noticed you bank’s website looks different on Chrome versus visiting the same website on Firefox. Heck, some even have wholly different JavaScript Engines.

    Apple, has for years successfully kept alternative browsers on iOS locked-into using Webkit to the dismay of Google and consumers. Last year in February, there was a concerted test to see how well a Blink-based browser would fair on iPhones. You see, Apple has resisted allowing apps to use alternative browser vendors for years because of several reasons.

    Apple likes to keep a iron-grip control on marketshare of it’s software. It is an old war that software companies continue to fight. For good reason too. It’s part of their strategy to keep users within the flywheel of their subscription businesses and tick-tock product cycles. If Apple wants to maintain market share of it’s browser, it must remain competitive. The problem with webkit, and Safari the browser by extension is, it’s lacking in terms of feature development and popularity. There are claims that webkit can has superior power management, simple to extend, secure and less of a memory hog.

    Yet, people continue to chose Chrome, even at the risk of antitrust and performance. Turns out, users like to see nice software features! Novel!

    All this being said, apparently the only consumers that will get to have true alternative browser choices on their mobile Apple devices will be EU consumers. Another disappointing reason to be American.

  • Every Two Weeks, a Language Dies

    Every Two Weeks, a Language Dies

    Nina Strochlic at National Geographic writes:

    Between 1950 and 2010, 230 languages went extinct, according to the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. Today, a third of the world’s languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers left. Every two weeks a language dies with its last speaker, 50 to 90 percent of them are predicted to disappear by the next century.

    In rare cases, political will and a thorough written record can resurrect a lost language. Hebrew was extinct from the fourth century BC to the 1800s, and Catalan only bloomed during a government transition in the 1970s. In 2001, more than 40 years after the last native speaker died, the language of Oklahoma’s Miami tribe started being learned by students at Miami University in Ohio. The internet has connected rare language speakers with each other and with researchers. Even texting has helped formalize languages that don’t have a set writing system.

    Other languages have not been so lucky in a post-internet world. Many, will never return from extinction. But it’s true that being more connected, we have more opportunities to connect and preserve our ancestral dialects and languages. In National Geographic’s article, they share a video of two surviving speakers of Gottscheerish:

    For more information, check out WikiTongues, the seed bank of the world’s languages.

  • The Origin of the Tag

    I love coming across this stuff. I always forget that Marc Andreessen is basically the father of Mosiac, Netscape and plenty of other internet startups through his VC, Andreessen Horowitz.

    Here’s Andreessen’s super-duper casual proposal over email, sent on February 25, 1993:

    I’d like to propose a new, optional HTML tag:


    IMG


    Required argument is SRC=”url”. 

    Lovely. Marc goes forward to say that browsers should support bitmap image filetypes, be flexible and recommends browser behavior when an <img> has been given a non-supported filetype in the src argument:

    Browsers should be afforded flexibility as to which image formats they
    support. Xbm and Xpm are good ones to support, for example. If a
    browser cannot interpret a given format, it can do whatever it wants
    instead (X Mosaic will pop up a default bitmap as a placeholder).

    Amazing to see how far we’ve come since then.

  • How Tiny Might Make The Web A Better Place

    How Tiny Might Make The Web A Better Place

    It’s the year 2000 and The Dot-com Bubble has just arrived. I was 11 years old at the time. I don’t remember it. What I do remember is playing Chess on Yahoo! Games or chatting with friends on AIM. Those were the good ol days.

    However, researching The Dot-com Bubble has been eye-opening. Two major factors catalyzed the conflagration of sell-offs, bankruptcy and failure of so many e-companies (as they were called then). Those startups (as we call them now), were plagued with:

    1. A crazy amount of over-spending. [1]
    2. The stock market crash that followed the 9/11 attacks.

    9/11 was unavoidable for those businesses. But overspending, or burning cash was a very serious problem then — and remains a serious problem now. Snapchat lost almost half a billion dollars in 2016. Uber spent $2.6 billion in 2016 alone. Apple, the prodigal son spent $10 billion on R&D in 2016. The tide is pulling back for some of these VC-backed companies, and there may be a tsunami looming around the corner.

    Enter, the holding company.

    Holding companies reduce the risk for owners. If a financial hardship comes for one of the holdings, it’s unlikely the business will disappear as the corporate group as a whole owns a stake. This is a healthy relationship, and strengthens the bonds between business and consumers.

    Tiny's Homepage

    Recently I came across Tiny. Tiny invests in internet startups, but it also buys businesses into their holdings. If you’re a bootstrapped company, struggling to grow under your own weight, or can scale to level that your VC’s want — Tiny will make you an offer (within 7 days no less).

    Their portfolio is very impressive.

    Dribbble, Crew, Designer News, Need/Want, and Buffer are just a few of their holdings. Tiny won’t flip the business, and they won’t come in and micro-manage team culture. These internet businesses are thriving — each one isn’t an Uber-sized goliath, but they come together in harmony. Each one working as hard as the next, producing a quality cluster of nodes for the web. Each one producing jobs, solving problems and existing through lean years and fat years. Even The Walt Disney Company has an immense amount of holdings and assets, which to say the least… is smart.

    If another (VC catalyzed) bubble is coming, and it most certainly will… I believe most of the businesses (if not all) within Tiny will survive. As overspending becomes more and more entrenched, it’s going to get rough out there. Minimizing the next bubble fallout means taking action.

    Holding companies can make the web a healthier place. Less link rot. Less bullshitery like what happened to Vine. No more dead projects like FFFFOUND, RIP.

    Maybe I’m paranoid, buy if you’re not standing underneath the umbrella of a holding company, I’d be worried about survival.

  • iOS 11 Strips AMP Cruft from URLs Via the Sharesheet

    iOS 11 Strips AMP Cruft from URLs Via the Sharesheet

    Good news everybody!

    Yeah, this is going to be awesome. May the web enjoy healthy browsing again.

    While I may be in “AMP is bullshit” camp, I can still respect the solution it is trying to solve. I totally agree with others that it is the web developer’s responsibility to load pages fast. As John Gruber points out, it is in the interest of publishers to use AMP as Google features AMP-ready cards in search queries.

    Which… is dumb. But oh well. However, when a user shares a webpage from the Safari sharesheet it will save me the headache of thinking about AMP.