Infrequently Noted
Infrequently Noted
Alex Russell
My blog discusses browsers, web standards, web performance, and how they relate to the competition between the web and native app ecosystems.
Latest Posts
TL;DR: Armed with new powers to rein in the worst excesses of mobile's duopolists, antitrust bodies around the world are struggling to find their footing, and an incurious tech press is letting it pass with nary a nod. Browsers are app...
Twitter's descent into a gutter of the lowest order has been gut-wrenching: Elon Musk’s Grok and the Mass Undressing Scandal As I draft this, a week later, it appears pressure from civil society, investigations by regulators, and...
The Budget, 2026 Edition Let's cut to the chase, shall we? Updated network test parameters for 2026 are: 9 Mbps downlink 3 mbps uplink 100 millisecond RTT Regarding devices, my updated recommendations are the Samsung Galaxy A24 4G (or...
Eric Prouzet And now we see it clear, like a Cupertino sunrise bathing Mt. Bielawski in amber: Apple will censor its App Store at the behest of the Trump administration without putting up a fight. It will twist words into their antipodes...
This blog really isn't just for beating up on Apple for the way it harms users, the web, standards, and society to maintain power and profits. So here's some fun stuff I've been doing in my 11ty setup to improve page performance....
ContentsLies by Any Other NameGreat Artists StealDear Tech Reporters: Access Is Not A Beat This blog is failing on several levels. First, September 2025 is putting the “frequent” in “infrequently”, much to my chagrin. Second, my...
Update: The charts below were inappropriately snapped, compressing the range of values. This has been corrected. Feature availability numbers also changed since drafting and are updated. In several recent posts, I've attempted to address...
Photo by Photo by Artan Sadiku Commentary about browsers and the features they support is sometimes pejorative towards pre-standardisation features. Given Apple's constriction of Mozilla's revenue stream and its own strategic...
TL;DR: Market competition underlies the enterprise of standards. It creates the only functional test of designs and lets standards-based ecosystems route around single-vendor damage. Without competition, standards bodies have no purpose,...
Photo by Claudia Raya Apple vs. Facebook is, and always was, kayfabe. In reality, Apple is Facebook's chauffeur; holding Zuck's coat while Facebook1 wantonly surveils iPhones owners.2 Facebook's gross profit over time. Facebook and Apple...
Anyone who has worked closely with me, or followed on social media [, ], will have seen a post or comment to the effect of: Names and dates on docs. Every time. Don't forget. This is most often tacked onto design documents lacking...
Mel Conway's seminal paper "How Do Committees Invent?" (PDF) is commonly paraphrased as Conway's Law: Organizations which design systems are (broadly) constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of...
Frances has urged me for years to collect resources for folks getting into performance and platform-oriented web development. The effort has always seemed daunting, but the lack of such a list came up again at work, prompting me to take...
Before saying anything else, I'd like to thank the organisers of JSNation for inviting to speak in Amsterdam. I particularly appreciate the folks who were brave enough to disagree at the Q&A sessions afterwards. Engaged debate about...
At Apple's annual developer marketing conference, the Safari team announced a sizeable set of features that will be available in a few months. Substantially all of them are already shipped in leading-edge browsers. Here's the list,...