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.
July 2026
August 2026
Top Words
- performance
- apple
- reckoning
- inequality
- store
- antitrust
- standards
- safari
- management
All posts (36)
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 under-funding of WebKit, this usually takes the form "Chromium just ships whatever it...
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, and neither they, nor the ecosystems they support, can retain relevance. Apple...
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 mugged convincingly for the cameras as "App Tracking Transparency" rolled out,...
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 inline attribution, and is phrased provocatively to make it sticky. Why do I care...
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 these organizations. This is deep organisational insight that engineering leaders...
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 on the side-quest amidst a different performance yak-shave. If that sounds like...
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 problems we can see and evidence we can measure makes our work better. The...
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, prefixed by the year that these features shipped to stable in Chromium: 2023: WebGPU...
Over the past decade, my work has centred on partnering with teams to build ambitious products for the web across both desktop and mobile. This has provided a ring-side seat to a sweeping variety of teams, products, and technology stacks across more than 100 engagements. While I'd like to be spending most of this...
This post is an edited and expanded version of a now-mangled Mastodon thread. ContentsPlatforms Are Competitions...and We're LosingWin ConditionYou Do It To Yourself, And That's What Really HurtsGroundhog DayReboot Some in the JavaScript community imagine that I harbour an irrational dislike of their tools when, in...
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