Microsoft loves you and wants to protect you. So every time you receive an email with a link in it, Microsoft Outlook helpfully rewrites it so that it goes through their "safelinks" system. Safelinks allow your administrator, or someone at Microsoft, to stop you visiting a link which is malicious or suspicious. Rather than going to example.com, your link now goes to safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=example.com. Hurrah! If you accidentally click on a naughty link you won't cause chaos…
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Yesterday I was on a train. I clicked on a link and my browser loaded a long article for me to read. Halfway through reading it, the train went into a tunnel and I lost signal. That meant I couldn't see the images on the other half of the page for the rest of the journey. I had a sea of broken images. Even though the page had fully loaded, the images were set to "lazy" loading. When my browser sees <img src="example.jpg" loading="lazy" /> it defers downloading the picture until it is about …
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Way back in 2011, I contributed to an article on The Next Web called "What will the Web be like in 20 years?". Foolishly, I missed the 10 year anniversary, but let's see how we're doing against those predictions a little over halfway through. My prediction for the Web? The same speed. Faster pipes & processors – more bloated markup & JS. Well... fuck! Bang on the money there. The web is faster than it was on dial-up. But I can't say that it's noticeably better since I got ADSL. Sure, it's …
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Many gallons of digital ink spilled at Google's plans for "Web Environment Integrity" which - depending on who you believe - is either an entirely reasonable proposal to protect users or a devious plan to add DRM to the entire web. (It's the latter, obviously.) We'll never know exactly whether users want this because Google is pathologically adverse to performing or publishing user research. Anyway, I have a solution to all of Google's problems. Forget this notion of untrusted "user agents" …
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The Guardian launched its online adventures back in 1999. At some point, they started using the name "Guardian Unlimited". Hey, the dot com boom made us all do crazy things! As part of that branding, they proudly used the domain GU.com Over time, the branding faded and GU.com became a URL shortening service. Tiny URls like gu.com/abc could be printed in papers, sent via SMS, or posted on Twitter. They made a huge fanfare about how it would help with analytics. You can read some of the history …
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Back in 2007 - an eternity in web years - the BBC published a document showing their 15 Web Principles. I thought I'd take a look at how they stack up today. And investigate whether the BBC is still living up to them. Here are the slides if you want to play along at home: BBC2.0: The BBC’s 15 Web Principles from hvs 1. Build Web Products that meet user needs This is still good advice! Sadly, there are still too many services around the web which are built on business needs. People g…
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This is quite the epitome of yak-shaving! Suppose you have an article written in HTML. The basic layout might be something like: <body> <main> <article> The content of your article ... Pretty standard. Now suppose you let users add comments to the article. I have two questions: Where in the tree should they go? What HTML element should be used to group them? It is, I think, a question where reasonable parties can justifiably come to distinctly different…
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Computers would be so much better if they never had to deal with users, amirite?!!? I remember, years ago, working on a mobile web service which had a URl bar - so users could tap in bbc.co.uk on their T9 keypads - and a separate search bar. I thought that was pretty nifty. But it turns out, users tried searching for URls and they tried going to "http:// When is the Next Bus?". Bloody users!! Users find input bars confusing. A good example of this is Amazon's search bar. It faithfully…
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My laptop ran out of space yesterday. Why? Useless ZIP files! I needed to download a Windows Virtual Machine in order to upgrade the firmware on a device (long story). The official Windows 10 VM is 20GB TWENTY GIGA-FUCKING-BYTES!!! It downloaded reasonably quickly - yay fibre! But I had to wait almost as long to unzip the bloody thing. Whereupon, I discovered that zipping the file - and it was only one single file in there - saved a whole 200MB. Yup, a 1% saving. As it happens, I downloaded …
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I've told this story at conferences - but due to the general situation I thought I'd retell it here. A few years ago I was doing policy research in a housing benefits office in London. They are singularly unlovely places. The walls are brightened up with posters offering helpful services for people fleeing domestic violence. The security guards on the door are cautiously indifferent to anyone walking in. The air is filled with tense conversations between partners - drowned out by the noise of…
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A curious little data leak, but one I struggle to care about. Perhaps useful for a bit of fingerprinting? Websites can access your system's camera and microphone. That's how modern video conferencing works in the browser. In an effort to retain user privacy, the browser asks the user for permission to use the camera and mics. No audio or video will be sent until the user agrees. But some metadata gets shared before you agree! Visit the WebRTC Detection Experiment site. You'll notice that…
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Lynx is a text based browser. You think the people who browse without JavaScript are weird? Lynx doesn't even do images or CSS! It downloads HTML and renders it at blazing fast speed. If you ever wondered just how slow modern web development has made the web - Lynx will show you the meaning of haste. I use Lynx most days. Not as my exclusive browser - I'm not a masochist - but as a handy tool. If I'm on a bandwidth constrained connection, or a site is overloaded, or I just want to browse…
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