Alex Russell

Trying to make the web work for *everyone*.

https://infrequently.org/about-me/

Still not speaking for my employer, lo these many years.

Blog: https://infrequently.org
Currently: Microsoft Edge
Previously: Chrome, Project Fugu 🐡, PWAs, W3C TAG, Web Components, TC39 & ES6, Chrome Frame, Dojo
Also: Making phae (npub1mmn…4juk) tea ☕

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Last Notes

2026-05-08 02:21:23 UTC

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There will be a blog post; apologies in advance

2026-05-08 01:56:27 UTC

A point excerpted from a talk I gave earlier this week at Microsoft's internal performance symposium (alt talk title: "CSS-in-JS: Frontend's Worst Idea"):
Browsers are virtual machines tuned to efficiently turn *markup* into *pixels*.
If your system tries to generate pixels from not-markup, you'll be working against the grain of the system, and should expect to suffer massive performance penalties -- both in CPU and memory use -- as a result.
For deep reasons, this is not going to change.

2026-04-23 05:59:29 UTC

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Somehow not mobile viewport friendly? Is this a message?

2026-04-12 06:58:28 UTC

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Having helped more than a hundred teams convalesce with codebases that are in deep, deep JS-ecosystem-dogma-created trouble, I'm well out of patience for the "but speed!" nonsense. Because it's nonsense.
These teams get *beached* by JS dogma. The frameworks and tools become ends unto themselves, and usability declines to the point that for all the churn, no progress is detectable by mgmt; only a knot so Gordian they fear it, rather than manage it. This is anything *but* going faster.

2026-04-12 05:43:37 UTC

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I like the (generous) nod towards specialisation, but it's not only that. There's a power dynamic that (superfluous) complexity creates, and it sand-blasts teams and leaders down to their values.
Turns out a lot of the JS community (esp Over Reactors) had pretty shitty values, and saw the opportunity to talk down to CSS knowers as an opportunity, rather than a problem. Complexity as gate to keep the riffraff out.

2026-04-11 14:53:07 UTC

This React -> Web Components post by the MDN team touches on challenges and solutions I've seen dozens of times over frontend's lost decade. Kudos to them for the improvements in performance, and the bravery to tell the story in an unvarnished way:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/blog/mdn-front-end-deep-dive/

2026-04-06 00:03:26 UTC

Had missed @npub1duh…4el7's excellent "Apple at 50" post; nodded the whole way:
https://brucelawson.co.uk/2026/apple-at-50-my-top-five-apple-moments/

2026-04-05 06:17:14 UTC

Twenty-five years ago, aggressive antitrust action made safe, interoperable, tax-free computing possible, and the web delivered, unlocking economic opportunity at the pace browsers got more powerful.
Today's regulators (and the press that cover them) are not following in the footsteps of that blockbuster success. A look at why:
https://infrequently.org/2026/04/the-web-is-an-antitrust-wedge/

2026-04-04 08:55:55 UTC

Got a piece out while on holiday, taking journalists and regulators to task for failing to clock the importance of legalising browser competition:
https://infrequently.org/2026/04/the-web-is-an-antitrust-wedge/
...but I'd missed that Brussels was discussing full surrender. WTF:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/04/digital-subjugation/#greenlands-next
/via @npub1fdr…lvhs
/cc @npub1kn4…3asa

2026-03-19 18:44:01 UTC

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ICYMI, all of the arguments the mobile duopolists make to justify their chokehold over mobile software are bullshit, starting with security. Cutting off side loading furthers the coverup of native app insecurity:
https://infrequently.org/2026/01/naked-power/#the-security-argument
MADA hijinks (look it up), nerfing PWAs in Play, and failure to open up WebAPKs is a funhouse mirror of Apple's anti-web strategy.
Portability and interoperability are the duopolist's enemies, so a safe, powerful web is kryptonite.
/cc @npub1kn4…3asa @npub1fdr…lvhs

2026-03-19 18:34:15 UTC

You might think that Google's latest Android moves are designed to undercut choice and alt OEM/ODM ecosystems that could challenge Play...:
https://www.theverge.com/tech/897420/android-sideloading-unverified-developers-process
But rest assured, there's *plenty* of malware choice inside the walled garden:
https://www.pcmag.com/news/study-reveals-googles-play-store-is-main-distributor-of-malicious-apps

2026-03-18 16:35:42 UTC

Back in '21, court filings recounted an Apple engineer characterising Cupertino's App Store protections as "bringing a plastic butter knife to a gunfight". And for however bad Apple has been (terrible), Play was always worse.
So how's that going? Oof:
https://www.pcmag.com/news/study-reveals-googles-play-store-is-main-distributor-of-malicious-apps

2026-03-18 04:57:53 UTC

A wonderful overview of some of the pain folks are wading through to make good mobile UIs on the web today. We need to fix the Chromium/Android issues; some of it likely comes down to Android kbds themselves...we'll have to dig in.
But the iOS situation Apple uniquely controls? Disgraceful.
https://zouhir.org/blog/virtual-keyboard-api/

2026-03-09 00:20:32 UTC

Sure would be a bad time for the US to have dropped the ball on renewables and electric vehicles.
https://www.investing.com/commodities/crude-oil-streaming-chart
https://assets.toot.cafe/media_attachments/files/116/196/347/855/839/034/original/b48343e7dc65ce5d.png
https://assets.toot.cafe/media_attachments/files/116/196/350/556/450/198/original/7dbc328256cf90a5.png

2026-03-02 15:31:57 UTC

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Clearly my fault. Apologies!

2026-03-02 15:31:21 UTC

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"can" seems to be mentally transposed with "will" by executives, and it elides the fact that code generation getting cheaper means that the new most important skill is knowing to ask for *good* code (for whatever version of "good" matters in your domain). These tools spit out crap by default, and that won't change because the corpuses they're trained on are pretty average.
A sense of taste and occasion, combined with understanding what's possible, is the new (old) differentiator.

2026-03-02 15:17:21 UTC

Heading out of London, and missing it already. #sotb26 was lovely; was great to see so many wonderful people. Seemed "everyone" was there!

2026-02-27 13:19:41 UTC

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Both.

2026-02-27 13:04:27 UTC

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A good question for @npub1kn4…3asa.
My advice would be to call for regulatory alignment with the EU's DMA at a minimum. Actionable timelines for interoperability requests, transparent and public processes, and no hiding the ball when it comes to requests that are initially denied.
Apple have been playing games around this sort of things since the DMA came into force, and what UK is proposing is exponentially weaker.

2026-02-27 11:57:45 UTC

If you are in the UK, I'd like to beg 5-10 minutes of your time to file comment with the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) about the proposed (toothless) "Interoperability Commitments" from Apple and Google.
These are dramatically weaker guidelines than even the EU's DMA, and Apple (particularly) has been utterly contemptuous there, ducking compliance for more than a year. Why is the UK rewarding scofflaw behaviour over these predatory practices?
https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apples-interoperability-commitments-to-the-uk-cma-promise-nothing/
/cc @npub1fdr…lvhs

2026-02-20 20:50:11 UTC

A conversation with a coworker re-triggered an intrusive thought that I find myself returning to regularly while working in a firm in the grips of AI influences:
Teams and engineering processes are like fish in tanks. There's a careful balance of the nitrogen cycle that keeps delicate organics alive; above a certain pH, it's just not plausible to believe things will keep working. But to understand effects, we have to take into account causes and add the effect of time.

2026-02-20 08:16:58 UTC

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Apple and Google arrive at enclosure differently thanks to their differing relationships to hardware ODMs, but the contours are similar: you, a developer, must pay a vig to them to get access to essential APIs, either on the front-end, or through a cut of revenue, and no permissionless innovation will be tolerated once it becomes big enough to catch the eye of the app store taxman.

2026-02-20 08:16:58 UTC

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In the beginning of a platform's life, this is an empty-ish threat. Platforms that aren't monopolies don't have the power to do more than rattle sabers regarding the the embedded patent, copyright, and breach of contract consequences. But what happens when the situation flips? When market power begets legal and lobbying might? When firms become comfortable corrupting governments to protect profits?
That's the situation in our pockets. Every smartphone now perpetuates enclosure.

2026-02-20 08:16:58 UTC

First, you should read @npub1djp…ept4's most recent post:
https://www.mnot.net/blog/2026/02/20/open_systems.html
Then, let's discuss "permissionless innovation" and what he called recently "the power of 'no'":
https://www.mnot.net/blog/2026/02/13/no.html
A short thread thisaway... 👇

2026-02-20 08:16:58 UTC

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The mobile duopolists fear and loathe the potential of interoperability with the intensity of a thousand suns and the briefs of a thousand lawyers. As I type this they (primarily Apple) are doing are doing a dozen underhanded and shitty things to keep anything from threatening the monopoly they've declared on standardized, largely Open Source, features and capabilities of underlying hardware and OSes.
Want access to a USB device? Or to make games? Or to access MIDI controllers? Pay up.

2026-02-20 08:16:58 UTC

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The path to technology that serves open societies (qua Popper) flows directly through open systems of the sort @npub1djp…ept4 describes. And through those open systems, we can achieve the goal of interoperability, and through it, portability.
And as @npub1fdr…lvhs will tell you, that's how you fix the outsized power of these petty tyrants. The gatekeepers only get away with extraction because they erode (and sometimes dynamite) the foundations of portable, interoperable computing: open access to APIs.

2026-02-20 08:16:58 UTC

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Last year I pointed out that Apple has effectively broken this permissionless structure and hollowed out the internet's standards bodies:
https://infrequently.org/2025/09/apples-crimes-against-the-internet-community/
This situation persists, and it matters because what Apple (and to a lesser extent, Google's Android team) are doing here is to enact an *enclosure agenda*.
Enclosure works by lacing open and standardised technologies with proprietary poison as the price of access, backed by legal agreements forced on everyone who wants to play.

2026-02-20 08:16:58 UTC

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In an earlier era, the web stood in opposition to this sort of enclosure. Open operating systems enabled browsers to go "over the top" of OS vendors and liberate essential system capabilities, re-standardizing capabilities that had their open, low-level representations overgrown in a thicket of proprietary OS goo. Browsers could create a tunnel of IP safety down to those essential features, standardising them, and making them interoperable.
And it's interoperability that gatekeepers *hate*.

2026-02-17 18:50:56 UTC

Have been groggily writing up the deep reasons why CSS-in-JS (the sort with a "runtime") is unfixably slow led me to reflect on the warnings I gave the various over-Reactors who popularised this anti-pattern. Apparently at some point last night I wrote:
"Evangelical hubris laced with virulent incuriosity has been the calling card of the entire enterprise."
I don't think I'm going to remove it from the post.

2026-02-12 17:51:29 UTC

If you're a technologist in the US, I think it's worth sitting with the reality that the government's current abuses against the population are playing out almost every single *"if we allow databases of X, bad thing Y will be possible"* warning.
Performative privacy protections were never enough; we have to make them structural (in law), toothsome (right-of-action for individuals), and national. Nothing else will do.

2026-02-03 08:21:01 UTC

Seems like a dam is (finally) breaking; here's just a small set of the "wow, Apple...really?" posts from the past week:
https://www.loopwerk.io/articles/2026/tim-cook-sold-apples-soul/
https://om.co/2026/01/27/a-ceo-captured/
https://spyglass.org/tim-cook-captured/
https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-crisis-no-5
Liz Lopatto, Anil Dash, and Charlie Warzel were far ahead on all of this.

2026-01-27 18:25:42 UTC

The mobile app stores demand we believe that they *must* be trusted exclusively to protect us, to the exclusion of a powerful open web:
https://www.theverge.com/news/868614/nudify-apps-ttp-report-google-apple-app-stores?view_token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJpZCI6IlVsREJZWHdXOFoiLCJwIjoiL25ld3MvODY4NjE0L251ZGlmeS1hcHBzLXR0cC1yZXBvcnQtZ29vZ2xlLWFwcGxlLWFwcC1zdG9yZXMiLCJleHAiOjE3Njk5NzAwNTgsImlhdCI6MTc2OTUzODA1OH0.uSVbunb5TN_U_3391Iuc6IohVTH7xuBYKeBfnP4IEJQ&utm_medium=gift-link
The only thing they're protecting is profits:
https://infrequently.org/2026/01/naked-power/

2026-01-22 01:09:10 UTC

The Grok/Musk AI undressing scandal teaches us that Apple and Google's shameful app stores stand for nothing but profit, invalidating one of the 5 arguments they make to retain monopoly power to tax all software. But the other four arguments are bullshit, too. The iceberg of deception is larger than the tip of content moderation:
https://infrequently.org/2026/01/naked-power/

2026-01-20 22:23:51 UTC

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I quote @npub1fdr…lvhs here because his work has helped us all understand how technically and ethically threadbare the app store justifications are. Now that they're silent in the face of widespread, above-the-fold abuse of women and girls, the jig is well and truly up. Tim and Sundar's next arguments before any self-respecting regulator are forfeit.

2026-01-20 18:32:23 UTC

Apple and Google's quisling era unearths the lies they've told to justify monopoly power over software for the most consequential computing platforms of our lives. If the app stores can't move against Musk/Grok, they should not be trusted with any of the powers they demand:
https://infrequently.org/2026/01/naked-power/

2026-01-10 04:26:00 UTC

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The web is that platform, which is why Apple has done literally everything in their power, including funding astroturf lobbying groups, to defeat a future for a powerful, interoperable web:
https://infrequently.org/series/browser-choice-must-matter

2026-01-09 23:02:50 UTC

The Verge is actually doing it. Actually connecting the dots between the fascistic tendencies of app stores with the profit motives of their proprietors.
FINALLY.
The open web has been roadkill in the profit games the mobile duopoly has set up, muscled out of view with policies and choices that were designed to leave no fingerprints. But we can all see it clearly now:
https://www.theverge.com/policy/859902/apple-google-run-by-cowards

2026-01-06 02:46:34 UTC

Americans on the left of fascism need to internalize that this [ gestures expansively] is why staying out of the ICC and international law with teeth is terrible for the US.
These people would not be doing this shit if they truly feared consequences.

2025-12-28 05:41:22 UTC

This is outstanding work, DSD + slotting will open up new worlds to folks exploring these patterns:
https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2025/revisiting-html-streaming-for-modern-web-performance/

2025-12-22 22:06:02 UTC

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The ones I resent most cosplayed solidarity while it was popular/expected while undermining the web's future. Some promoted tech they knew would limit access (JS frameworkists), others helped to undermine publisher's autonomy (AMP team, FB, etc.) thereby removing funding for truth-finding.
I often worry that it might just be the narcissism of small differences talking, but then I go back to the record and it infuriates me all over again.

2025-12-20 18:25:24 UTC

Highly recommended listening/reading for your winter break:
https://www.volts.wtf/p/the-cure-for-misinformation-is-not

2025-12-13 20:31:39 UTC

A conversation with an incredibly technical friend last night made it clear to me that the biggest change in computing of the last 15 years eludes the SV blob: most client devices are slow, low-end Androids with *incredible*, *up-to-date* browsers.

2025-12-03 02:46:21 UTC

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Anybody whose actions make you think "the Copyright Mafia might have a point..." is playing with fire.

2025-11-25 17:23:10 UTC

Frontend is failing. 75% of devices with browsers are smartphones, but not even half of sites pass Core Web Vitals on them. Why not? Too much JavaScript, added to indulge SPA fantasies the data is falsifying in real time:
https://infrequently.org/2025/11/performance-inequality-gap-2026/
https://assets.toot.cafe/media_attachments/files/115/611/493/256/943/049/original/30761621e3da4646.png
https://assets.toot.cafe/media_attachments/files/115/611/493/247/561/305/original/8d9d1d78da0c9616.png
https://assets.toot.cafe/media_attachments/files/115/611/493/250/617/721/original/8e62ee1f53275506.png

2025-11-24 19:31:40 UTC

Inspired by perfnow.nl, I've dusted off drafts of my network and device situation analysis. Good news/bad news: devices and networks are improving, but web page payloads are swelling.
The result is predictable: the web is usable for the wealthy, but less so for everyone else. This is an ethical crisis for frontend:
https://infrequently.org/2025/11/performance-inequality-gap-2026/

2025-11-23 22:44:06 UTC

How broken is today's frontend culture?
@npub12nl…6dft points out that the median *mobile* page is now larger than a copy of DOOM (2.6 MiB vs. 2.48 MiB), the P75 page is larger than 2 DOOMs, and the P90 mobile page is 4.5x the size of DOOM:
https://httparchive.org/reports/page-weight

2025-11-18 03:15:43 UTC

I meet web developers who cannot accept that most smartphones in the world, and even in the US, are not iPhones. And that keeps them from understanding that the "i" in "iPhone" stands for "inequality":
https://assets.toot.cafe/media_attachments/files/115/568/476/807/224/381/original/67842dacc30f1ccb.png
https://assets.toot.cafe/media_attachments/files/115/568/489/158/744/047/original/e988f70b1d83f2e6.png
https://assets.toot.cafe/media_attachments/files/115/568/512/641/595/582/original/4a438ac6bed2e4e6.png

2025-11-08 16:23:15 UTC

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...and the second is marginal.

2025-11-03 14:53:52 UTC

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My god. We're all going to be on Linux in 6 months, aren't we?

2025-10-26 21:44:56 UTC

Look, I've given RSC a hard time — for at least 3 years it featured viral client-side dependency ambush, it generally makes code harder to factor and reason about, and doesn't add anything useful to the toolbox except to make RPCs slower — but JFC, this takes the bloody cake:
https://marma.dev/articles/2025/when-perfect-code-fails

2025-10-24 13:55:00 UTC

Worth your time:
https://terminal.ahumanfuture.co/posts/2025-10-17/the-world-is-something-that-we-make/
(can't recall link source; apologies if it was you!)

2025-10-21 04:59:14 UTC

US-EAST-1 really jumping the gun on the general strike, but I appreciate the enthusiasm.

2025-10-12 00:18:09 UTC

At a critical moment, the tech press are failing to connect the dots between Apple and Google's craven capitulations and the authoritarianism they have nurtured within their own ecosystems. Apple is now corrosive to democracy itself, and we have to get smarter about the way these forces interact:
https://infrequently.org/2025/10/the-app-store-was-always-authoritarian/
/cc @npub1kn4…3asa @npub1fdr…lvhs

2025-10-09 21:33:21 UTC

This tool from Firefox DevRel is *awesome*, and if you care about how much progress the web platform delivers *please* go rank your interests:
https://interop-rank.jakearchibald.com/

2025-10-09 03:04:07 UTC

So Apple is censoring another ICE-spotting app, and I think we need to talk about the coverage, as much as Apple's groveling pre-compliance.
@npub1psa…j5uh broke this, specifically @npub1n2y…qlcl, and unlike some previous coverage, it includes this:
https://www.404media.co/apple-banned-an-app-that-simply-archived-videos-of-ice-abuses#:~:text=The%20website%20for%20Eyes%20Up%20which%20functions%20essentially%20the%20same%20way%20is%20still%20available
This is a good start! Much better than the coverage re: the ICE Block takedown last week. Mentioning that the web as an alternative opens the door to discussing why this is happening: Apple wants stuff from the govt
https://assets.toot.cafe/media_attachments/files/115/341/842/169/827/135/original/9e9f85428d3cc8d0.jpg

2025-10-08 20:10:38 UTC

Every time I watch a team of hard-working folks burn months on a React upgrade, I'm reminded of how thoroughly the JS-Industrial-Complex gaslit us.
You know who hasn't slogged through constant breaking change migrations? Web Components developers. New runtimes drop *every month*...and it's *fine*.

2025-10-06 19:00:57 UTC

One of these just arrived, and it's now my new writing machine...and while I wish the screen was *slightly* higher res and wish I could get it in 32GB config, it's otherwise incredible:
https://www.theverge.com/reviews/697878/lenovo-chromebook-plus-14-laptop-google-chromeos-review
ARM CPU is very much the star of the show.

2025-10-05 05:24:05 UTC

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I mean, I appreciate self-deprecation. Can't blame 'em for that. I don't even blame 'em for the output. It's fine-ish (if Web Components-hostile; but that's resolvable). It really just fell in with a bad crowd that don't want to learn how browsers really work, then cargo cult a bunch of (usually false) things around without measuring anything. And again, that's not even Tailwind's fault.

2025-10-03 06:17:29 UTC

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.@npub1psa…j5uh : no mention of web apps as an alternative
Bloomberg: same
Reuters: ditto
BI: you were expecting...what, exactly?...from BI?
The Verge: [ drooling sounds ]
NYT: [ copies The Verge's homework ]
Engadget: [ copies less prestigious outlet's homework ]
BBC: lolsob, but in British accent
Bloomberg: same slop, but at Bloomberg because you're at a terminal, I guess?
Cooked. Totally, absolutely, Tim levels of cooked.

2025-10-03 06:07:59 UTC

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Would a web app be fully censorship resistant? No. But it wouldn't be a single point of failure like this.

2025-10-03 06:04:46 UTC

The tech press are 100% cooked. I double dog dare you to find any mention in any of the stories covering this that point out it there is an alternative to the App Store:
https://www.techmeme.com/251002/p40#a251002p40

2025-10-03 05:39:58 UTC

Apropos of nothing, but maybe monopolies on software distribution are, like, bad? And a threat to the legitimate exercise of civic rights?
Anyway, make web apps and support @npub1kn4…3asa

2025-10-02 21:14:38 UTC

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My usual reply: trace or it didn't happen.

2025-10-02 18:37:40 UTC

A colleague asked me yesterday what I thought of Tailwind, and thought I'd share the topline response: avoid it, not because it's slow (it's fine-ish), but because of the culture it drags behind it.
Instead, hire people who know CSS, then let them loose on your UI problem(s). Give them space to turn huge pile of JS into tiny rulesets, and create guardrails to keep slow selectors from hurting (e.g., Shadow DOM). Lean on the browser, not the transpiler.

2025-09-27 16:23:52 UTC

All I can add [1] to @npub1fdr…lvhs's latest is that Apple are the primary force keeping us from having powerful, interoperable apps on phones through suppression of the web. It's not an accident, and @npub1kn4…3asa has the receipts [2]:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/26/empty-threats/
[1]: https://infrequently.org/2025/09/apples-antitrust-playbook/
[2]: https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apples-browser-engine-ban-persists-even-under-the-dma/

2025-09-25 23:34:03 UTC

What Apple is trying to pull in the EU is as embarrassing for Cupertino as it is for the EU and the tech press that have credulously repeated Apple's talking points. The only good news is that the EU declined to unilaterally disarm:
https://infrequently.org/2025/09/apples-antitrust-playbook/

2025-09-25 15:10:16 UTC

You can tell the tech press is cooked because 95% of them can connect the dots. Apple's regulatory playbook is the same that Big Oil and Big Tobacco use: delay == winning. The steps:
- try corruption (a.k.a. "lobbying" usually works)
- plant fake "think tanks" (ACT, etc.)
- set up false comparison points with public
- petulance when laws pass
- market "compliance" (but do not comply)
- appeal to public, claim law hurts kittens ("jobs", "privacy", "american pie")
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250925-apple-asks-eu-to-scrap-landmark-digital-competition-law

2025-09-25 03:49:52 UTC

"so, um, this law you passed...yes, we know we're not complying, and, well, you see, it's *inconvenient* that we keep getting caught trying to mislead you. Could you scrap it? Cheers."
-- Cupertino
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250925-apple-asks-eu-to-scrap-landmark-digital-competition-law

2025-09-21 22:00:30 UTC

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Also, absolute LOLLLLLLL at the bootlicker drooling over this kind of abject failure:
https://www.webpagetest.org/video/compare.php?tests=250921_ZiDcCX_72E-r:1-c:0

2025-09-21 21:33:16 UTC

Technology is political. Film at 11.
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:lopqc5qlyamugbxdujsojdhb/post/3lzee26lse22g

2025-09-21 08:34:05 UTC

If you've ever wondered if there's anything to the critique that some browsers "ship whatever they want" or "don't follow standandards", here's the long-form explanation of why those arguments fail on their own terms:
https://infrequently.org/2025/09/standards-and-the-fall-of-iamus/

2025-09-05 15:56:01 UTC

Strongly agree with a good 3/4 of this by @npub1fdr…lvhs:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/03/unpunishing-process/
The best outcome would have been for Chrome and Android to have been spun out into non-profits, endowed with the cash Google has been paying Apple to avoid any more competition across apps/search/web.
It has not helped matters that neither DOJ, nor most civil society orgs (save @npub1kn4…3asa), could see through private-equity-adjacent logic to understand the public interest in these software projects. Own goals all around.

2025-09-04 09:24:54 UTC

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Maybe we're just looking in the wrong place? CVE counts, OTOH...

2025-09-03 15:16:14 UTC

Thanks to 20+ years of cooperation via standards, most web devs are insulated from the reality that competition (or the threat of it) makes standards possible. It's a shock to recognise that Apple has broken the system so thoroughly that SDOs themselves are at risk:
https://infrequently.org/2025/09/apples-crimes-against-the-internet-community/

2025-09-02 13:15:13 UTC

One assumption made web standards possible: competitors are free to ship differing ideas when they disagree. Until iOS, this was the norm. Apple's ban on competing browser engines changed that, and Cupertino is poisoning the roots of the tree that gave the web life:
https://infrequently.org/2025/09/apples-crimes-against-the-internet-community/

2025-08-27 16:09:16 UTC

Cory Doctorow (@npub1fdr…lvhs) quipped: *"An 'app' is just a web-page skinned in enough IP to make it a crime to add an ad-blocker to it."*,[1] but the native rot goes deeper. Remember when FB rebuffed Apple's offer it couldn't refuse?[2]
Knock me over with a feather, the "privacy wars" were all for show:
https://infrequently.org/2025/08/apple-vs-fb-kayfabe/
[1]: https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/12/market-failure/
[2]: https://www.phonearena.com/news/apple-facebook-almost-worked-together_id141910

2025-08-23 19:51:39 UTC

I want you, a tech-literate person, to internalize one deep fact: Apple vs. Facebook is, and always was, kayfabe. In reality, Apple is (and always was) Facebook's chauffeur; holding its coat while it surveilled everyone. How to be sure? IABs:
https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/in-app-browsers-the-worst-erosion-of-user-choice-you-havent-heard-of/
Apple facilitates mass surveillance through native apps from Facebook, both directly from in-app activity, but much more insidiously, through "in-app browsers" that FB tacks onto every link you tap. And these things are *rank*.

2025-08-12 03:38:14 UTC

Several times over the course of my career, specific companies have gummed up the works in web standards, leaving it to everyone else to figure that out they weren't on board with the web continuing to progress. It's bad, and we should learn to spot it:
https://infrequently.org/2025/08/how-do-committees-fail-to-invent/

2025-08-09 15:27:50 UTC

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great stuff. Presumably someone has made you aware of the analogous "rule of two" for untrusted web content in browsers?
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/security/rule-of-2.md
/cc @npub12nl…6dft

2025-07-31 11:23:43 UTC

An extremely cool ping/pong of ideas teasing out what good browsers can do with almost no code in these posts:
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/07/1kb-js-numbers-station/
https://dbushell.com/2025/07/26/text-to-speech-synthesis/

2025-07-16 23:16:37 UTC

I spent hours and hours trawling through the sites of some of the world's best web developers, and despite the horrors I regularly experience in my daily work in Big JavaScript Territory, what I saw left me hopeful:
https://infrequently.org/2025/07/links/

2025-07-16 09:45:13 UTC

Just published a new section on my site to capture references to a lot of the essential web performance and fundamentals-oriented webdev resources I find myself continually directing folks to. Also, lots and lots of links to blogs I love:
https://infrequently.org/links/

2025-07-12 22:42:20 UTC

The dirty JS hacker in me loves this (ab)use of `PerformanceObserver` so much:
https://leanrada.com/notes/simple-live-reload/

2025-07-12 21:06:22 UTC

I've been pretty lax about keeping up with the webperf slack, but this was in the scrollback from March, and I love that it shows so directly how understanding the rendering engine unlocks better experiences for everyone, not just folks on low-spec machines and networks:
https://www.granola.ai/blog/dont-animate-height

2025-06-26 20:52:46 UTC

Every engineer worthy of the title adopts one unshakeable article of faith: POPULARITY IS NOT A QUALITY METRIC

2025-06-23 20:35:24 UTC

Things I would like every young web engineer to learn:
- anything you can do in CSS + HTML, you *should* do in CSS
- *framework du jour* is not a platform, it's a high-interest loan against your future capacity. The platform is the platform
- understanding the memory hierarchy *always* matters
- client-side isn't easier than the server, and "generalists" usually suck at client-side. Mind the (packet) gap
- managers who are not technical are not useful
- put users first, always

2025-06-13 15:55:38 UTC

Safari at WWDC '25: The Ghost of Christmas Past
https://infrequently.org/2025/06/the-ghost-of-christmas-past/

2025-06-03 22:53:51 UTC

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I spend a truly horrifying fraction of my time walking folks who have been doing frontend engineering in anger for many years through the fundamentals of how the browser actually processes content in order to explain just how deeply they've been duped. Everything most folks need to know is in this talk:
https://youtu.be/K2QHdgAKP-s?si=ToSngpfOu9tTxC1E
What *isn't* in the talk is that userland component systems like React don't encapsulate squat. They *look* like components in code, but are div soup post-compiler.

2025-06-03 22:41:12 UTC

React: cheap, fast, good; choose none.

2025-05-08 18:02:53 UTC

Lots of folks fell for the "DOM is slow" marketing of certain frameworks, but DOM isn't slow. *Uncontrolled style read-back* is. But what if that wasn't a thing?
Looking for feedback on a new proposal to control layout thrashing here:
https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/main/EventPhases/explainer.md

2025-05-06 22:41:58 UTC

Jeffery Goldberg had the most secure device in the chat...do I have that right?

2025-04-19 19:16:56 UTC

Some good signs from the No Kings protest in SF.
https://assets.toot.cafe/media_attachments/files/114/366/226/787/260/979/original/b73b876cd0b01e70.jpg
https://assets.toot.cafe/media_attachments/files/114/366/227/689/281/127/original/e5df5de393386bac.jpg

2025-03-31 18:59:46 UTC

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Ok, but here me out: the value in this phrasing is to acknowledge that the incantations "production ready" and "scale" no longer contain any semantic content, thereby allowing us to more aggressively call BS on the Vercels and Reacts of the world.

2025-03-03 03:53:56 UTC

Hey Econ profession, is fiddling with the econometric data a *good* sign for a nation's future prosperity?
https://apnews.com/article/trump-gdp-economy-government-spending-lutnick-7414ba1bd441bd4bf64620bfd66923b2

2025-02-20 08:54:00 UTC

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Another way to phrase this is that very few managers have succeeded in midwifing software that matters and so are unfamiliar with the required discipline required to keep it alive should they come into possession of such an odd beast.
The market for Dr. Spock-but-for-software is only as large as the set of people that *want *to build functional software (and teams).

2025-02-10 07:38:08 UTC

Go get 'em, @npub1wpv…rz2s
https://youtu.be/LbjxvvKEtyE?si=mR9hoOL329EArtc0

2025-02-09 07:17:33 UTC

Most of the damage Musk can do now is premised on his wealth, which comes back to Tesla. This is gonna be a bumpy ride, but to all my EV-loving peeps who aren't down with the fash, I salute you:
https://insideevs.com/news/750076/tesla-sales-tanking-globally/

2025-02-07 08:22:53 UTC

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Node's Buffer makes a client-side appearanc, conservatively, in half the sites I trace. That's how bad things are today.

2025-02-06 22:50:24 UTC

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The correct floor for your JS payload is 0 bytes (gzipped, on the wire), not 45KB. Or 100KB.
Every byte over 0 is a question that needs to be answered, and the fact of there already being a lot of JS is not a reason why more doesn't matter, it's a (rapidly escalating) reason why adding more *is fundamentally inadvisable*. Blowing past a budget doesn't mean the budget isn't still the right limit.

2025-02-06 22:42:22 UTC

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The best way to avoid these bad practices is to start reading the JS that your tools output.
Yes, that's right, I'm saying you should *manually inspect the transpiled output*. Copy it into a text editor, pretty-print it, and start scrolling. Anything you don't recognise is a lead to track down.