Something I learned

  1. Scroll animations: 
    Back in the heyday, creating CSS animations tied to scrolling required some Javascript event listeners and query selectors. Not until animation-timeline came to be. This week, I learned and used this awesome CSS declarative way of specifying scroll animations. It removes many headaches from doing what feels like a simple feature. Out of the box, it offers a way to tie the scroll-based animations to some predefined containers (ex, root) or user-defined ones.

    Now, why am I bringing this up? Since these sections are becoming more about what I learned so I can complain afterward, here is the hot-take complaint. Today, only 69.08% of browsers out in the wild support it. This is a problem because Chromium-based browsers have supported it for 8 months now. Unlike what some are inclined to believe, neither Chrome nor Google developed this standard; it was established by W3C, an open-standards organization of 400ish org members. It is true Chrome and Google can influence the creation of these standards, but it's no more than anyone else can.

    People are so quick to jump at the argument of how Chrome's monopoly over the web is a bad thing, I can't but disagree with this take. This isn't the first or last new feature that Chrome has supported for months, if not years, while other "better" browsers fall behind; I'm looking at you, Safari. Oh, Yazeed, but IE's monopoly held web dev back in the heyday; well, yes, cause Microsoft didn't care to keep it updated, the same way Apple has little incentive to do so today. Today's IE is not Chrome; it's Safari. Today, Microsoft adopted Chromium in Edge, and by doing so, Edge supports all sorts of cool new features.

    I can already hear the privacy folks screaming at the top of their lungs, "But hey, Firefox privacy this and privacy that." Sure, I don't really know how much privacy they're gaining or how to quantify it for them. Something tells me a few extensions and configs in Chrome can get you there.

    Competition is cool and whatnot, but it's precisely why Chrome is winning today; the competition is trying to keep up, not push Chrome into doing things it doesn't want; they're, in fact, struggling to differentiate or do so as a facade while providing an inferior experience. Safari not supporting BeforeInstallPromptEvent for Progressive Web Apps for years only further helps keep their App Store monopoly. No idea what Firefox is doing here. As for security, I'd go as far as to argue that Chromium-based browsers are more secure, given how much usage and cybercriminal targeting they get. They've been battle-tested more, as simple as that.

    And btw, Microsoft has been taking more of an active role in Chromium's development as of 2020, making this whole monopoly and lack of security argument even weaker. Google is more than happy to indirectly fund the hell out of Firefox to keep the perception of competition alive while they work to improve the web. It's in their interest if the browser you use to Google and access all their products works well. 
  2. Be careful what you worship: 
    Since the technical thing I learned this week has many words, I'll leave this non-technical one with a quote. I came across this quote I liked from a commencement speech David Foster Wallace gave in 2005 at Kenyon College:
    "
    In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. 
    If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.
    "

Gratefulness 

The demo last week went well, and we're making it to the next stage, so I'm grateful for my co-founder and, so far, to my surprise, their good sales personality. We're still early in the journey, and I'll write more about what we do, but for now, I'm grateful for the progress we've been making after a very slow time at the end of last year.