WDRL — Edition 230: DNS over HTTPS, Web Push and Bitcoin’s Dark Energy Secret

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Hey,

the web’s evolving every single day and it’s amazing to follow and watch what happens. So when I heard first about Notifications in our web browsers by websites I was immediately concerned that a lot of websites will abuse this and ask for permission. Over time, a lot of people got annoyed by this and now Firefox even has a setting for users that allows them to generically block Push Notification permission prompts.
Unfortunately, this is not the first technology that gets restricted because we as developers don’t build solutions responsibly but often follow instructions blindly or go the easiest way. The Battery API is another example where a useful technology was abused and then got removed from browsers to protect users again — with the result that we have no way to optimize our websites according to the battery status of our users anymore and thus removed one important feature that completed the web app experience in comparison to native apps. If we realize that this is our fault, we’re able to build better solutions. Let’s do this.

News

• Google has released Lighthouse 3.0, the third major version of their performance analyzation tool which features a new report interface, some scoring changes, a CSV export and First Contentful Paint measurement.
• Chrome 67 is out and brings Progressive Web Apps to the Desktop, a Generic Sensor API, and it extends the Credential Management API so it now supports U2F authenticators via USB.

UI/UX

• Cool Backgrounds is a cool side-project by Moe Amaya. It’s a online generator for polygonal shaped backgrounds with gradients that can generate a lot of variants and shapes that simply look beautiful.

Tooling

• Ben Frain shares some text editing techniques that are available in almost all modern code editors and that are really helpful for developers.

Security

• DNS over HTTPS gets more and more important as security attacks via DNS get more popular. Lin Clark explains the technology with a cartoon so it’s easier to understand it.

JavaScript

• The people from Microsoft created a nice interactive demo page to show how Web Push Notifications can and should look like. If you didn’t get around with that technology yet, it’s a great start into understanding how this all works and how to build an interface for this that doesn’t disturb users.

Go beyond…

• So what has been speculated and reported already in a few newspapers has become even worse now that a real study shows evidence: Bitcoin’s energy footprint is rising rapidly (doubled compared to six months ago) and is damaging a lot of efforts to reduce CO2 emissions on our planet as most energy used for this cryptocurrency isn’t renewable. So if you care about the planet, think again if you want to own or trade Bitcoins. If you’re really into crypto currencies, there are way more energy effient currencies out there.

—Anselm