WDRL — Edition 255: CSS Grid Flex-Columns, Lost Screen Time, Wait and UX Personalization.

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Hey,

The only constant in life is change, they say. And it’s true even if we think nothing changes in life. It’s all only how you perceive things, how you observe things and whether you notice the change or not. In tech, it’s easy, just read a newsletter like this one and see how much changes every single week. But there’s more to it and since I’m meditating more again, I have a new perspective added to my life, my work, my thoughts, my anxieties. I learn to really and deliberately appreciate things and to find personal values and gratefulness for things that even don’t seem very positive or nice.

It’s easy to forget but this week I was reminded about how the Internet is structured. Today, if you visit the Internet, most traffic is directed at some point through Amazon. And if you block it, or Google’s servers, or Apples or all together, the Internet barely exists anymore. I have a pi-hole DNS blocker in my network since three years now but never obviously appreciated it, but this week I learned about the real value, the security, the privacy it ensures and gives to me and all my beloved ones in my area. A big part of my felt security and privacy on the Internet relies on one piece of Open Source software that the authors who spend countless hours on the project provide for free.

News

• Firefox 65 is released and brings a couple of changes. Events are now dispatched on disabled HTML elements, the referrerpolicy attribute is now supported on script elements, CSS environment variables (the env() function) have been implemented, in JavaScript Intl.RelativeTimeFormat is now available, and Support for WebP images has been added.
• Safari Tech Preview 74 brings abortable fetch, support for U2F HID Authenticators on macOS and more features in the Web Authentication API.

UI/UX

• Colin Eagan sums up the dozens of possibilities to personalize a web experience for the user and which ones are a good idea and which ones aren’t. He concludes this by advising us to start simple instead of following the cult of complex, regardless of how tech-savy the company and its team is.

Privacy

• “I was wrong about Google and Facebook: there’s nothing wrong with them (so say we all)” — Aral Balkan. This great piece explains a lot how even the most honorable Open Source projects struggle to follow ethical choices and the fallacy of offering the best UX to users instead of promoting ethically correct solutions.

JavaScript

• Why is Web Authentication such a hot topic you may ask? Well, most data breaches are based on weak and reused passwords. That’s why the new API impacts online security a lot. The new Guide to Web Authentication is a nice example of how beautiful a security implementation guide can be.

CSS

• Roman Komarov shares his approach for a flexible blog layout that has an optional sidebar available using CSS Grid and Custom Properties.

Work & Life

• Paul Greenberg is in search of Lost Screen Time and explores what our lifes could look like and how much more time we’d have if we escape the screens in our life. And there are some revealing numbers in the article: The average American spends $14,000 per decade on smartphones. That’s $70,000 over the course of an average working life. A reference to a study that says that more than 29 percent of Americans would rather give up sex for three months than give up their smartphone for a single week. Or you could plant 150 trees and buy half an acre of land for the average spending for a smartphone (and its apps) per year.
• Are you a patient person? Regardless if you are or not, this experiment that Jason Fried wants to try certainly is a challenge: Trying to pick the longest/slowest line at a supermarket, cancelling Amazon Prime so delivery takes longer, and any other opportunity to pick the wait. Embrace the wait, embrace slowness.

—Anselm