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Search - "new web browser"
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Boss: I need to demo our product but it looks smaller on my laptop.
Me: That is because you have a 1920x1080 monitor and your laptop is 1280x800
Boss: Is that something you can fix?
Me: No you will need a new laptop, but the company has a sales laptop with that resolution.
Boss: No just get the company credit card and buy me one today!
*Bosses son hears*
Bosses Son: Here take the sales laptop
Boss: Will that be quick enough
Bosses Son: It has a 8 core i7 Processor, 16GB ram and a dedicated GPU
Boss: *looks at me confused*
Me: Your demoing a web browser, that will be more then ok. But were using chrome so 16GB of ram will be pushing it.
*me and bosses son laughs*
Boss: Can we upgrade it?17 -
TABLE BASED WEB DESIGN
I was surprised there were no rants about this topic before I realized it was more than a decade back 😳
We've never had it better! So to help add a little perspective for all those ranting about what is unarguably the golden age for web developers... let me fill you in on web dev in the late 90's;
JavaScript was a joke. No seriously! - I once got laughed out of the room for suggesting we try use it for more than disabling a button - (I wanted to check out the new XHR request thingy [read AJAX]).
HTML was simple and purely a markup language (with the exception of the marquee tag). The tags were basically just p,ul,ol,h*,form inputs,img and table and html took 10 minutes to learn. Any style was inline and equally crude - anything that wasn't crude could not be trusted and probably wouldn't render at all in most browsers (never mind render correctly).
There were rumors of a style TAG and something called a cascading style sheet which were received with much skepticism since it went against the old ways and any time saved would be lost writing multiple [IE version specific] style sheets for each browser just to get it to work - so we simply didn't.
No CSS meant the only tags you had to work with to create a structured layout were br, hr and table... so naturally EVERYTHING was in nested tables! JS callback hell can't touch this! - it was not uncommon to have 50+ nested tables all with inline style in a single page which would be edited without any dev tools or linting.
You would spend 30 minutes scanning td tags until your eyes bled to find something, make a change, ftp the file to the server, reload the web page and then spend 10 minutes staring at the devastation on your screen convinced you broke
the internet before spotting an un-closed td tag with your bloodshot eyes.
Tables were not just a silver bullet - they were the ONLY bullet and were in the wild west!
Q: Want an inline form or to align your inputs left?
A: Duh table!
Q: Want a border with round-corners, a shadow or blur?
A: That's easy! Your gonna want to put that table in the center cell of another table then crop a image of the border into 6 smaller images to put in the surrounding cells... oh and then spend 10 minutes fucking with mystical attributes like cell-padding and valign to get them flush.
...But hey at least on the bright-side vertically & horizontally centering stuff was a breeze!23 -
Looks like Apple is the new Microsoft and Microsoft is the new Apple...
I remember when every release of Windows was a catastrophic mess and you had to wait until at least SP2 to get the OS to work in a stable way. And Internet Exploder was *the* browser that broke everything, every time. And there was the whole embrace/extend thing, where they tried to impose their vision of web standards and compatibility, and *everything* you used *had* to come from Microsoft...
And now, it's Apple who fuck up every single OS release, on mobile and desktop, and whose browsers openly shit on web standards (ever try developing anything for Mobile Safari?). Apple's stuff that only works with Apple stuff (down to things like headphone jacks - OOPS, forgot, they dropped those now).
Microsoft is making interesting, beautiful hardware (Surface machines) while Apple is pushing un-innovative, overpriced garbage year in year out. And they're open-sourcing more and more, while Apple walls itself further and further behind its walled "garden". Bleh.
Be interesting to see in 10 years what will have shifted, because it'll change again by then.15 -
Last weekend I witnessed the most infected computer I have ever seen in my life...
I went on a private party. A girl had her laptop plugged to the speakers to play some music. This thing was literally 99% cancer. The first thing I noticed, when I looked at her opened browser, was that nearly half the screen was taken by toolbars. Also any popular website you could visit had additional ads INJECTED into it. The fist 10 YouTube search results: always porn. No idea how that didn't make her suspicious.
Precisely every 10th click (anywhere not only in the browser) would open up a window with either more ads or an aggressively blinking message saying: "A virus has been detected on your machine. Click here to download our antivirus programm. You have 60 seconds left before your firewall breaks!!!".
Also physically this device was on the edge of completely broken. The power supply had to be taped to the socket because it was so loose. Every little jiggle would immediatly shut the system down and Windows had to be completely reinstalled (which of course didn't solved any of the "software issues").
First I wanted to use that laptop to show some friends a new web project of mine but this thing probably would have DDoSed the shit out of my recently finished work or something.
I couldn't decide if I should laugh or cry...9 -
How did I learn programming?
When I joined college I was literally the dumbest in the class... I didn't even know what is a char and what is a String.. Our lecturer made fun of and humiliated me in front of the whole class....also my parents barely afforded my college tutotion fed...
So one night I sat with myself and reevaluated myself and decided that no matter how hard it is gonna be, I must become an excellent programmer....spent restless nights and days learning the core of programming in c++ then switched to Java *best day in my life* and also learned Android development.. And later JavaScript "mostly worked with jQuery and AngularJs*
In my final year project I built an Android web browser that even the lecturer that made fun of me was impressed by..and my app was rated the best project of that batch.
Now I'm working as a Java web dev and made a promise to myself that I'd learn something new every day.8 -
All web developers should support up to IE9 without any problems.
Why? Because in Korea, it is normal.
Every person uses that damn Win7, which has either IE9 or IE10. Without IE support, no one will browse your webpage.
Now you would ask us, why don't you use other modern browsers?
We would then ask you, why would you install a new browser that is
1. Buggy
2. Heavy
3. Takes up ram
4. Has so many features
when you have an awesome minimalistic browser that is preinstalled, and works in all Windows? No thanks.
So, if you put a message saying you will soon drop support of IE, it means that you won't target Korea. Just after the support drop, there won't be traffic to your web site.
So what is the point of this rant?
1. We love IE. Lol
2. IE is lightweight, minimalistic, and the fastest browser in the world.
3. All websites should NOT drop support for IE.
4. We don't care whether web devs will have a hard time. We just think websites are built with Wix and Wordpress, and they work in IE, meaning, IE support is the number one priority.
5. If you ever start a business in Korea, and has a website, make sure to hire an senior Korean web dev who has worked with IE for a long time.
6. Here is the tl;dr
Hate us. Period.25 -
Would the web be better off, if there was zero frontend scripting? There would be HTML5 video/audio, but zero client side JS.
Browsers wouldn't understand script tags, they wouldn't have javascript engines, and they wouldn't have to worry about new standards and deprecations.
Browsers would be MUCH more secure, and use way less memory and CPU resources.
What would we really be missing?
If you build less bloated pages, you would not really need ajax calls, page reloads would be cheap. Animated menus do not add anything functionally, and could be done using css as well. Complicated webapps... well maybe those should just be desktop/mobile apps.
Pages would contain less annoying elements, no tracking or crypto mining scripts, no mouse tracking, no exploitative spam alerts.
Why don't we just deprecate JS in the browser, completely?
I think it would be worth it.22 -
+++ Microsoft switches to the open-source Chromium engine for the Edge browser +++
On December 6th, Microsoft announced that they will dump their own Edge engine and replace it with Chromium, an open-source browser engine developed by Google.
This way they are promising the ~2% of global internet users who prefer Edge over other browsers to experience a better web experience.
The about 2% of market share is one of the reasons Microsoft decided to stop developing their own engine. It's just not worth it.
Joe Belfiore, corporate veep of Windows, said they also want to bring Edge to other platforms, like macOS, to target more audiences.
Web-Developers, like myself, will most likely have the most to gain. Less browsers to target means less incompatibility issues.
There are a lot of HTML5 features that the Edge engine doesn't support...
The new Edge won't be a UWP app, in order to make it usable outside of Windows 10. Instead, it will be build in accordance with the Win32 API, so we can even expect support for older Windows versions, like Windows 7 and 8. A preview release is planned for early 2019.
Because they are switching to Chromium and the Win32 API, Microsoft is hiring new developers! So if you always wanted to work at Microsoft, now is your chance!
That's it!
Thanks for reading!
Source: https://theregister.co.uk/2018/12/...11 -
"Ad targeters are pulling data from your browser’s password manager"
---
Well, fuck.
"It won't be easy to fix, but it's worth doing"
Just check for visibility or like other password managers handle it iirc: assign a unique identifier based on form content and fill that identifier only.
---
"Nearly every web browser now comes with a password manager tool, a lightweight version of the same service offered by plugins like LastPass and 1Password. But according to new research from Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy, those same managers are being exploited as a way to track users from site to site.
The researchers examined two different scripts — AdThink and OnAudience — both of are designed to get identifiable information out of browser-based password managers. The scripts work by injecting invisible login forms in the background of the webpage and scooping up whatever the browsers autofill into the available slots. That information can then be used as a persistent ID to track users from page to page, a potentially valuable tool in targeting advertising."
Source: https://theverge.com/2017/12/...14 -
My first job was actually nontechnical - I was 18 years old and sold premium office furniture for a small store in Munich.
I did code in my free time though (PHP/JS mostly, had a litte browsergame back then - those were the days), so when my boss approached me and asked me whether I liked to take over a coding project, I agreed to the idea.
Little did I know at the time: I was supposed to work with a web agency the boss had contracted to build their online shop. Only that he had no plan or anything, he basically told them "build me an online shop like abc(a major competitor of ours at the time)"
He employed another sales lady who was supposed to manage the shop (that didn't exist yet). In the end, I think 80% of her job was to keep me from killing my boss.
As you can imagine, with this huuuuge amout of planning and these exact visions of what was supposed to be, things went south fast and far. So far that I could visit my fellow flightless birds down in the Penguin's republic of Antarctica and still need to go further.
Well... When my boss started suing the web agency, I was... ahem, asked to take over. Dumb as I was, I did - I was a PHP kid and thought that Magento, being written in PHP, would be easy to master. If you know Magento, you know that was maybe the wrongest thing I ever said.
Fast forward 3 very exhausting months, the thing was online. Not all of it worked yet, but it was online and fairly secure.
I did next to everything myself, administrating the CentOS box the shop was running on, its (own) e-mail server, the web server, all the coding required for the shop (can you spell 12 hour day for 8 hour pay?)
3 further months later, my life basically was a wreck, I dragged myself to work, the only thing I looked forward being the motorcycle ride home. The system worked though.
Mind you, I was still, at the time, working with three major customers, doing deskside support and some admin (Win Server 2008R2 at the time) - because, to quote my boss, "We could not afford a full time developer and we don't need one".
I think i stopped coding in my free time, the one hobby I used to love more than anything on the world, somewhere Decemerish 2012. I dropped out of the open source projects I was in, quit working on my browser game and let everything slide.
I didn't even care to renew the domains and servers for it, I just let it die without notice.
The little free time I had, I spent playing video games and getting drunk/high.
December 2013, 1.5 years on the job, I reached my breaking point and just left, called in sick at least a week per month because I just could not see this fucking place anymore.
I looked for another job outside of ALL of what I did before. No more Magento, no more sales, no more PHP. I didn't have to look for long, despite what I thought of my skills.
In February 2014, I told my boss that I quit. It was still seven months until my new job started, but I wanted him to know early so we could migrate and find a replacement.
The search for said replacement started in June 2014. I had considerably less work in the months before, looks like he got the hint.
In August 2014, my replacement arrived and I got him started.
I found a job, which I am still in, and still happy about after almost half a decade, at a local, medium sized ISP as a software dev and IT security guy. Got a proper training with a certificate and everything now.
My replacement lasted two months, he was external and never really did his job - the site, which until I had quit, had a total of 3 days downtime for 3 YEARS (they were the hoster's fault, not mine), was down for an entire month and he could not even tell why.
HIS followup was kicked after taking two weeks to familiarize himself with the project. Well, I think that two weeks is not even barely enough to familiarize yourself with nearly three years of work, but my boss gave him two days.
In 2016, the shop was replaced with another one. Different shop system, different OS, different CI. I don't know why and I can't say I give a damn.
Almost all the people that worked at the company back with me have left for greener pastures, taking their customers (and revenue) with them.
As for my boss' comments, instructions and lines: THAT might not be safe for work. Or kids. Or humans in general. And there wouldn't be much left if you put it through a language filter...
Moral of the story: No, it's not a bad thing to leave a place if you're mistreated there. Don't mistake loyalty with stupidity!
And, to quote one of my favourite Bands: "Nothing matters when the pain is all but gone" (Tragedy + Time by Rise Against).8 -
PORTFOLIO INFLATION
when every junior is writing algorithms, the next step up, the only way to keep up is writing apps. When every junior is writing apps, the next leg up is writing an entire SN.
Eventually junior full stack devs are writing microservice streaming cloud backend content delivery optimized social networks wrapped in virtualization with load balancing, proper CI, public accessible analytics apis, written in custom webaseembly compiled scripting backend utilizing both the latest graphql and every single feature of postgres, while also being a web site builder, an in browser app, mobile optimized, designed to transmogrify your asset pipelines linearflow functional-oriented modular rust cratified turbencabulator while cooking your turducken with CPU cycles, diffusing your gpt, and finetunning your llama 69 trillion parameter AI model to jerk you off all at the same time.
And then the title "wizard" becomes a reality as the void of meaning in our lives occupied by the anxiety of trying to reduce the fear of rejection in job hunting, is subsumed by the brief accidental glance into the cthulian madness-inducing yawning abyss of the future which is all the rest of our lives we have to endure existing for until at last sweet sweet death consumes us and we go to annihilation never having to configure one more framework or devops deploy of another virtual environment.
And it dawns on us that we no longer develop or write code at all. No, everything has become a "service" in this new hellscape future. We slowly come to the realization that every job is really just Costco greeter, or eventually going to be reduced to something equivalent, all human creativity, free will and emotions now taken care of by the automation while we manage the human aspects, like sardines pushing against one another not realizing their doom has been sealed along with the airless can they have been packed into, to be suffocated by circumstance and a system designed to reduce everything to a competition of metrics designed by the devil, if the metrics were misery", and "torture", while we ourselves are driven by this ratfuck wheel to turn endlessly toward social cannibalism, like rats eating their babies, but for the amusement of wallstreet corporate welfare whores who couldnt turn a dime if it wasnt already stolen.
And on our gravestones, those immortal words are carved, by the last person who gave up the ghost, the last whose soul wasnt yey shovelled onto the coal fires driving the content machine consuming the world:
Welcome to costco. I love you.12 -
I miss the good times when the web was lightweight and efficient.
I miss the times when essential website content was immediately delivered as HTML through the first HTTP request.
I miss the times when I could open a twitter URL and have the tweet text appear on screen in two seconds rather than a useless splash screen followed by some loading spinners.
I miss the times when I could open a YouTube watch page and see the title and description on screen in two seconds rather than in ten.
I miss the times when YouTube comments were readily loaded rather than only starting to load when I scroll down.
JavaScript was lightweight and used for its intended purpose, to enhance the experience by loading content at the page bottom and by allowing interaction such as posting comments without having to reload the entire page, for example.
Now pretty much all popular websites are bloated with heavy JavaScript. Your browser needs to walk through millions of bytes of JavaScript code just to show a tweet worth 200 bytes of text.
The watch page of YouTube (known as "polymer", used since 2017) loads more than eight megabytes of JavaScript last time I checked. In 2012, it was one to two hundred kilobytes of HTML and at most a few hundred kilobytes of JavaScript, mostly for the HTML5 player.
And if one little error dares to occur on a JavaScript-based page, you get a blank page of nothingness.
Sure, computers are more powerful than they used to be. But that does not mean we should deliberately make our new software and website slower and more bloated.
"Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster."
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
A presentation by Jake Archibald from 2015, but more valid than ever: https://youtube.com/watch/...34 -
Today, I planned on getting started with something different.
I've been thinking of learning some new stuff in Java, which I'm totally unfamiliar with.
So, I thought of creating a widget for devRant.
It is basically a small web browser which only opens up devRant.8 -
Got to love Ubisoft web devs.
Their new "30 days of Ubisoft" calendar has the browser download 30 images of closed numbered boxes, 30 images for the hover state of each box and another 30 for the open state. Granted, the images aren't big, but hasn't anybody heard of custom fonts and CSS3?
Oh, and the "surprises" have already been leaked on reddit, gj on keeping hints in the page source.
https://30days.ubi.com/Promotion/...1 -
Introducing No.js! A revolutionary new framework. Just build your templates and then... Stop. No worrying about browser compatibility. Web dev has never been so simple.4
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Static HTML pages are better than "web apps".
Static HTML pages are more lightweight and destroy "web apps" in performance, and also have superior compatibility. I see pretty much no benefit in a "web app" over a static HTML page. "Web apps" appear like an overhyped trend that is empty inside.
During my web browsing experience, static HTML pages have consistently loaded faster and more reliably, since the browser is immediately served with content useful for consumption, whereas on JavaScript-based web "apps", the useful content comes in **last**, after the browser has worked its way through a pile of script.
For example, an average-sized Wikipedia article (30 KB wikitext) appears on screen in roughly two seconds, since MediaWiki uses static HTML. Everipedia, in comparison, is a ReactJS app. Guess how long that one needs. Upwards of three times as long!
Making a page JavaScript-based also makes it fragile. If an exception occurs in the JavaScript, the user might end up with a blank page or an endless splash screen, whereas static HTML-based pages still show useful content.
The legacy (2014-2020) HTML-based Twitter.com loaded a user profile in under four seconds. The new react-based web app not only takes twice as long, but sometimes fails to load at all, showing the error "Oops something went wrong! But don't fret – it's not your fault." to be displayed. This could not happen on a static HTML page.
The new JavaScript-based "polymer" YouTube front end that is default since August 2017 also loads slower. While the earlier HTML-based one was already playing the video, the new one has just reached its oh-so-fancy skeleton screen.
It would once have been unthinkable to have a website that does not work at all without JavaScript, but now, pretty much all popular social media sites are JavaScript-dependent. The last time one could view Twitter without JavaScript and tweet from devices with non-sophisticated browsers like Nintendo 3DS was December 2020, when they got rid of the lightweight "M2" mobile website.
Sometimes, web developers break a site in older browser versions by using a JavaScript feature that they do not support, or using a dependency (like Plyr.js) that breaks the site. Static HTML is immune against this failure.
Static HTML pages also let users maximize speed and battery life by deactivating JavaScript. This obviously will disable more sophisticated site features, but the core part, the text, is ready for consumption.
Not to mention, single-page sites and fancy animations can be implemented with JavaScript on top of static HTML, as GitHub.com and the 2018 Reddit redesign do, and Twitter's 2014-2020 desktop front end did.
From the beginning, JavaScript was intended as a tool to complement, not to replace HTML and CSS. It appears to me that the sole "benefit" of having a "web app" is that it appears slightly more "modern" and distinguished from classic web sites due to use of splash screens and lack of the browser's loading animation when navigating, while having oh-so-fancy loading animations and skeleton screens inside the website. Sorry, I prefer seeing content quickly over the app-like appearance of fancy loading screens.
Arguably, another supposed benefit of "web apps" is that there is no blank page when navigating between pages, but in pretty much all major browsers of the last five years, the last page observably remains on screen until the next navigated page is rendered sufficiently for viewing. This is also known as "paint holding".
On any site, whenever I am greeted with content, I feel pleased. Whenever I am greeted with a loading animation, splash screen, or skeleton screen, be it ever so fancy (e.g. fading in an out, moving gradient waves), I think "do they really believe they make me like their site more due to their fancy loading screens?! I am not here for the loading screens!".
To make a page dependent on JavaScript and sacrifice lots of performance for a slight visual benefit does not seem worthed it.
Quote:
> "Yeah, but I'm building a webapp, not a website" - I hear this a lot and it isn't an excuse. I challenge you to define the difference between a webapp and a website that isn't just a vague list of best practices that "apps" are for some reason allowed to disregard. Jeremy Keith makes this point brilliantly.
>
> For example, is Wikipedia an app? What about when I edit an article? What about when I search for an article?
>
> Whether you label your web page as a "site", "app", "microsite", whatever, it doesn't make it exempt from accessibility, performance, browser support and so on.
>
> If you need to excuse yourself from progressive enhancement, you need a better excuse.
– Jake Archibald, 20139 -
Just finished a rant about rererereinstalling windows (sorry, in a ranty mood), and now I have another reason to rant. Not the 10 new and exciting bloatware apps. Again. Lovely. No, this rant is about Edge.
You know, the new browser Microsoft is soo excited about (or was when it came out)? Just found out that it won't connect to Googles links to download chrome (tried 4-5). Because, you know, I might need to develop something. Incredible. That's some pretty high level *insertSpecialWords* from the Microsoft Edge team. "uhhhhh so your Highness, sir customer destructinator sir, our browser isn't that great. Everyone is still using chrome."
"how about we stop them from downloading that freaking amazing browser. That should stump them."
"wonderful sir! Amazing. We'll implement that straight away."
>:(
There's even a try this list of "suggestions" to fix this "problem". Including:
> Make sure you've got the right web address.
And my personal favorite, is less subtle:
>search for what you want!
Umm, I did. And then you blocked me from doing the one thing that I would realistically use this browser for. Aaand after the windows 10 forced update debacle, I'm not feeling especially "friendly" towards windows' "suggestions".
No worries though. I installed Firefox (not blocked) just to install chrome. Great job Microsoft.
10/109 -
Mozilla has announced that it's rolling out changes under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) to all Firefox users worldwide.
According to report of ZDNet: The CCPA (America's privacy legislation) came into effect on January 1, 2020, offering Californian users data-protection rules. Much like Europe's GDPR, the CCPA gives consumers the right to know what personal information is collected about them and to be able to access it. While the law technically only applies to data processed about residents in California, US. But Mozilla notes it was one of the few companies to endorse CCPA from the outset. Mozilla has now outlined the key change it's made to Firefox, which will ensure CCPA regulations benefit all its users worldwide. The main change it's introducing is allowing users to request that Mozilla deletes Firefox telemetry data stored on its servers. That data doesn't include web history, which Mozilla doesn't collect anyway, but it does include data about how many tabs were opened and browser session lengths. The new control will ship in the next version of Firefox on January 7, which will include a feature to request desktop telemetry data be deleted directly from the browser.6 -
Who knew SQL Server Report Manager didn’t have a log off / sign out button when you log in via the web browser?
I didn’t until I tried to test someone’s new credentials and realised I couldn’t log out of my administrator account. MS doesn’t ship it in the box apparently. Because that’s clearly not a useful piece of functionality to have. Except, some people have developed their own hacks to get around it......
Wtf.. mind blown -
So, I work in a game development studio, right?
We're trying to launch the title on as many platforms as reasonable, because as a social VR app we're kinda rowing upstream.
So far, Steam and Oculus have been fairly reasonable, if oddly broken and inconsistent.
Enter store 3.
Basically no in-game transaction support (our asking prompted them to *start* developing it. No, it's not very complete). No patch-update system (You want an update? Gotta download the whole fsckin' thing!). No beta-testing functionality for most of their stuff ("Just write the code like the example, it will work, trust us!"). No tools besides the buggy SDK (Wanna upload that new build? Say hello to this page in your web browser!).
So, in other words: Fun.
We've been trying to get actively launched for two months now. Keep in mind that the build has been up on Steam and Oculus for over a year and half a year (respectively), so the actual binary functionality is, presumably fine.
The best feedback we get back tends to be "Well, when we click the Launch button it crashes, so fail."
Meanwhile we're going back and forth, dealing with other-side-of-the-world timezone lag, trying to figure out what is so different from their machines as ours. Eventually we get them to start sending logs (and no, Windows Event logs are not sufficient for GAMES, where did you even get that idea????) except the logs indicate that the program is getting killed so terribly that the engine's built-in crash handler can't even kick in to generate memory dumps or even know it died.
All this boils down to today, where I get a screenshot of their latest attempt.
I just can't even right now.5 -
I despise it when software developers remove features because "too few people use them".
Is this what those shady telemetry features are for? So they can pick which useful features to get rid of because some computer rookies whined that it is "feature creep" rather than just ignoring it?
Now I have to fear losing useful (or at least occasionally convenient) features each time I upgrade, such as Firefox ditching RSS, FTP, and the ability to view individual cookies. The third can be done with an extension, but compatibility for it might be broken at some point, so we have to wait for someone to come up with a replacement.
Also, the performance analysis tool in the developer tools has been moved to an online service ("Firefox profiler"). I hope I don't need to explain the problems with that.
But perhaps the biggest plunge in functionality in web browser history was Opera version 15. That was when they ditched their native "Presto" browsing engine for Chromium/Blink, and in the process removed many features including the integrated session manager and page element counter.
The same applies to products such as smartphones. In the early 2010s, it was a given that a new smartphone should cover all the capabilities of its predecessors in its series, so users can upgrade without worrying a second that anything will be missing. But that blissful image was completely destroyed with the Galaxy S6. (There have been some minor feature removals before that, such as the radio and the three-level video recording bitrate adjustment on the S4, but that's nothing compared to what was removed with the S6.).
Whenever I update software to a new version or upgrade my smartphone, I would like it to become MORE capable, not LESS (and to hell with that "less is more" nonsense).15 -
yet another Microsoft bashing rant...
I'm trying to get `Visual Studio`
You use your Windows 10 VM, use Edge, use Bing and search for `Visual Studio`.
First fucking result:
A Visual Studio alternative - A powerful C & C++ IDE - CLion
-- from jetbrains.com
Like... WTF, you not even promoting your' own stuff ?
But then for when you search 'firefox' w/ bing+edge a thick fat banner: 'Promoted by Microsoft': There's no need to download a new web browser.\n MS recommends Edge for fast ...8 -
Three of us doing a project for free for our web-dev teacher at university. Looking back at that project I think we did a terrible job, we built an ugly, monolithic application with Express, MongoDB, Pug and Vue.
It was a CMS for a local church and the best part of the project was including some hidden easter eggs accessible only by setting some cookies manually in the browser.
Although we did the project for free, I think we all have been learning a lot of valuable things and we also tried out new stuff, like the Kanban board and a few aspects of the scrum way. The most interesting part of this was learning all of it by ourselves, because our web-development teacher couldn't really help in web-development... -
*leaning back in the story chair*
One night, a long time ago, I was playing computer games with my closest friends through the night. We would meet for a whole weekend extended through some holiday to excessively celebrate our collaborative and competitive gaming skills. In other words we would definitely kick our asses all the time. Laughing at each other for every kill we made and game we won. Crying for every kill received and game lost. A great fun that was.
Sleep level through the first 48 hours was around 0 hours. After some fresh air I thought it would be a very good idea to sit down, taking the time to eventually change all my accounts passwords including the password safe master password. Of course I also had to generate a new key file. You can't be too serious about security these days.
One additional 48 hours, including 13 hours of sleep, some good rounds Call of Duty, Counter Strike and Crashday plus an insane Star Wars Marathon in between later...
I woke up. A tiereing but fun weekend was over again. After I got the usual cereals for breakfast I set down to work on one of my theory magic decks. I opened the browser, navigated to the Web page and opened my password manager. I type in the password as usual.
Error: incorrect password.
I retry about 20 times. Each time getting more and more terrified.
WTF? Did I change my password or what?...
Fuck.
Ffuck fuck fuck FUCKK.
I've reset and now forgotten my master password. I completely lost memory of that moment. I'm screwed.
---
Disclaimer: sure it's in my brain, but it's still data right?
I remembered the situation but until today I can't remember which password I set.
Fun fact. I also could not remember the contents of episode 6 by the time we started the movie although I'd seen the movie about 10 - 15 times up to that point. Just brain afk. -
TLDR;
How much do you earn for your skill set in your country vs your cost of living?
BONUS;
See how much I & others earn.
Recently I became aware of just how massive the gap in developers earnings are between countries. I'd love to calculate a fixed score for income vs cost of living.
I know this stuff is sensitive to some so if you prefer just post your score (avg income p/m after tax / cost of living).
I'm not shy so I'll go first:
MY RATES
Normal Rate (Long term): $23
Consulting / Short term: $30-$74
Pen Test: $1500 once off.
Pen Test Fixes: consulting rate.
Simple work/websites: min $400+
Family & Friends: Dev friends are usually free (when mutually beneficial). Family and others can fuck off, even if they can pay (I pass their info to dev friends with fair warning).
GENERAL INFO
Experience: 9 years
Country: South Africa
Developer rareness in country: Very Rare (+-90 job openings per job seeker).
Middle class wage in country: $1550 p/m (can afford a new car, decent apartment & some luxuries like beer/eating out).
Employment type: Permanent though I can and do freelance occasionally.
Client Locality: Mostly local.
Developer Type: Web Developer (True web dev - I do anything web related from custom HTTP servers to sockets, services, advanced browser api's, apps & more).
STACKS / SKILLSETS
I'M PROFICIENT IN:
python, JavaScript, ASP classic, bash, php, html, css, sql, msql, elastic search, REST, SOAP, DOM, IIS, apache
I DABBLE WITH:
ASP.net, C++, ruby, GO, nginx, tesseract
MY SPECIALTIES:
application architecture, automation, integrations, db's, real time data, advanced browser apps/extensions (webRTC, canvas etc).
SUMMARY
Avg income p/m after tax: $2250
Cost of living (car+rent+food): $1200
Score: 1.85
*Note: For integrity when calculating my cost of living I excluded debt repayments and only kept my necessities which are transport, food & shelter.
I really hope you guy's post your results, it would be great to get an idea of which is really the worst / best country to be a developer in.20 -
It all started with an undelivereable e-mail.
New manager (soon-to-be boss) walks into admin guy's office and complains about an e-mail he sent to a customer being rejected by the recipient's mail server. I can hear parts of the conversation from my office across the floor.
Recipient uses the spamcop.net blacklist and our mail was rejected since it came from an IP address known to be sending mails to their spamtrap.
Admin guy wants to verify the claim by trying to find out our static public IPv4 address, to compare it to the blacklisted one from the notification.
For half an hour boss and him are trying to find the correct login credentials for the telco's customer-self-care web interface.
Eventually they call telco's support to get new credentials, it turned out during the VoIP migration about six months ago we got new credentials that were apparently not noted anywhere.
Eventually admin guy can log in, and wonders why he can't see any static IP address listed there, calls support again. Turns out we were not even using a static IP address anymore since the VoIP change. Now it's not like we would be hosting any services that need to be publicly accessible, nor would all users send their e-mail via a local server (at least my machine is already configured to talk directly to the telco's smtp, but this was supposedly different in the good ol' days, so I'm not sure whether it still applies to some users).
In any case, the e-mail issue seems completely forgotten by now: Admin guy wants his static ip address back, negotiates with telco support.
The change will require new PPPoE credentials for the VDSL line, he apparently received them over the phone(?) and should update them in the CPE after they had disabled the login for the dynamic address. Obviously something went wrong, admin guy meanwhile having to use his private phone to call support, claims the credentials would be reverted immediately when he changed them in the CPE Web UI.
Now I'm not exactly sure why, there's two scenarios I could imagine:
- Maybe telco would use TR-069/CWMP to remotely provision the credentials which are not updated in their system, thus overwriting CPE to the old ones and don't allow for manual changes, or
- Maybe just a browser issue. The CPE's login page is not even rendered correctly in my browser, but then again I'm the only one at the company using Firefox Private Mode with Ghostery, so it can't be reproduced on another machine. At least viewing the login/status page works with IE11 though, no idea how badly-written the config stuff itself might be.
Many hours pass, I enjoy not being annoyed by incoming phone calls for the rest of the day. Boss is slightly less happy, no internet and no incoming calls.
Next morning, windows would ask me to classify this new network as public/work/private - apparently someone tried factory-resetting the CPE. Or did they even get a replacement!? Still no internet though.
Hours later, everything finally back to normal, no idea what exactly happened - but we have our old static IPv4 address back, still wondering what we need it for.
Oh, and the blacklisted IP address was just the telco's mail server, of course. They end up on the spamcop list every once in a while.
tl;dr: if you're running a business in Germany that needs e-mail, just don't send it via the big magenta monopoly - you would end up sharing the same mail servers with tons of small businesses that might not employ the most qualified people for securing their stuff, so they will naturally be pwned and abused for spam every once in a while, having your mailservers blacklisted.
I'm waiting for the day when the next e-mail will be blocked and manager / boss eventually wonder how the 24-hours-outage did not even fix aynything in the end... -
How the Common Lisp Community will eventually die soon:
Clojure is the only main Lisp dialect having some sort of heavy presence in today's modern development world. Yes, I am aware of other(if not all) environments in which Lisp or a dialect of it is being used for multiple things, CADLisp, Guile Scheme, Racket, etc etc whatever. I know.
Not only is Clojure present in the JVM(I give 0 fucks about whether you like it or not also) but also has compilation targets for Javascript via Clojurescript. This means that i can effectively target backend server operations, damn near everything inside of the JVM and also the browser.
Yet, there is no real point in using Lisp or Clojure other than for pure academic endeavours, for which it is not even a pure functional programming language, you would be better served learning something else if you want true functional purity. But also because examples for one of the major areas in software development, mainly web, are really lacking, like, lacking bad, as in, so bad most examples are few in between and there is no interest in making it target complete beginners or anything of the like.
But my biggest fucking gripe with Lisp as a whole, specifically Common Lisp, is how monstrously outdated the documentation you can find available for it is.
Say for example, aesthetics, these play a large role, a developer(web mostly) used to the attention to detail placed by the Rails community, the Laravel community, django, etc etc would find on documentation that came straight from the 90s. There is no passion for design, no attention to detail, it makes it look hacky and abandoned. Everything in Lisp looks so severely abandoned for which the most abundant pool of resources are not even made present on a fully general purpose language constrained as a scripting environment for a text editor: Emacs with Emacs Lisp which I reckon is about the most used Lisp dialect in the planet, even more so than Clojure or Common Lisp.
I just want the language to be made popular again y'know? To have a killer app or framework for it much like there is Rails for Ruby, Phoenix for Elixir, etc etc. But unless I get some serious hacking done to bring about the level of maturity of those frameworks(which I won't nor I believe I can) then it will always remain a niche language with funny syntax.
To be honest I am phasing away my use of Clojure in place of Pharo. I just hate seeing how much the Lisp community does in an effort to keep shit as obscure and far away from the reach of new developers as possible. I also DESPISE reading other Lisp developer's code. Far too fucking dense and clever for anyone other than the original developer to read and add to. The idea that Lisp allows for read only code is far too real man.
Lisp has been DED for a while, and the zombies that remain will soon disappear because the community was too busy playing circle jerks for anything real to be done with it. Even as the original language of AI it has been severely outshined by the likes of Python, R and Scala, shit, even Javascript has more presence in AI than Lisp does now a days.9 -
Three-factor authentication:
1. Setup an Amazon.com account.
2. Setup an Amazon Web Services account under the same e-mail address
3. Setup two-factor authentication for both systems.
4. Login to Amazon Web Services in a new browser session, and you'll be required to provide BOTH security tokens at login (Amazon.com first, then AWS second.)3 -
I like how software is smart so I have to do things twice instead of once.
Automatically putting quotes works only if you put quotes and then paste inside it, the problem is I usually paste then put first quote and then need to remove second quote and put it on back and remove second quote from back.
Video start from where you left automatically fires and shows closing credits because you obviously want to see them.
Evaluate variable removes old evaluation because why you want old one when you have new.
Collapsing imports or functions in ide so you need to expand them all the time because who needs to look at functions when we have ai
AI models suggesting and adding meaningless annotations and code suggestions to distract me.
Randomly running some console command because I entered keyboard shortcut I don’t know even exists.
Literally every web browser address bar becomes advertising network instead of showing me history results.
Shadowing browsing history when you click back and forward button.
Search results are now buy results.
Suggesting me useless crap to watch because I watched one video in that topic.
Showing me 10 minutes videos as a solution to my problem where I want to find exact line of text to copy paste it. If I’m lucky I need to write text from video into my computer.
Stack overflow infinite loop of answered in #some-different-question
I think it’s about time for me to slowly retire from programming and software as a whole or switch to notepad because I don’t want to use this crap anymore.
Looks like software is now meant for entertainment and distraction instead of doing actual work where you need precise data and information.
Luckily if everything goes good I can retire soon and throw everything away for a while.3 -
Oh, my worst dev experience.
First of all everyone know it, people who ask you to repair there computer 🤦♂️
Or people who say: "Hey Windows Media player is not working now. Fix it"
But the best moment and worst too is a moment where I present my new website and a friend start to refresh the site with F5 on his browser. I ask him why he do it and he answere "Yeah, you will be rich when I do it"
I don't get it. Why rich? So I ask him and he answere that websites are paid by web request an "clicks" "views" counter.
That was the stupidest thing I ever hear. Okay when I would show ads than maybe it's "true" but without them🤦♂️
But that's not the end after I explained him that it's not so he fucked me up that I would be very stupid because I don't register on a service which pay you for it. I explained him that the only service could be an ad service but no he don't understand it and try to discuss with me that a service like this exist. I ask for a link to the service and he could not answer.
For me it was the worst experience because for me it was the most stupidest thing ever and he try to discuss with me and really we discuss 1 hour about it🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️1 -
Imagine a web way ahead of our time where its size goes beyond our imagination...
This is my first rant, and I'll cut to the chase! I don't like how web currently stands. Here's what makes me angry the most altough I know there's a myriad of solutions or workarounds:
- A gazillion credentials/accounts/services in your lifetime.
- Everyone tries to reinvent the wheel.
- There's no single source of truth.
- Why the fuck there's so much design in a vision that started as a network of documents? Why is it that we need to spend time and energy to absorb the page design before we can read what we are after?
- What's up with the JS front end frameworks?! MB's of code I need to download on every page I visit and the worse is the evaluation/parsing of it. Talk about acessibility and the energy bills. I don't freaking need a SPA just give a 20-50ms page load and I'm good to go!
- I understand that there's a whole market based on it but do we really need all that developer tools and services?
- Where's our privacy by the way? Why the fuck do I need ads? Can't I have a clue about what I wan't to buy?
Sticking with this points for now... Got plenty more to discuss though.
What I would like to see:
A unique account where i can subscribe services/forums/whatever. No credentials. Credentials should be on your hardware or OS. Desktop Browser and mobile versions sync everything seemlesly. Something like OpenID.
Each person has his account and a profile associated where I share only what I want with whom I want when I want to.
Sharing stuff individually with someone is easy and secure.
There's no more email system like we know. Email should be just email like it started to be. Why the hell are we allowing companies to send us so much freaking "look at me now, we are awesome", "hey hey buy from me".. Here's an idea, only humans should send emails. Any new email address that sends you an email automatically requests your "permission" to communicate with you. Like a friend request.
Oh by the way did I tell you that static mail is too old for us? What we need is dynamic email. Editing documents on the fly, together, realtime, on the freaking email. Better than mail, slack and google docs combined.
In order for that to work reasonably well, the individual "letter" communication would have to be revamped in a new modern approach.
What about the single source of truth I talked about? Well heres what we should do. Wikipedia (community) and Larry Page (concept) gave us tremendous help. We just need to do better now.
Take the spirit of wikipedia and the discoverability that a good search engine provides us and amp that to a bigger scale. A global encyclopedia about everything known to mankind. Content could be curated from us all just like a true a network.
In this new web, new browser or whatever needed to make this happen I could save whatever I want, notes, files, pictures... and have it as I left it from device to device.
Oh please make web simple again, not easy just simple and bigger.
I'm not old by the way and I don't see a problem with being older btw.
Those are just my stupid rants and ideas. They are worth nothing. What I know for sure is that I'll do something about or fail trying to.12 -
!rant
May I suggest an email service?
I saw this post recommending the Vivaldi browser (https://devrant.com/rants/1544070/...) and there was a discussion a few days ago about how email providers snoop around and sell data. I can't find it anymore, but noone mentioned protonmail.ch there.
I just wanted to share my so far positive experience with protonmail. It's a fully encrypted email service that was first used internally by some Swiss academics. Now they made a product out of it with paid subscriptions and a basic, free account. They already open-sourced the front-end web client and are planning to do the same for the back-end in the future, which is really cool. Oh and they have really nice email clients for iOS and Android, which have higher ratings than gmail itself in the Play Store. But that might also be because only a special audience uses protonmail and not the regular guys.
So, I suggest that you register an account there even if you don't want to use it right now. The free account comes with 1 email address and storage limitations. But it's usable and ad-free. Since it's still quite the new service, many email addresses are available. Just like gmail in the early days. That's why I'm suggesting you go and register even if you don't need it now.
Oh and last but not least: I'm not affiliated in any way with protonmail, except for having a paid subscription. But I believe things making the internet a better place should be promoted and devrant is definitely the community with people thinking the same way I do. Have a nice day.9 -
My grandparent once wanted me to fix their tablet which they said had a virus. I couldn't find anything so I went to the web browser. A tab was up which said "Your Android has 5 viruses please download our antivirus to clean your phone"
It had the fake gif flashing alerts and whatnot so I simply closed out of the tab and deleted all of the recent "antiviruses" which had been downloaded
To this day they think I'm a technical genius for the easiest "fix" I've ever done.
Oh and merry Christmas everybody! I'm new here but it seems like a great community of people :)3 -
Sure you can specify svg object attributes x, y, width and height in metric values like mm and after put things on paper get same printed output but if you want to transform svg object you need to calculate new values by yourself cause you can’t simply provide translate (10mm, 10mm).
Now I ended up with manually converting values to mm.
Making free transform tool for exact document data rendering inside browser is pain in the ass.
I started to wonder how google docs or microsoft word for web deal with this stuff.2 -
I'm working with a consultant group at my company to implement a new authentication strategy for our entire platform.
The senior dev lead from the consultant group has 25+ years consulting and claims to have written a web browser for the blind and all sorts of in-depth accessibility things.
Stakeholders tell us "Don't forget about accessibility compliance on this project"
Senior dev lead with all this claimed accessibility experience asks me, "What does accessibility mean?"2 -
Oh my god, when will Firefox shut up about its motherfucking colours!? Themes have been a feature since forever, none of this is new. Also, I DO NOT want my fucking userchrome to be colourful, and I DO NOT want to be constantly bugged about this. It's a fucking browser. I want iit have a reasonably high contrast and otherwise blend into the edge of the screen, because for a web browser, the UI is not important and should not stick out.
I respect if someone has different opinions about UI, but it pisses me off to no end that Mozilla doesn't respect mine.6 -
It's 2022 and mobile web browsers still lack basic export options.
Without root access, the bookmarks, session, history, and possibly saved pages are locked in. There is no way to create an external backup or search them using external tools such as grep.
Sure, it is possible to manually copy and paste individual bookmarks and tabs into a text file. However, obviously, that takes lots of annoying repetitive effort.
Exporting is a basic feature. One might want to clean up the bookmarks or start a new session, but have a snapshot of the previous state so anything needed in future can be retrieved from there.
Without the ability to export these things, it becomes difficult to find web resources one might need in future. Due to the abundance of new incoming Internet posts and videos, the existing ones tend to drown in the search results and become very difficult to find after some time. Or they might be taken down and one might end up spending time searching for something that does not exist anymore. It's better to find out immediately it is no longer available than a futile search.
----
Some mobile web browsers such as Chrome (to Google's credit) thankfully store saved pages as MHTML files into the common Download folder, where they can be backed up and moved elsewhere using a file manager or an external computer. However, other browsers like Kiwi browser and Samsung Internet incorrectly store saved pages into their respective locked directories inside "/data/". Without root access, those files are locked in there and can only be accessed through that one web browser for the lifespan of that one device.
For tabs, there are some services like Firefox Sync. However, in order to create a text file of the opened tabs, one needs an external computer and needs to create an account on the service. For something that is technically possible in one second directly on the phone. The service can also have outages or be discontinued. This is the danger of vendor lock-in: if something is no longer supported, it can lead to data loss.
For Chrome, there is a "remote debugging" feature on the developer tools of the desktop edition that is supposedly able to get a list of the tabs ( https://android.stackexchange.com/q... ). However, I tried it and it did not work. No connection could be established. And it should not be necessary in first place.7 -
At one of my first jobs, we were tasked with building a new website for the company. Since we were the first in-house web development team (everything done prior to us had been contracted out), we had NO relevant software or tools available to use because the company had never needed them before.
On top of that, our computers were on complete lockdown: we had no permissions to install anything ourselves, and any software installation requests had to go through a formal review process that took a minimum of a few months for approval.
So: for the first couple of months, we coded everything in Notepad (!) on Windows (so no autocomplete, no syntax highlighting, etc.)...and tested only in IE6, the sole browser we had at our disposal 😮2 -
This story happened to everyone, and i am sure that if i search, i will find dozens of similar stories, but the different here is, i tried, i really tried, in a hundred different ways to achieve my goal !
When you are stuck on a problem, let's say, that you have a program, project, website ... and need to achieve something technically weird (or hard) and need some help to save you time on experimentations. The first thing a lot of people do is : Google.com && put search dorks.
But, at a moment, google gets "dirty", you use it so often that he always think to know better then you what you are looking for.
It reminds of "Ted", the movie (for thows who know it) where they asked : "Hey ! Why does google always suggest us to look for black dicks ??"
It is exactly what happened to me, i got results who doesn't have anything to do with what i was looking for !
You can give it a try now : type "semantic web RDF to RDB"
You won't find anything, except results related to : NOSQL DBs, which is totally annoying.
Something else, i once google swift to get some updates, what results did i got ? Taylor Swift ... (musician)
I often get 2 or 3 results from google, which made me thinking that i somewhat reached the end of internet, or that people are so dumb that i will have spend hours trying to figure my solutions, but, before doing that, other solutions had to be tested.
1- TOR : Google tracks his users and uses its algos and bullshits to return results as close as possible to the user's demand (big fail ...) so how about moving to a different country ? DL TOR browser, open, setup, go to US, open google (got us version YAY !) enter my keywords, and, nothing, still nothing, more results for sure, but nothing related to what i was looking for.
2- VM
Pop a VM, launch TOR, use Hidden mode, delet all cookies and stuff (it is a new VM but who knows).
Use keywords (now in UK). Here they are !! my results !!! i finally found some decent results about my keywords !
But, i have the required knowledge to do this kind of stuff, but how about people who rely heavily on google ? they can't change country, clear everything, trick google to think you are a new user, they have almost biased and flawed results. I tried duckduckgo (i love them) but they are not that efficient.
Google says not to anything evil, but they ARE EVIL, miss guiding people, suggesting corrections who have nothing to do with the keywords, or results totally unrelated in any way to the keywords while results exist in other countries ???
Ever since, i don't pay attention to google at all, and started thinking that google's algos are manipulating people, i don't know if it is done on purpose or not, but the result is the same, people have biased results based on their country, on their tag, on their ID, and the recent keywords.
During that period i was cursing google every funcking day, and i am still doing it, too much trackers, too much manipulation, i will end-up enclosing myself in darknet.4 -
Is there a mockup/authoring system for linux that I can use to mockup gui interfaces? I want to be able to create pages of screens with button that link to other pages. I first want to use this to document out current app. Then I want to use it to create a new version so that others can review the approach I want to take.
I am first looking at libreoffice because you can draw primitives very easy. It has a scripting backend as well. I had used authoring systems years ago (20 years) on old black and white macs. I have not seen systems like that in a while. Searching for authoring systems for linux brings up a lot of web based ones. I don't want to mock it up on web if I can help it, but it could work if it did relative links to html files in the same directory. That way any browser would work.
I really just don't know what the state of the art tools used for this. Probably using terms I don't recognize.5 -
Motherfucking peace of shit....
Dont know to whom I should direct this to .
Was creating a new login page for web app using Quasar(vue.js). Since my application have 2 different types of user, which also have different UI, and functionality.
One is written in vanilla ( and is quiet heavy) and the other one in vuejs ( though earlier it was written in vanilla too ). Login page too was written in vanilla which was working fine.
Now just yesterday I finished a prototype for the third type of user, which is also written in vuejs. Now I decided to re create login page using vuejs. Quiet small and easy to do. Finished it yesterday itself. Now since today's morning I am trying to configure it so that it this piece of shit just let me log in. It was authentication and verifying but not letting me log in.
( On server after authentication, I set cookies/token on clients browser and auto reload the page, so during next request to server/ or during reload, server will read the cookie/token and send the specific admin panel to user)
Prick. Dick.
It was setting cookie, but not at the '/' path. Mother fucker.
It was setting cookie to the path I was sending login credentials ( which was different from '/', I.e.- /login/verify=password )
So it was setting cookie/token at '/login/verify=password'.
Even tried setting path for cookie at server. Read everything on internet. MF nothing worked. All I came across was, 'this is CORS' .... 'this is CORS'. Assholes, if it were CORS', how then I am able to make request to server and getting response without error
Only a hour ago, when I made get request to '/login/verify=password' I figured out, cookie is being sent to server for this path only. Then did some changes at server, so to send login credentials to '/'. Now that shit is working
Fucking waste of time. Wasted more than 6 hours. Asshole.
Btw, if you can suggest a better way to login, then please. -
How is a "web app" any better than a "web site"?
All a "web app" does is adding a JavaScript program as a middle-man between the browser and the server.
Where as "web sites" instantly deliver content, "web apps" deliver JavaScript code that then loads the content and puts it on the page.
A "web site" serves the browser useful content on a silver plate (metaphorically speaking), where as "web apps" serve some JavaScript code and the browser has to do the heavy lifting.
It appears that the only benefit of "web apps" is the fancier name. "App" sounds fancy while "site" sounds mundane. But technically, a "web app" is worse than a "web site". It's both slower and vulnerable to scripting errors.
Why would anyone in their right mind choose to create a web "app" over a web "site" to load text and a bunch of pictures?
I get it, some things such as posting comments without reloading the page and loading new search results when scrolling down are not possible without JavaScript, but why use JavaScript for everything, even where it wouldn't be necessary?
JavaScript should never be required to show a bunch of boxes containing pictures and some text. JavaScript is intended to enhance web sites, not to load entire websites.
As web developer Jake Archibald said, "[100% of] your users are non-JS while they're downloading your JS" ( https://twitter.com/jaffathecake/... ).
See also: I miss the good times when the web was lightweight. ( https://devrant.com/rants/9987051/... )
"App" is not an excuse: https://jakearchibald.com/2013/...
I am sad Archive.org switched to being a web app. But I applaud them for resisting that trend longer than most other large sites.28 -
Time for a new laptop, bored with current. Taking community suggestions. May donate current laptop to some poor dev soul in need; has been a trustworthy machine.
I do some of a lot on any given day: c#, PHP, node and typically run vs 2017, phpstorm, datagrip, sql management, webstorm, plus slack, office, etc.
I have terrible browser tab management skills and prefer electron apps over web apps. Am a vm junkie, constantly spinning up linux distros to see something.
Do light gaming when the mood strikes, Spotify or Netflix always on.
Suggest away.8 -
Browser automation is a PITA. I’m going on my fourth side mission with this crap and I honestly still look like a newbie. I’ve tried Java Selenium with Chrome, Excel VBA with IE9, Vanilla JS in the browser console, and tonight I’m thinking to concoct some kind of hybrid CDP & Selenium approach in Chrome. Never used CDP before, not even sure where to start but I heard it sucks like anything else unless you get some extra libraries and plugins and stuff.
It doesn’t help that I can’t get just anything I want from our IT Department. It would be another PITA to ask for puppeteer. If puppeteer is totally legit please let me know.
Selenium sucks. The buttons don’t click, the waits don’t wait. Its unusable. Iframes are annoying as all hell but I can deal with that. HTML Tables suck too. It doesn’t help I have to restart my whole java program and whole Chrome every time an element doesn’t get picked correctly. Scripting one single element can take all fucking night.
Chrome dev tools what the fuck. Why the fuck is the DOM explorer in the same window as the web page I’m working on?? I can’t undock it. Am I supposed to use a fucking TV screen to work with this bastard?? If I use the remote chrome tools on port 9225 or whatever - It Still Renders The Whole Fucking Page Alongside The Console. Get Out Of My Way!!! The nested HTML CODE IS ONE CHARACTER WIDE ALL THE TIME. I can’t for the life of me figure out what the fuck I’m looking at. Haven’t you people ever heard of A HORIZONTAL SCROLL BAR at least.
Fuck I tried using getElementById, and the Xpath thing and its not all that great seeing I have seemingly 1000s of nested Divs all over the god damned place oftentimes containing a single element. I’m finally on chrome now should I learn Jquery now? I mean seriously wtf.
I use this one no code tool for dev it has web automation built in. As you can imagine its just as broken as anything else!! I have 10 screens to navigate it gets stuck on the second screen all the damn time. Fuck I love clicking the buttons when my script misses and playing catch up with it.
So as a work around to Selenium not waiting even 1 millisecond when I use explicit wait or implicit wait or fluent wait, I’m guessing maybe I can attach both Chrome Dev Tools Protocol (CDP as ive called it earlier) and selenium to the same browser and maybe I can use CDP to perform a Wait with any degree of success. Selenium will do nothing more than execute vanilla javascript Element.click(); This is the only way I know to even ACTUALLY use selenium beyond the simplest html documents possible. Hell I guess CDP can execute js idk.
I can’t get the new selenium that has CDP but I do have some buggy ass selenium from a few years back. Yeah, I remember reading there was a pretty impactful regression defect in the version I have. Maybe I’m being gaslighted by some shit copy of selenium?
The worst part is that I do seem to be having issues that the rest of the internet’s devs do not seem to be having. People act like browser automation is totally viable and pretty OK. How in the fuck hell is my Selenium Test Suite going to be more reliable my application under test?!!?? I’ll have more fucking bugs in my test suite than in my application. Today, I have less than half a test script and, I. already. fucking. do.
I am still SUPER PISSED at the months of 12 hour days (always 8 hours spent on normal sprint work btw only 4 to automation) I spent trying to automate our regression tests. I got NOWHERE.
I did learn a lot about HTML and JS though like I’m not that mad…but I’m just trying to emphasize my achievement on my task was zero.
The buttons don’t click. There are so many divs and I swear you sometimes need to select a div somewhere in the middle sometimes to get it working. The waits don’t wait. XHR requests are invisible. Java crashes 100 times before I find an xpath and thread.sleep() combo that works. I have no failure modes to use — Sometimes I click the same element 20x in a script because I have no way to know if it clicked the first time! Sometimes you gotta scroll the page to make the click work. So many click methods all broken. So many wait methods all broken. Its not just the elements don’t click! There are so many ways to click that almost work but surely they all fail the same in the end. ok at this point I’m just repeating myself…
there yet even more issues that I can’t remember…and will soon remember as I journey into this project yet again…
thanks for reading I hope I entertained and would love to hear your experience!6 -
[CONCEITED RANT]
I'm frustrated than I'm better tha 99% programmers I ever worked with.
Yes, it might sound so conceited.
I Work mainly with C#/.NET Ecosystem as fullstack dev (so also sql, backend, frontend etc), but I'm also forced to use that abhorrent horror that is js and angular.
I write readable code, I write easy code that works and rarely, RARELY causes any problem, The only fancy stuff I do is using new language features that come up with new C# versions, that in latest version were mostly syntactic sugar to make code shorter/more readable/easier.
People I have ever worked with (lot of) mostly try to overdo, overengineer, overcomplicate code, subdivide into methods when not needed fragmenting code and putting tons of variables.
People only needed me to explain my code when the codebase was huge (200K+ lines mostly written by me) of big so they don't have to spend hours to understand what's going on, or, if the customer requested a new technology to explain such new technology so they don't have to study it (which is perfectly understandable). (for example it happened that I was forced to use Devexpress package because they wanted to port a huge application from .NET 4.5 to .NET 8 and rewriting the whole devexpress logic had a HUGE impact on costs so I explained thoroughly and supported during developement because they didn't knew devexpress).
I don't write genius code or clevel tricks and patterns. My code works, doesn't create memory leaks or slowness and mostly works when doing unit tests at first run. Of course I also put bugs and everything, but that's part of the process.
THe point is that other people makes unreadable code, and when they pass code around you hear rising chaos, people cursing "WTF this even means, why he put that here, what the heck this is even supposed to do", you got the drill. And this happens when I read everyone code too.
But it doesn't happens the opposite. My code is often readable because I do code triple backflips only on personal projects because I don't have to explain anyone and I can learn new things and new coding styles.
Instead, people want to impress at work, and this results in unintelligible, chaotic code, full of bugs and that people can't read. They want to mix in the coolest technologies because they feel their virtual penis growing to showoff that they are latest bleeding edge technology experts and all.
They want to experiment on business code at the expense of all the other poor devils who will have to manage it.
Heck, I even worked with a few Microsoft MVPs.
Those are deadly. They're superfast code throughput people that combine lot of stuff.
THen they leave at you the problems once they leave.
This MVP guy on a big project for paperworks digital acquisiton for a big company did this huge project I got called to work in, which consited in a backend and a frontend web portal, and pushed at all costs to put in the middle another CDN web project and another Identity Server project to both do Caching with the cdn "to make it faster" and identity server for SSO (Single sign on).
We had to deal with gruesome work to deal with browser poor caching management and when he left, the SSO server started to loop after authentication at random intervals and I had to solve that stuff he put in with days of debugging that nasty stuff he did.
People definitely can't code, except me.
They have this "first of the class syndrome" which goes to the extent that their skill allows them to and try to do code backflips when they can't even do code pushups, to put them in a physical exercise parallelism.
And most people is like this. They will deny and won't admit, they believe they're good at it, but in reality they aren't.
There is some genius out there that does revoluitionary code and maybe needs to do horrible code to do amazing stuff, and that's ok. And there is also few people like me, with which you can work and produce great stuff.
I found one colleague like this and we had a $800.000 (yes, 800k) project in .NET Technology, which consisted in the renewal of 56 webservices and 3 web portals and 2 Winforms applications for our country main railway transport system. We worked in 2 on it, with a PM from the railway company.
It was estimated 14 months of work and we took 11 and all was working wonders. We had ton of fun doing it because also their PM was a cool guy and we did an awesome project and codebase was a jewel. The difficult thing you couldn't grasp if you read the code is if you don't know how railway systems work and that's the only difficult thing.
Sight, there people is macking me sick of this job11 -
If your SPA doesn't work with the browsers navigation buttons . . . go fuck yourself and fix your application.
At work I have to deal with an application that manages work tickets. There's a login page, an overview console and a page for each individual ticket (and a whole bunch of other pages that I'll ignore for this rant.) If I click on a ticket to view it I go to a new page, right?
What happens if I want to go back to the overview? I hit back on my browser. That should take me back!
WRONG
Nope. Because it's a single page application with no fucking routing programmed, the browser still thinks that the login page is the last page so it takes me there instead.
Like come on, good UX/UI design takes advantage of what the user expects and what the user is used to. The user expects the back button to take him back one page, and therefore it is the responsibility of a SPA developer to mimic that capability in his app. I don't know what framework this web page uses (it has none of the recognizable hallmarks of React or Angular) but for gods sake, implement a freaking router.4 -
I need a new professional email address and i was thinking of going with an encrypted email service, do you guys have any recommendations on what to use?
My only requirement is that it needs to work with desktop email clients like Thunderbird, i am too lazy to use a web browser :)11 -
Is it possible to continue file upload for android default browser without the browser being open?
I’ve been tasked by a company to make it so video and photo files can continue being uploaded from an app even when that app is closed. Slight issue is that the app is just a web viewer that goes to a web app.
I know this is convoluted but would the only way to do that be to overlay an actual upload button over the web view so that I can use androids built in service to do that and make a whole new way for the file to be uploaded to the server?
Surely there must be an easier way.14 -
Why does Chromes sometimes suck balls when it comes to caching and reloading updated files on the backend web server?
Sometimes I get stuck in a state where I don't get the whole F-ing site refreshed... until I open a new virgin browser who's never been touched by the web code.
Why can't refresh .. .just REFRESH?
GRRRR6 -
firstly, does anyone know of an online telegram or whatsapp group where i can ask silly stuff regarding web dev and get immediate answers, just like it is here?
secondly i am trying to learn js and there are just too many related terms that are messing with my brain:
"some features are supported ines5/es6/es15/es16/es17 , some are supported in chrome's v8/chakra/spidermonkey/android browser , some features are only supported in "serverside" and blocked in all browsers thanks to browser's vm environment; babel can't read this code, some features are provided only by node js..."
WHAT THE MESS IS THIS?
All i am trying to do is to write code that would make a website visible to everyone. if by specific browser , i want to target, chrome and its subsidaries and android chrome/other android browsers .
for other browsers am willing to make external converters later but don't want to change my code by 1 bit. And from what i know, each browser (at least the browsers am thinking of supporting) has the complete JS compilers already built in
can i or can i not built a complete functional website with those things?
and finally my main question : how to make custom exceptions in vanilla js? i saw this answer on stack overflow:
===================
function InvalidArgumentException(message) {
this.message = message;
// Use V8's native method if available, otherwise fallback
if ("captureStackTrace" in Error)
Error.captureStackTrace(this, InvalidArgumentException);
else
this.stack = (new Error()).stack;
}
InvalidArgumentException.prototype = Object.create(Error.prototype);
InvalidArgumentException.prototype.name = "InvalidArgumentException";
InvalidArgumentException.prototype.constructor = InvalidArgumentException;
Usage:
throw new InvalidArgumentException();
var err = new InvalidArgumentException("Not yet...");
=====================================
where is the error code? what would be the exception details? what is the line number/timestamp of error?why is that function making an error, i thought error/exception is a class in JS?4 -
Dear web developers, please think of the boot disk users.
Users might have to boot their computer from external bootable media such as a live USB stick, SSD, or live CD/DVD, after their operating system caught a problem that prevents it from booting.
Emergency boot media usually has earlier versions of web browsers because they are not frequently used, much less updated. Sadly, the developers of many websites have a habit of breaking compatibility for older web browsers. For example, the new audio player used by the Internet Archive (Archive.org) does not even support Firefox 57, a version that was released as recently as November 2017!
Therefore, websites should retain support for old web browsers. If not all features can be made to work, at least the essential features should work on older browser versions. Websites should not let down people who are stuck due to a computer problem. Those users should still be able to browse the Internet for help, and perhaps enjoy basic entertainment such as watching videos (YouTube, Dailymotion) and listenening to music or audio books (SoundCloud, Internet Archive) while at it.
The attached screenshot shows something no internet user wants to be "greeted" with.
Keep the Internet accessible.18 -
Heres a truly vitrolic and unnecessary rant:
Package control for sublime is all well and good
through the command palette, but it's just
fucking retarded. How about you point me to a
FUCKING COMMAND to actually INSTALL A
MOTHERFUCKING PACKAGE YOU
FINGERPAINTING FUCKWITS?
Under babel plugin while browsing packages
on packagecontrol.io:
"Find it as Babel through Package Control."
FUCKING HOW?
What command?
What fucking command? How do I "Find" it?
The browse command just opens my
motherfucking browser. How do I fucking install
your fucking packages you assholes?
"Use autocomplete" except your god damn
autocomplete doesn't list "install package"
for some god damn reason because everything
web is a broken pile of utter shit, built
on a more shit, like a leaning garbage tower
of bullshit waiting for the smallest mistake to
take down the entire house of cards like
someone removing a leftpad on npm.
Maybe specify I have to enter
"install package" and THEN hit enter, and THEN
enter the GOD DAMN MOTHERFUCKING package name
on a separate god damn line for
some fucky reason.
Next time don't make a tool that breaks
motherfucking conventions. It's bad enough
every fucking look-at-me-im-smart cunt of a
dev and their dog has to invent a CLI and
then go and invent a new domain specific
language too motherfuckers.
Next tool that breaks convention around me is
gonna see the dev lit on fire.
fucking uppity cunts.
"Say thanks" the site say. I am not
feeling fucking thankful at the moment.
The least you can do if you're going to
contribute to open source, is not make things
actively fucking worse, least of all in the
fucking *documentation*.
FUCK count for this rant: 19 / 50,
RANK: RUSH HOUR TRAFFIC
0-5: GENTLE AS A LAMB
6-10: ANGRY GOAT
11-15: NUN WITH PMS
16-20: RUSH HOUR TRAFFIC
21-25: CANTANKEROUS VIETNAM VET
26-30: BREAKING SHIT
31-35: DOMESTIC DISTURBANCE
36-40: BIPOLAR EPISODE
41-45: DESPAIR EVENT HORIZON
46-50: BROKEN CAPSLOCK
50+ : MIDLIFE CRISIS / MASTER GRAND WIZARD
OF RANTS AND ANGRY-WORD MASTURBATION.
If you prefer to cheat, you may also include any
cursewords in general, but be warned, you'll
never know the sweet taste of victory when you
achieve the rank of master grand wizard.
Like when you were a kid, and you discovered
gameshark, and all your hopes of finishing that
one game became but a ruthlessly hollowed out
husk, somewhere where could-have-been childhood
memories and nostalgia go to die like the
graveyard of dreams
(the same place officer workers souls go).4 -
Modern Web Developer
(To the tune of "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General" from Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Pirates of Penzance")
I am the very model of a modern web developer
I’m quite fluent with JavaScript; An HTML whisperer
My code is clean and elegant, I genuinely innovate
And even know my way around a Promise and async / await
I’m very well acquainted too with matters vector graphical
I understand why SVG coordinates seem magical
And even without Photoshop I elegantly can produce
A mockup or a logo in most any format that you choose
[Chorus]
A mockup or a logo in most any format that you choose
A mockup or a logo in most any format that you choose
A mockup or a logo in most any format that you choose
I'm quite adept at ES6 expressions like destructuring
I know the ins and outs of functional reactive programming
In short, in matters browser-based or Node.js if you prefer
I am the very model of a modern web developer
[Chorus]
He is the very model of a modern web developer
I know our mythic history, the humble start, the browser wars
I know why Douglas Crockford fought the battle over ES4
The World Wide Web Consortium and Ecma International
My knowledge of our legacy is truly supernatural
With LESS and SASS and CSS, designing for mobility
I’ll perfectly apply the right amount of specificity
From custom fonts and parallax to grid and flex and border-box
I know most every tip and trick both common and unorthodox
[Chorus]
He knows most every tip and trick both common and unorthodox
He knows most every tip and trick both common and unorthodox
He knows most every tip and trick both common and unorthodox
And when it comes to lazy loading, bundling up and splitting code
There’s nothing quite like Webpack, which of course is built on top of Node
Considering my resume, I’m certain that you will concur
I am the very model of a modern web developer
[Chorus]
He is the very model of a modern web developer
When new frameworks and libraries emerge I must be ravenous
And gobble up the hot new thing, my appetite is bottomless
React and Vue and Angular, Immutable, RxJS
The list will be outdated long before I'm finished singing this
My pull requests rely on multitudinous utilities
To help me lint and test and build, a deluge of analyses
And every single day there are a hundred thousand more to learn
The web is going through an irresponsible amount of churn
[Chorus]
The web is going through an irresponsible amount of churn
The web is going through an irresponsible amount of churn
The web is going through an irresponsible amount of churn
This pace is agonizing! Code from yesterday is obsolete!
The speed of innovation is enough to knock me off my feet!
It's happening too fast! I can’t keep up! I’m tired! It’s all a blur!
I am the very model of a modern web developer!
[Chorus]
He is the very model of a modern web developer!1 -
Trying to make a nodejs backend is pure hell. It doesn't contain much builtin functionality in the first place and so you are forced to get a sea of smaller packages to make something that should be already baked in to happen. Momentjs and dayjs has thought nodejs devs nothing about the fact node runtime must not be as restrained as a browser js runtime. Now we are getting temporal api in browser js runtime and hopefully we can finally handle timezone hell without going insane. But this highlights the issue with node. Why wait for it to be included in js standard to finally be a thing. develop it beforehand. why are you beholden to Ecma standard. They write standards for web browser not node backend for god sake.
Also, authentication shouldn't be that complicated. I shouldn't be forced to create my own auth. In laravel scaffolding is already there and is asking you to get it going. In nodejs you have to get jwt working. I understand that you can get such scaffolding online with git clone but why? why express doesn't provide buildtin functions for authentication? Why for gods sake, you "npm install bcrypt"? I have to hash my own password before hand. I mean, realistically speaking nodejs is builtin with cryptography libraries. Hashmap literally uses hashing. Why can't it be builtin. I supposed any API needed auth. Instead I have to sign and verfiy my token and create middlewares for the job of making sure routes are protected.
I like the concept of bidirectional communication of node and the ugly thing, it's not impressive. any goddamn programming language used for web dev should realistically sustain two-way communication. It just a question of scaling, but if you have a backend that leverages usockets you can never go wrong. Because it's written in c. Just keep server running and sending data packets and responding to them, and don't finalize request and clean up after you serve it just keep waiting for new event.
Anyway, I hope out of this confused mess we call nodejs backend comes clean solutions just like Laravel came to clean the mess that was PHP backend back then.
Express is overrated by the way, and mongodb feels like a really ludicrous idea. we now need graphql in goddamn backend because of mongodb and it's cousins of nosql databases.7 -
Please support old web browser versions for all eternity.
I hate it when I open a site like SoundCloud one day and am greeted with a "we no longer support your browser" notice. Now I am forced to update my browser to a new version with removed features. On Android, Chrome sometimes crashes due to an apparent memory leak, so I have to go back to Samsung Internet, which does not work with some sites. Also, the Samsung clipboard manager (which can hold up to 20 items) is only available on Samsung Internet, not Chrome or Firefox.
I also have to update the browser on my live USB bootable stick because sites stop supporting it. Any browser starting in 2015 (ECMA script 6) should be supported until at least 2050 so that I never have to fear that a site one day spontaneously stops working on my browser.
I would like to browse the Internet forever without having to ever worry about pages to stop working one day. Browser vendors might also deprecate support for devices and operating systems. Old devices also have replaceable batteries and are easier to repair. I don't want be forced to buy new devices that are difficult and expensive to repair.20 -
I am creating a new android app and I am also a web developer and i know that links are also set to be opened in new tabs and whenever this action will happen, my browser might get stuck or might call intent service.I want to get the links which it wants to open in new tab and whenever this happens I can programm my browser to handle this event.3
-
!rant
Got bored at work and decided to try out the new Outlook. After 15-20 mins of use I can confidently say this is the first time ever that Outlook didn't suck. It finally replaced Word as an engine and now uses a normal web browser engine. Gone are the days of adapting the fucking mails to Outlook once everyone has the new Outlook. It also feels snappier than before, I like it so far3