2023.01.23 - History of Web Browser Engines

Title: 2023.01.23 - History of Web Browser Engines

Page With No Code & Libre Arts 2023 & Full‑Stack & Digital World Cup & Chairman’s Spring Festival

This Week’s Highlights

History of Web Browser Engines from 1990 until today https://eylenburg.github.io/browser_engines.htm
The loss of browser diversity since the rise of Chromium has been greatly lamented. Below you can find a graph that shows the historical and present browser engines (not browsers, but the HTML rendering engines), as well as the periods during which they were developed. For the larger engines, market share is indicated by a coloured shape (see legend).

The Page With No Code https://danq.me/2023/01/11/nocode/
It all started when I saw no‑ht.ml, Terence Eden’s hilarious response to Salma Alam‑Naylor’s excellent “HTML is all you need to make a website.” The latter argues against both the absurd amount of JavaScript that sites routinely burden users with and the reliance on CSS. As a fan of CSS Naked Day and a firm believer in using JS only for progressive enhancement, I’m obviously on board.

Libre Arts – 2023 in Preview https://librearts.org/2023/01/year-in-preview/
What’s coming this year across the entire stack of free software for creatives. Related: Unpacking the value of open source and code collaboration.

Introducing the WebAssembly JavaScript Promise Integration API https://v8.dev/blog/jspi
The JavaScript Promise Integration (JSPI) API allows WebAssembly applications that were written assuming external functionality was synchronous to operate smoothly in an environment where much of the desired functionality is asynchronous. Related: Why You Should Pay Attention to WebAssembly.

The Pain Points of Teaching Computer Science https://austinhenley.com/blog/teachingpainpoints.html
Teaching is hard. But exactly what about it is hard? How could technology help? To investigate the pain points that CS instructors face and their workarounds, we conducted semi‑structured interviews with 32 computer‑science instructors. Their institutions range from large research universities to small liberal‑arts colleges and community colleges across seven different countries.

In‑Depth Reading

Another Full‑Stack Wave – Darkest Hour for Engineers or New Opportunity? https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/mFbE_CGJJauioxAvs5OO7Q
Every year I do a year‑end review and trend forecast. In the past I’ve been fairly optimistic about front‑end trends, but this year I feel an inexplicable melancholy because 2023 may be the most transformative year yet. The “full‑stack” in the title is familiar, but today I’m talking about “another full‑stack”: low‑code full‑stack, which I see as the future direction. As front‑end maturity and technical breakthroughs converge, low‑code full‑stack emerges, reshaping engineers’ roles. This could be the front‑end’s darkest hour—or a fresh opportunity. This article explores the issue and hopes to provide a different perspective.

Discovering the Capable Web https://developer.chrome.com/blog/how-fugu-is-my-browser-and-how-fugu-is-the-web/
What advanced web capabilities does your browser support? And what web apps make use of these capabilities? To answer these questions, check out a browser testing site and a browser extension.

Optimize Time to First Byte https://web.dev/optimize-ttfb/
Learn how to optimize for the Time to First Byte metric.

Why Is My Jest Test Suite So Slow? https://blog.bitsrc.io/why-is-my-jest-suite-so-slow-2a4859bb9ac0
The simple mistake undermining Jest’s performance.

Making Your React Native Gestures Feel Natural https://shopify.engineering/making-react-native-gestures-feel-natural
When working with draggable elements in React Native mobile apps, I’ve learned some simple ways to make gestures and animations feel smoother and more natural.

Fixing a Memory Leak in a Production Node.js App https://kentcdodds.com/blog/fixing-a-memory-leak-in-a-production-node-js-app
A few months ago, I wrote about my migration from Postgres to SQLite. I ended that with a “to be continued” because I had a number of memory and CPU‑spike issues I couldn’t explain.

We Invested 10% of Bandwidth to Pay Back Tech Debt; Here’s What Happened https://blog.alexewerlof.com/p/tech-debt-day
Why and how we continuously invested team bandwidth to repay tech debt and what the results were.

Who Owns the Generative AI Platform? https://a16z.com/2023/01/19/who-owns-the-generative-ai-platform/
We’re starting to see the very early stages of a tech stack emerge in generative artificial intelligence (AI). Hundreds of new startups are rushing into the market to develop foundation models, build AI‑native apps, and stand up infrastructure/tooling. Many hot technology trends get over‑hyped far before the market catches up. But the generative AI boom has been accompanied by real gains in real markets, and real traction from real companies. Related:

• Notion, AI, and Me
• Google: Why We Focus on AI (and to What End)
• Google: 9 Ways We Use AI in Our Products
• Ethical AI Is Not About AI
• Can AI Demonstrate Creativity?
• OpenAI and Microsoft Extend Partnership

Fresh Finds

Acquiring the “Android” of the robot world, Google bets on the next fifty years Zawinski: mozilla.org’s 25th anniversary Deno in 2022: npm, Edge Functions, Series A, Fresh, and More Git Security Vulnerabilities Announced Material 3 for Flutter

graph: A library for creating generic graph data structures and modifying, analyzing, and visualizing them. Inertia.js v1.0: Build single‑page apps without building an API. Glob 8.1: Match files using the patterns the shell uses, like stars and stuff. Prisma 4.9: Next‑generation ORM for Node.js & TypeScript Restify 11.0: The Future of Node.js REST Development

From Ruby to Node: Overhauling Shopify’s CLI for a Better Developer Experience Rust: Officially Announcing the Types Team Rust Concepts I Wish I Learned Earlier Pandoc 3.0

Products and Others

How to Draw Ideas https://ralphammer.com/how-to-draw-ideas/
Great ideas are hard to find. Drawing makes it a lot easier—and fun. How? In a creative process, drawing can play four different roles. Let’s say we want to come up with ideas for a new flower pot.

The Paradox of Goals [https://nesslabs.com/the-paradox-of-goals](https://nesslabs.com/the-pa

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Originally written by Ping Xia (平侠) and published in Chinese on Web技术周刊 (Web Tech Weekly). Translated and adapted for DriftSeas with permission.