Tech News - Web Development

Today, web developers are greeted with a new update of the popular Firefox web browser. Firefox 60 hosts a variety of feature additions and updates targeted specifically to the web developer community. Quantum CSS for Android available now Firefox has brought their new CSS engine called Quantum CSS (previously known as Stylo) in Firefox for Android. This engine takes advantage of modern hardware, parallelizing the work across all of the cores in your machine running upto almost 18 times faster. New Web APIs Two new Web APIs have been added. The Web Authentication API has been enabled which allows USB tokens for website authentication. The WebVR API has also been enabled by default on macOS. It provides support for exposing virtual reality devices to web apps. Firefox 60 also brings a new policy engine and Group Policy support for customized enterprise deployments, using Windows Group Policy or a cross-platform JSON file. Changes in Javascript ECMAScript 2015 modules have been enabled by default. The Array.prototype.values() method has been added again. It was disabled due to compatibility issues in earlier versions. Changes in CSS The align-content, align-items, align-self, justify-content, and place-content property values have been updated as per the latest CSS Box Alignment Module Level 3 spec. The paint-order property has been implemented. Changes in Developer Tools In the CSS Pane rules view, the keyboard shortcuts for precise value increments (increase/decrease by 0.1) have changed from Alt + Up/Down to Ctrl + Up/Down and the CSS variable names will now auto-complete. In Responsive Design Mode, a Reload when... dropdown has been added to allow users to enable/disable automatic page reloads when touch simulation is toggled, or simulated user agent is changed. Changes in DOM The dom.workers.enabled pref has been removed, meaning workers can no longer be disabled. PerformanceResourceTiming is now available in workers. The PerformanceObserver.takeRecords() method has been implemented. The Animation.updatePlaybackRate() method has been implemented. The Gecko-only options object storage option of the IDBFactory.open() method has been deprecated. Promises can now be used within IndexedDB code. The entire list of developer centric changes are available on the Mozilla Developer page. You can also file a bug in Bugzilla or see the system requirements of this release. Get ready for Bootstrap v4.1; Web developers to strap up their boots npm v6 is out! What’s new in ECMAScript 2018 (ES9)?

After running the pre-release version of Rails 6.0 for months in production, the GitHub application was deployed to production on its official release last month. Yesterday, GitHub shared how its upgrade team was able to make the transition from Rails 5.2 to 6.0 smoothly just after 1.5 weeks of the release. Rails 6.0 was released with several amazing features including action mailbox, multiple database support, parallel testing, and more last month. GitHub is not only using it but has also made significant contributions to this release. It submitted over 100 pull requests for documentation improvements, bug fixes, performance improvements. Its contributions also included updates to the new features in the framework: parallel testing and multiple database support. “For many GitHub contributors, this was the first time sending changes to the Rails framework, demonstrating that upgrading Rails not only helps GitHub internally, but also improves our developer community as well,” GitHub wrote in the announcement. GitHub’s approach to this update was incremental. Instead of waiting for the final release, it upgraded every week by pulling in the latest changes from Rails master and running its tests against that new version. This enabled them to identify regressions quickly and early. The weekly updating process also made it easy to find these regressions because they were dealing with only a week’s worth of commits. GitHub now plans to use this co-development approach for future releases as well. It wrote, “Once our build for Rails 6.0 was green, we’d merge the pull request to master, and all new code that went into GitHub would need to pass in Rails 5.2 and the newest master build of Rails. Upgrading every week worked so well that we’ll continue using this process for upgrading from 6.0 to 6.1.” Following this approach has not only helped in improving the GitHub application in terms of security, performance, and new features but has also improved the working experience with the GitHub codebase for its engineers. This sparked a discussion on Hacker News were developers also recommended taking an incremental approach for upgrading one’s application. A user commented, “Incremental updates may require more time to complete, as an API may be refactored multiple times over many versions. However, the confidence in moving incrementally is well worth it IMHO. If you don't have an extensive enough test suite or poor/missing QA process (or both!), doing a big bang upgrade is going to both be extremely painful and very error-prone. It's worthwhile to keep up to date. It's probably not worthwhile to upgrade ASAP after a release, but you don't want to wait too long.” Another user added, “...they could have waited but if one has the developer resources, it's better to be proactive instead of waiting for an official release and all of a sudden try to upgrade and run into a lot of unforeseen issues.” Check out the official announcement to know more in detail. Other news in web development GitHub now supports two-factor authentication with security keys using the WebAuthn API The first release candidate of Rails 6.0.0 is now out! GitLab considers moving to a single Rails codebase by combining the two existing repositories

Google Cloud announced the availability of their latest Second Generation runtime, PHP 7.2 on the App Engine standard environment, on Monday. This version is available in beta for users to build and deploy reliable applications with improved flexibility. PHP 7.2 is open and idiomatic as compared to other second Generation runtimes on App Engine standard such as Python 3.7 and Node.js 8. This means one can run popular frameworks such as Symfony, Laravel, and even WordPress on PHP 7.2. With PHP 7.2 on the App Engine standard environment, users can easily build and deploy an application, which can run reliably under heavy load and large amounts of data. The applications will run within its own secure, reliable environment. Thus, making it independent of the hardware, operating system, or the physical location of the server. Benefits of Google App Engine standard environment for PHP 7.2 Faster auto-scaling: Being on the Google App Engine standard environment allows running instances in seconds. This allows the app to handle sudden bursts in demand. Faster deployment times of about less than a minute for PHP apps; One can also scale apps down to zero instances if required. This makes it perfect for apps to operate at any scale. No restrictions in running code: As PHP 7.2 is a Second Generation runtime, one can run any code without restrictions. Existing PHP apps and open source libraries will run unmodified. Support for new languages: This is because PHP 7.2 need not custom-modify language runtimes to work with App Engine. Thus, support for new languages can be launched quickly. Supports Google Cloud client libraries: One can integrate Google Cloud services into their apps and run it on App Engine, Compute Engine, or any other platform. To know more about this news in detail and to get started with PHP 7.2 for App Engine visit Google Cloud blog. Common PHP Scenarios Oracle releases GraphPipe: An open source tool that standardizes machine learning model deployment Perform CRUD operations on MongoDB with PHP

Yesterday, the React team published a roadmap for React 16.x releases. They have split the rollout of new React features into different milestones. The team has made it clear that they have a single vision for how all of these features fit together, but are releasing each part as soon as it is ready, for users to start testing them sooner. The expected milestone React 16.6: Suspense for Code Splitting (already shipped) This new feature can “suspend” rendering while components are waiting for something, and display a loading indicator. It is a convenient programming model that provides better user experience in Concurrent Mode  In React 16.6, Suspense for code splitting supports only one use case: lazy loading components with React.lazy() and <React.Suspense>. React 16.7: React Hooks (~Q1 2019) React Hooks allows users access to features like state and lifecycle from function components. They also let developers reuse stateful logic between components without introducing extra nesting in a tree. Hooks are only available in the 16.7 alpha versions of React. Some of their API is expected to change in the final 16.7 version. Hooks class support might possibly move to a separate package, reducing the default bundle size of React, in future releases. React 16.8: Concurrent Mode (~Q2 2019) Concurrent Mode lets React apps be more responsive by rendering component trees without blocking the main thread. It is opt-in and allows React to interrupt a long-running render to handle a high-priority event. Concurrent Mode was previously referred to as “async mode”. A name change happened to highlight React’s ability to perform work on different priority levels. This sets it apart from other approaches to async rendering. As of now, the team doesn’t expect many bugs in Concurrent Mode, but states that components that produce warnings in <React.StrictMode> may not work correctly. They plan to publish more guidance about diagnosing and fixing issues as part of the 16.8 release documentation. React 16.9: Suspense for Data Fetching (~mid 2019) In the already shipped React 16.6, the only supported use case for Suspense is code splitting. In the future 16.9 release, React will officially support ways to use Suspense for data fetching. The team will provide a reference implementation of a basic “React Cache” that’s compatible with Suspense. Data fetching libraries like Apollo and Relay will be able to integrate with Suspense by following a simple specification. The team  expects this feature to be adopted incrementally, and through layers like Apollo or Relay rather than directly. They also plan to complete two more projects Modernizing React DOM and Suspense for Server Rendering  in 2019. As these projects require more exploration, they aren’t tied to a particular release as of now. For more information, visit the React blog. React Conf 2018 highlights: Hooks, Concurrent React, and more React introduces Hooks, a JavaScript function to allow using React without classes React 16.6.0 releases with a new way of code splitting, and more!

Yesterday, the Django team announced the release of Django 2.2. This release comes with classes for custom database constraints, Watchman compatibility for runserver, and more. It comes with support for Python 3.5, 3.6, and 3.7. As this version is a long-term support (LTS) release it will receive security and data loss updates for at least the next three years. Also, this release marks the end of the mainstream support for Django 2.1 and it will continue to receive security and data loss fixes until December 2019. Following are some of the updates Django 2.2 comes with: Classes for custom database constraints Two new classes are introduced to create custom database constraints: CheckConstraint and UniqueConstraint. You can add constraints to the models using the 'Meta.constraints' option. Watchman compatibility for runserver This release comes with Watchman compatibility for runserver replacing Pyinotify. Watchman is a service used to watch files and record when they change and also trigger actions when matching files change. Simple access to request headers Django 2.2 comes with HttpRequest.headers to allow simple access to a request’s headers. It provides a case insensitive, dict-like object for accessing all HTTP-prefixed headers from the request. Each header name is stylized with title-casing when it is displayed, for example, User-Agent. Deserialization using natural keys and forward references To perform deserialization you can now use natural keys containing forward references by passing ‘handle_forward_references=True’ to ‘serializers.deserialize()’. In addition to this, forward references are automatically handled by ‘loaddata’. Some backward incompatible changes and deprecations Starting from this release, admin actions are not collected from base ModelAdmin classes. Support is dropped for Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL) 1.9 and 1.10. Now, the team has made sqlparse a required dependency to simplify Django’s database handling. Permissions for proxy models are now created using the content type of the proxy model. With this release, model Meta.ordering will not affect GROUP By queries such as  .annotate().values(). Now, a deprecation warning will be shown with the advice to add an order_by() to retain the current query. To read the entire list of updates, visit Django’s official website. Django 2.2 alpha 1.0 is now out with constraints classes, and more! Django is revamping its governance model, plans to dissolve Django Core team Django 2.1.2 fixes major security flaw that reveals password hash to “view only” admin users

On Monday, Twitter rolled out the new website to the general public. Those who have already seen it, may find the new design refreshing in its subtlety. A few things have been rearranged in the new three-column design, and the site is noticeably faster, but according to users it seems there aren’t a lot of drastic updates. The official blog post reads, “a refreshed and updated website that is faster, easier to navigate and more personalized. The site has an updated look and feel that is more consistent with the Twitter you see on other devices, making it easier to access some of your favorite features, and with more options to make it your own.” The Twitter engineering team on Monday posted a separate blog on the new Twitter website and its architecture. They say that their goal was to create one codebase website that is responsive to more than just design and the screen size. The team posted, “Our goal was to create one codebase - one website - capable of delivering the best experience possible to each person.” The engineering team also wrote, “On web, we believe in the “write once, run everywhere” philosophy.” They said the goal for this new website is two fold. First to make it easier and faster to develop new features for people worldwide. Secondly, provide each person and each device with the right experience. This post gained a lot of attention on Hacker News and the users commented of appreciating the single code base for mobile and web but they feel the major turn off is how the Home timeline appeared on the mobile and desktop. One of the users commented, “To the posted article, I think it's impressive they are shipping a single codebase for mobile and desktop. Modular features you can turn off for different views. It's smart and I'll be curious to see if other sites follow suit. Unfortunately they've now ported one of the most offensive features from mobile to desktop. The "Home" timeline, with tweets out of order. And the real kicker; you can still select "latest Tweets first" but then the app literally undoes your preference every week or two, forcing you back to their "Home" view. It's offensive. Also a small thing, but the new desktop Twitter now has obfuscated CSS classes for everything. The names change frequently too, maybe at every deploy? Anyway it makes it a lot harder to modify the desktop HTML presentation with an extension or set of ad blocker rules.” Finally let us check out the new features added to Twitter. Updates to new Twitter With the new features listed below the team at Twitter has tried to make conversations easier to find and follow – and a bit more fun: More of What’s Happening: They have brought over Explore to bring the same great content found in our apps; you can expect more live video and local moments personalized for wherever you are in the world. Get context with profile information within conversations and check out your Top Trends in any view so you never miss what’s happening. Easy Access to Your Favorite Features: Bookmarks, Lists, and your Profile are right up front and have their own spot on the side navigation, making it easier and faster to jump between different tabs. Direct Messages All in One Place: Direct Messages have been expanded so you can see your conversations and send messages all from the same view. Now there’s less hassle switching between screens to send a message. Login, Logout Struggle No More: Whether you have one profile or a few, now you can switch between accounts faster, directly from the side navigation Make Twitter Yours: The love is real for dark mode themes Dim and Lights Out. Twitter has brought to you different themes and color options, along with two options for dark mode. However, the new site for Twitter was all about “Woah, What’s this? a shiny new Twitter.com is here. '' Users seem to be unhappy with the statement and posted dull comments on the announcement. The users feel new features were added to the site but a lot of it is still missing. Here’s some of the tweet responses to the official announcement. https://twitter.com/grandayy/status/1150948766851174402 https://twitter.com/BetterGarf/status/1150972967482023936 https://twitter.com/falcons_fan1966/status/1150833643046211596 https://twitter.com/Autumn_Antal/status/1150870408570134529 https://twitter.com/MrPuddins/status/1151342148626866178   Once again Twitter only focused on the web design and UI, made no efforts for better or healthier conversations on Twitter, which is actually their motto. Creative Commons’ search engine, now out of beta, indexes over 300 million public domain images Mozilla launches Firefox Preview, an early version of a GeckoView-based Firefox for Android Vue maintainers proposed, listened, and revised the RFC for hooks in Vue API

Yesterday, Mr Macintosh website reported of Google Chrome Keystone updated to remove the /var symlink on NON SIP protected Mac computers, causing account and booting issues. Few MacAdmins started to report that their systems would not boot properly. And they had following issues:   1. After rebooting the affected system it would Kernel Panic. The system will reboot only to KP again 2. User Logs out and the system shows the Setup Assistant. 3. The System Kernel Panics into a boot Loop.   The MacOS versions 10.9 – 10.14 Mojave were affected by this. It seems the issue affects all Macs that have SIP (System Integrity Protection) Disabled or turned off. Google Chrome keystone update causes booting issues AVID users were some of the first to report the issue. They said that AVID Media Creators use 3rd Party Graphics cards connected to their Mac Pro. When the issue hit yesterday, it was thought that AVID was the main cause of the problems since all the users experiencing the issue had AVID software. Only later after a MacAdmins dived deep in an investigation. After investigation from some of the top minds in the MacAmins Slack Chat #varsectomy channel it was found that the Google Chrome Keystone Updater was at the heart of the issue. How to check if the /var symlink was modified You can check to see if the /var symlink was modified by running the following command. ls -ldO /var The following outputs appear. The first one below means that your /var volder is SIP protected (notice the restrictedflag) and the proper sym link /var -> private/var lrwxr-xr-x@ 1 root wheel restricted,hidden 11 Apr 1 2018 /var -> private/var The next one means that your symlink is broken and the folder is NOT SIP Protected. drwxr-xr-x 5 503 wheel - 170 Sep 24 14:37 /var If you find /var in this condition you are affected! If you LOGOUT, SHUTDOWN OR RESTART your Mac will NOT Boot! You will need to boot into recovery, repair the /var symlink and reset the restricted flags. And there are two ways to fix the issue. First is to fix from MacAdmins User Juest and second is from Google Support, you need to use commands while booting through macOS Recovery. Community hates automatic updates from Google Chrome On Hacker News, users are discussing about sudden updates on Google Chrome Keystone which cause such issues and prefer using Safari or Firefox instead of Chrome. One of them commented, “I've always hated that "service" (more like malware given this news) like everything else that installs itself into the autolaunch sequence without permission, and remove* it whenever I notice/remember it, but it keeps coming back whenever I touch Google Chrome, which I prefer not to use in favor of Safari/FireFox because of reasons like this. Things like these (including secretly signing you into Search when you sign into YouTube† or refusing to support PiP on iPadOS/macOS) just solidify Google's image in my mind as a forever scummy, intrusive company that I wish I could leave behind like I did Microsoft, but sadly Google Search and YouTube still don't have good enough alternatives yet.” Another user commented, “The trends that Google has spearheaded have had a real effect on me over the years. I feel alienated from my computer. Subtle things will just change. If I really dig I might be able to find out why, but I don't have the time, so I just accept it. Usually very small things that are barely noticeable. My Chromecast extension disappeared and was integrated into the browser. My brain could not help but notice this benign change, which caused a hard to place sense of unease. Or when Google decided to remove rotation from the home screen on Android 2.3 -- it wasn't a huge problem, but I could have sworn that something changed. Users were conflicted, many convincing themselves that the homescreen never rotated at all. It has made me not trust my computer. I second guess myself much more. If some option no longer exists, I wonder if it was just my imagination or if it was quietly deprecated while I wasn't looking. Does it even matter? I think that we are being trained to see devices as ephemeral, and not to get too attached to them.” To know more about Google Chrome Keystone update and the issue regarding this, check out the Mr. Macintosh website. Other interesting news in web development Google Chrome 76 now supports native lazy-loading Google Chrome to simplify URLs by hiding special-case subdomains Google Chrome will soon support LazyLoad, a solution to lazily load below-the-fold images and iframes

After the release of Angular 6.1.0 last month, Angular 7 beta.0 is here. The new version, released last week, explores new features, bug fixes and other updates among others. Angular 7 beta.0 includes a new feature, namely, Angular Compatibility Compiler (ngcc).This new compiler helps convert the node_modules, which have been compiled with ngc, into node_modules that appear to have been compiled with ngtsc. This conversion, further, allows these “legacy” packages to be used by the Ivy rendering engine. Also, XMB placeholders ( <ph>) have been updated to include the original value on top of an example. Now placeholders can have one example(<ex>) tag and a text node. The compiler has been updated to flatten nested template fns. Apart from the newly added compiler features, there are certain bug fixes included as well. In Bazel, compile_strategy() is now used to decide whether to build Angular code using ngc (legacy) or ngtsc (local). compile_strategy() is importable in Angular 7 beta.0 to enable g3 BUILD rules to switch properly. It also allows ivy testing in g3. In Ivy, Template functions are no longer nested inside each other. The parent contexts are re-defined explicitly through an instruction, instead of nesting the functions and using closures to get parent contexts. This gets rid of the need to create multiple function instances for loops that are nested inside other loops. TView.components are no longer used for directive indices (just host element indices). The components array can be cut in half as the context for components is now being stored in the component’s LViewData instance. There’s also a new instruction, reference() (r()) in Angular 7 beta.0. Earlier, closures were used to get access to local refs in parent views. With nested template functions being flat now; we need another way to walk the view tree. reference takes a nesting level, and the local ref’s index then walks the view tree to find the correct view and loads the local ref.w. from there. Angular 7 beta.0 is now enabled with better error handling for @output in cases where the property is not initialized. Angular 7 will be released sometime in September/October 2018. For more information on the latest Angular 7 beta.0 release, check out the official release notes. Angular 6.1.0 is here! Build user directory app with Angular [Tutorial] Why switch to Angular for web development – Interview with Minko Gechev ng-conf 2018 highlights, the popular angular conference  

Google keeps a track of everything that you do online, including the websites you visit, the ads you see, the videos you watch, and the things you search. Soon, this is (partially) going to change. Google, on Wednesday, launched a new feature allowing users to delete all or part of the location history and web and app activity data, manually. This has been a long requested feature by all internet users, and Google says it “ has heard user feedback that they need to provide simpler ways for users to manage or delete their data.” In the Q1 earnings shared by Google’s parent company Alphabet, they said that EU’s USD 1.49 billion fine on Google is one of the reasons their profit sagged in the first three months of this year.  This was Google’s third antitrust fine by EU since 2017. In the Monday report, Alphabet said that profit in the first quarter fell 29 percent to USD 6.7 billion on revenue that climbed 17 percent to USD 36.3 billion. “Without identifying you personally to advertisers or other third parties, we might use data that includes your searches and location, websites and apps you’ve used, videos and ads you’ve seen, and basic information you’ve given us, such as your age range and gender,” the company explains on its Safety Center Web page. Google already allows you to turn off their location history and Web and app activity. You can also manually delete data that’s generated from searches and other Google services. This new feature, however, lets you remove such information automatically. It has a time limit for how long you want your activity data to be saved: Keep until I delete manually Keep for 18 months, then delete automatically Keep for 3 months, then delete automatically Based on the option chosen, any data older than that will be automatically deleted from your account on an ongoing basis. Surprisingly, Google still does not have an option that says 'don't track me' or 'automatically delete after I close website', which would ensure 100 percent data privacy and security for users. Source: Google Blog Enabling privacy has not been one of Google’s strongholds in recent times. Last year, Google was caught in a scandal which allowed Google to track a person’s location history in incognito mode, even when they had turned it off. In November last year, Google came under scrutiny by the European Consumer Organisation (BEUC). They published a report stating that Google is using various methods to encourage users to enable the settings ‘location history’ and ‘web and app activity’ which are integrated into all Google user accounts. They allege that Google is using these features to facilitate targeted advertising. “These practices are not compliant with GDPR, as Google lacks a valid legal ground for processing the data in question. In particular, the report shows that users’ consent provided under these circumstances is not freely given,” BEUC, speaking on behalf of the countries’ consumer groups, said. Google was also found helping the police use Google’s location database to catch potential crime suspects, and sometimes capturing innocent people in the process, per a recent New York Times investigation. The new feature will be rolled out in the coming weeks for location history and for web and app activity data. It is likely to be incorporated in data history as well, but it has not been officially confirmed. To enable this privacy feature, visit your Google account activity controls. European Consumer groups accuse Google of tracking its users’ location, calls it a breach of GDPR. Google’s incognito location tracking scandal could be the first real test of GDPR Google’s Sidewalk Lab smart city project threatens privacy and human rights: Amnesty Intl, CA says.

Reportedly, Google wants all the web developers to adopt the AMP approach for their websites. The AMP project was announced by Google on October 7, 2015 and AMP pages first became available to web users in February 2016. Nowadays, mobile search is getting more popular as compared to desktop search. It is important for web pages to appear in Google’s mobile search results, and this is why AMP is not optional for web publishers. Without AMP, a publisher’s articles will be extremely unlikely to appear in the Top Stories carousel on mobile search in Google. What is AMP? AMP is short for Accelerated Mobile Pages. As the name suggests, this open-source project aims to provide a straightforward way to create web pages that are compelling, smooth, and load near instantaneously for users. AMP consists of three components: AMP HTML: This component consists of regular HTML with some custom AMP properties. AMP JS: This component is responsible for fast rendering of your page. It implements all of AMP's best performance practices, manages resource loading, and provides the custom tags. AMP Cache: It is used to serve cached AMP HTML pages. It is a proxy-based content delivery network for delivering all valid AMP documents. Why are web developers annoyed with AMP? This is the part which infuriates developers, because they have to follow the rules set by Google. Developing a website in itself is a difficult job and on top of that AMP adds the extra burden of creating separate AMP versions of articles. Following are some of the rules that AMP pages need to follow: To avoid delay caused by JavaScript in page rendering, AMP only allows asynchronous JavaScript. Resources such as images, ads, or iframes should mention their size in the HTML to enable AMP to determine each element’s size and position before resources are downloaded. CSS must be inline and the upper limit for the size of inline style sheet is 50 kilobytes. All resource downloads are controlled by AMP. It optimizes downloads so that the currently most important resources are downloaded first and prefetches lazy-loaded resources. Web font optimization should be kept in mind as web fonts are super large. Google Search Console checks your AMP pages and shares feedback stating what all improvements you can make to better align it with the restrictions set by Google. It basically wants full equivalency between the regular website and the AMP versions of the pages. It is not very easy to follow these restrictive rules. Many developers feel they have to do all the work they already put in to build the normal version of the site all over again specifically for the AMP version. Instead of creating two different versions, developers would be forced to build the whole site in AMP. Why Google wants web developers to accept AMP? It's very rare to find websites that look good, have great performance, and fully follow the web standards. This becomes a huge challenge for search engines. Google's crawlers and indexers have to process a lot of junk to find and index content on the web. Website built entirely in AMP are fast to load, fast to crawl, easy to understand, and in short makes Google's life so much easier. One redditor stated in a long discussion thread, that the main problem is not “AMP” itself, but “Google treating it special” is. “The problems you're describing I believe are problems with implementation not AMP itself. The only issue I really have with AMP is actually that Google treats it special. If you treat it like a web framework where you write slightly different html and get lazy loading and tons of integrations as built in components for free, it's actually quite nice both for the user and for the programmer. The problems are that people want to put in all their normal functionality, continue trying to game SEO and ad revenue, and that Google wants to serve it themselves. If Google stopped trying to integrate AMP directly into their search results/CDN system, I'd be much more willing to support and use it. AMP itself is basically just a predefined set of web components and a limitation to not use taxing JS. You can even be partially AMP compliant and still leverage all the benefits with none of the negatives (including the fact that Google won't host it if you aren't fully compliant, I believe).” To know more on why Google wants developers to embrace AMP, read this article: Google AMP Can Go To Hell. If you are interested in reading about how AMP makes content loading quicker, check out this article: What is Google AMP and how does it work?. Like newspapers, Google algorithms are protected by the First amendment making them hard to legally regulate them Google launches a Dataset Search Engine for finding Datasets on the Internet Google Chrome’s 10th birthday brings in a new Chrome 69

Last year in November, Victoria Wang, a UX designer at Mozilla, announced the initiation of a Design Tools survey. The motivation behind this survey was to get an insight into the biggest CSS and web design issues developers and designers face. She shared the results of this survey yesterday. This survey received more than 900 responses, which revealed the following issues: Source: Mozilla One of the main takeaways from this survey was that developers and designers, irrespective of their experience level, want to better understand CSS issues like unexpected scrollbars and sizing. Cross-browser compatibility was also one of the top issues. Now, the Firefox DevTools team is trying to find out ways to ease the pain of debugging browser difference, including auditing, hints, and a more robust responsive design tool. Some of the mid-ranked issues included building Flexbox layouts, building with CSS Grid Layout, and ensuring accessibility. To address this, the team is planning to improve the Accessibility Panel. Among the lowest-ranked issues included Lack of good Visual/WYSIWYG tools, Animations, WebGL, and SVG. Source: Mozilla The top issues developers face when working with a browser tool was “No easy way to move CSS changes back to the editor”. To address this issue the Mozilla team is planning to add export options to their Changes Panel and also introduce DOM breakpoints. You can read more about this Design Tools survey on Mozilla’s official website. Mozilla partners with Ubisoft to Clever-Commit its code, an artificial intelligence assisted assistant Mozilla releases Firefox 65 with support for AV1, enhanced tracking protection, and more!

Yesterday, Dan Abramov, one of the React developers, announced the release of React 16.8, which comes with the feature everyone was waiting for, “Hooks”. This feature first landed in React 16.7-alpha last year and now it is available in this stable release. This stable implementation of React Hooks is available for React DOM, React DOM Server, React Test Renderer, and React Shallow Renderer. Hooks are also supported by React DevTools and the latest versions of Flow, and TypeScript. Developers are recommended to enable a new lint rule called eslint-plugin-react-hooks that enforces best practices with Hooks. It will also be included in the Create React App tool by default. What are Hooks? At the React Conf 2018, Sophie Alpert and Dan Abramov explained what are the current limitations in React and how they can be solved using Hooks. React Hooks are basically functions that allow you to “hook into” or use React state and other lifecycle features via function components. Hooks comes with various advantages such as enabling easy reuse of React components, splitting related components, and use React without classes. What’s new in React 16.8? Currently, Hooks do not support all use cases for classes, but soon it will. Only two methods, that is, getSnapshotBeforeUpdate() and componentDidCatch(), don’t have their Hooks API counterpart. A new API named ReactTestUtils.act() is introduced in this stable release. This API ensures that the behavior in your tests matches what happens in the browser more closely. Dan Abramov in a post recommended wrapping code rendering and triggering updates to their components into act() calls. Other changes include: The useReducer Hook lazy initialization API is improved Support for synchronous thenables is added to React.lazy() Components are rendered twice with Hooks in Strict Mode (DEV-only) similar to class behavior A warning is shown when returning different hooks on subsequent renders The useImperativeMethods Hook is renamed to useImperativeHandle The Object.is algorithm is used for comparing useState and useReducer values To use Hooks, you need to update all the React packages to 16.8 or higher. On a side note, React Native will support Hooks starting from React Native 0.59 release. Read all the updates in React 16.8 on their official website. React Conf 2018 highlights: Hooks, Concurrent React, and more React introduces Hooks, a JavaScript function to allow using React without classes React 16.x roadmap released with expected timeline for features like “Hooks”, “Suspense”, and “Concurrent Rendering”

Last week on Friday, Firefox users were left infuriated when all their extensions were abruptly disabled. Fortunately, Mozilla has fixed this issue in their yesterday’s releases, Firefox 66.0.4 and Firefox 60.6.2. https://twitter.com/mozamo/status/1124484255159971840 This is not the first time when Firefox users have encountered such type of problems. A similar issue was reported back in 2016 and it seems that they did not take proper steps to prevent the issue from recurring. https://twitter.com/Theobromia/status/1124791924626313216 Multiple users were reporting that all add-ons were disabled on Firefox because of failed verification. Users were also unable to download any new add-ons and were shown  "Download failed. Please check your connection" error despite having a working connection. This happened because the certificate with which the add-ons were signed expired. The timestamp mentioned in the certificates were: Not Before: May 4 00:09:46 2017 GMT Not After : May 4 00:09:46 2019 GMT Mozilla did share a temporary hotfix (“hotfix-update-xpi-signing-intermediate-bug-1548973”) before releasing a product with the issue permanently fixed. https://twitter.com/mozamo/status/1124627930301255680 To apply this hotfix automatically, users need to enable Studies, a feature through which Mozilla tries out new features before they release to the general users. The Studies feature is enabled by default, but if you have previously opted out of it, you can enable it by navigating to Options | Privacy & Security | Allow Firefox to install and run studies. https://twitter.com/mozamo/status/1124731439809830912 Mozilla released Firefox 66.0.4 for desktop and Android users and Firefox 60.6.2 for ESR (Extended Support Release) users yesterday with a permanent fix to this issue. These releases repair the certificate to re-enable web extensions that were disabled because of the issue. There are still some issues that need to be resolved, which Mozilla is currently working on: A few add-ons may appear unsupported or not appear in 'about:addons'. Mozilla assures that the add-ons data will not be lost as it is stored locally and can be recovered by re-installing the add-ons. Themes will not be re-enabled and will switch back to default. If a user’s home page or search settings are customized by an add-on it will be reset to default. Users might see that Multi-Account Containers and Facebook Container are reset to their default state. Containers is a functionality that allows you to segregate your browsing activities within different profiles. As an aftereffect of this certificate issue, data that might be lost include the configuration data regarding which containers to enable or disable, container names, and icons. Many users depend on Firefox’s extensibility property to get their work done and it is obvious that this issue has left many users sour. “This is pretty bad for Firefox. I wonder how much people straight up & left for Chrome as a result of it,” a user commented on Hacker News. Read the Mozilla Add-ons Blog for more details. Mozilla’s updated policies will ban extensions with obfuscated code Mozilla re-launches Project Things as WebThings, an open platform for monitoring and controlling devices Mozilla introduces Pyodide, a Python data science stack compiled to WebAssembly

When Qt 5.11 was released last week, a technology preview of Qt for WebAssembly was released along with it, allowing developers to run Qt applications directly inside the browser window. WebAssembly is a brand-new technology that represents a paradigm shift in web development. Leveraging this technology web developers can write high-performance applications that can run directly in the browser. A common misconception about WebAssembly is that it will eventually replace JavaScript, but the fact is that it’s intended to be used alongside JavaScript. WebAssembly is nothing but a bytecode format which is executed in a web browser. This allows an application to be deployed to a device with a compliant web browser without going through any explicit installation steps. WebAssembly is now supported by all major web browsers as a binary format for allowing executable code in web pages that is nearly as fast as native machine code. Qt uses Emscripten, an open source LLVM to JavaScript compiler. Emscripten complies Qt applications so they can run in a web browser from a web server. Deploying applications on multiple platforms is a tedious task, with WebAssembly developers need to just compile and deploy on a web server for any platform that has a browser. This feature comes in handy especially for enterprise users with multiple clients who are using different platforms. These enterprises can use Qt for WebAssembly to compile their Qt or Quick app and deploy once. Adding support for WebAssembly is a huge step forward for Qt in order to become a truly cross-platform framework. The project is currently in beta and has been released as a technology preview. You can visit the official Qt blog for more information. Qt 5.11 has arrived! How to create multithreaded applications in Qt 3 ways to deploy a QT and OpenCV application

Yesterday, the Google Chrome team introduced Carlo, a web rendering surface for Node applications. Carlo provides rich rendering capabilities powered by the Google Chrome browser to Node applications. Using Puppeteer it is able to communicate with the locally installed browser instance. Puppeteer is also a Google Chrome project that comes with a high-level API to control Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol. Why Carlo is introduced? Carlo aims to show how the locally installed browser can be used with Node out-of-the-box. The advantage of using Carlo over Electron is that Node v8 and Chrome v8 engines are decoupled in Carlo. This provides a maintainable model that allows independent updates of the underlying components. In short, Carlo gives you more control over bundling. What you can do with Carlo? Carlo enables you to create hybrid applications that use Web stack for rendering and Node for capabilities. You can do the following with it: Using the web rendering stack, you can visualize dynamic state of your Node applications. Expose additional system capabilities accessible from Node to your web applications. Package your application into a single executable using the command-line interface, pkg. How does it work? It’s working involve three steps: First, Carlo checks whether Google Chrome is installed locally or not It then launches Google Chrome and establishes a connection to it over the process pipe Finally, exposes high-level API for rendering in Chrome In case of those users who do not have Chrome installed, Carlo prints an error message. It supports all Chrome Stable channel, versions 70.* and Node v7.6.0 onwards. You can install and get started with it by executing the following command: npm i carlo Read the full description on Carlo’s GitHub repository. Node v11.0.0 released npm at Node+JS Interactive 2018: npm 6, the rise and fall of JavaScript frameworks, and more Node.js and JS Foundation announce intent to merge; developers have mixed feelings