Alex Russell

You're probably looking for something that is more focused on specific software decisions/implementations, but https://infrequently.org is the best web development blog out there. It's not "technical" so much as it just educates you on how to be a good web developer/run a team. There's zero fluff and considerable detail (footnotes are practically blog posts themselves).

There's a framework that always seems to get forgotten, but was there before Backbone, Angular and others: the Dojo Toolkit [1], released in 2005, it had some goodies like built-in tooling (that was hell to work with) and modules (in 2005 they were godsend!) with RequireJS. We chose it in my company in 2008 before the framework boom and it had served us well for a very long time. It's batteries included, has for example it has a very comprehensive i10n module, which was not usual at the time. Also worth mentioning it was started among others by Alex Russell [2], a famous developer advocate at Google. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dojo_Toolkit [2] https://infrequently.org/

>> If your app doesn't work for the wealthiest 50% of users, why go that route? > Why doesn't business hire two teams? One for the amazing native-like PWA, and one for iOS? You quote me, but missed the exact part where I already answered that question (I presume by accident ;)), so I'll just repeat myself: > Yes. The web's winning feature is "it works everywhere". If your app doesn't work for the wealthiest 50% of users, why go that route? Making a desktop web app work on mobile, just for Android, is a lot of work. It needs to work on both iOS and Android to make it worthwhile. For background, this piece by Alex Russell is worth reading: Platform Adjacency Theory https://infrequently.org/2020/06/platform-adjacency-theory/

Alex Russel - member of the Chrome core team has a few excellent titles on why React is not the way to go 1. Market for Lemons - https://infrequently.org/2023/02/the-market-for-lemons/ 2. https://infrequently.org/2024/11/if-not-react-then-what/

>If it doesn’t revolve around her, why should revolve it around you? I know reading comprehension is hard, but you will get better at it, if you put in some effort: "It is irrelevant what system I am personally using, since it's about the principle and not about personal preferences" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45859640 >Also “shill”? I don’t work for Apple. I am not Tim Cook. I have no reason to shill for anyone. That’s just an ad hominem. Your profile states "Places we might have crossed paths: VMWare, Google, Apple", so you have an evident conflict of interest, that's just an objective fact worth mentioning; especially when one is dedicated to making bad faith arguments in defense of anti-competitive business practices regurgitating bogus narratives[1]. [1] https://infrequently.org/2025/09/apples-antitrust-playbook

Alex Russel did a lot of writing on this and posts yearly updates based on the state of the phone market. You can pick median, P75 or P95 device based on the analysis and set up targets based on that. https://infrequently.org/2024/01/performance-inequality-gap-2024/ I did it the simple way and bought a first item in "sort by cheapest" smartphone list. That's Alcatel 1, and it's extremely underpowered. It's maybe a bit overkill, but if something runs on that device, it will run amazing on anything else.

Are you in a fast and wired connection? The link I posted above has data: https://infrequently.org/#e-commerce

"React works because I can hire engineers that can be productive quickly. A lot of tech conversations leave the talent pool aside as if it's easy to find good engineers in all of the options you might have." That's covered in this section: https://infrequently.org/2024/11/if-not-react-then-what/#%22...we-need… "The ecosystem is another aspect. You have so many great options for off the shelf components and libraries with React that you might not have with other frameworks." That's covered here: https://infrequently.org/2024/11/if-not-react-then-what/#%22...the-eco…

The article refers to the JS-industrial-complex but only has stats for NextJS[1]. Maybe other frameworks are better? I would love to see a similar chart for the showcases of other frameworks. [1]: https://infrequently.org/2024/10/platforms-are-competitions/#fn-failur…

I heard a saying recently that went along the lines of "engineering without constraints isn't engineering", and after reading "The Performance Inequality Gap"[0] and its follow-up series "Reckoning"[1], I'm convinced that software developers should use lower end devices so that they, too, feel the pain they're inflicting on others. Running cheap hardware is fun and will make you want to improve your craft. [0] - https://infrequently.org/series/performance-inequality/ [1] - https://infrequently.org/series/reckoning/

Google is paying Apple 20 billion per year in their search deal, which is 40 times more than what Mozilla takes. Safari is funded ENTIRELY by Google's ads, also making a profit, and this is a fact. We can entertain a counterfactual, maybe Safari would still be funded without Google funding it with billions, but that's not the world we live in today. And given Apple's reluctance to advance the web, going against their other cash cows, it's disingenuous to suggest otherwise. I recommend reading this opinion: https://infrequently.org/2022/06/apple-is-not-defending-browser-engine…

Not sure this is true. The following post has issues but I do find sense its argument that the result of what you are saying has been accelerated shrinkage of the mobile web as businesses increasingly use apps instead. https://infrequently.org/2023/02/the-market-for-lemons/#shrinkage

In this case, the author does have a personal blog already: https://infrequently.org

An excellent, in-depth overview of Webkit/Safari issue: https://infrequently.org/2021/04/progress-delayed/ Previous HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27019077

Do you have a problem with BigInt? fetch? Push notifications for PWAs? Dozens of other useful web technologies used by millions of apps? Is that "web-standard-of-the-week-insanity"? I agree not all standards are great. But they're *standards*. As in, you really should, because everyone else agreed it was a good idea. The time for vetoing it was when it was being decided (and Apple does shoot down tons of proposals), not when everyone else already agreed is was a good idea. It's not that Safari doesn't get these features - it gets them years later than the competition. The problem with these big companies (Google is bad as well) is that they're too big to fail. If they don't like something, then the standard isn't their standard. * https://infrequently.org/2021/04/progress-delayed/

This is a fantastic distillation of how bitter the PWA discussion often seems to be. I had no idea that “progressive” should be understood as “progressive enhancement” (graceful degradation) rather than “technological progress”. Looks like the term was coined in [1], which describes the idea of something that starts as a website, but progresses to become app-like as technology and the user’s wishes allow. By that definition it’s your PWA not planning on supporting Firefox. 1: https://infrequently.org/2015/06/progressive-apps-escaping-tabs-withou…

FWIW Alex Russell wrote a great article about why our current approaches don't work and why this is interesting to explore: https://infrequently.org/2015/08/doing-science-on-the-web/ [Full disclosure: I work on this project]

For a more visual explanation of the difference between where we are now, and where Alex would like us to be, see the diagrams in his next blog post. http://infrequently.org/2012/04/one-for-dave-and-david/ There's some fantastic discussion in the comments there, too.

Ah you're right! You were actually very clear by saying Android 9 or below, but I misinterpreted while multitasking here, sorry for that. > If you're arguing that it is Google who is dropping support/making people have insecure browsers, we're in agreement. As with Safari (or at least those at Apple who control/fund Safari), the Android team is very anti-Web/Chrome. Lots has been written about all of that at https://infrequently.org. Oh, haven't seen that blog before. Incredible resource, thanks! And yeah, Google, Apple, and also a situation with vendors (e.g. Qualcomm, due to drivers) that makes it so miserable. Not only due to the way they favor their stores, but also indirectly due to how hard they make to have updated or custom OSes for older devices. I believe it's a consequence of the amount of control they exert, Apple by plainly not allowing bootloader unlocking and Google by gatekeeping essential APIs (especially Play Integrity) on "secure" (read: controlled by Google) OSes. It's a bit insane that we live in two completely different realities on desktop vs mobile, where it's easy to install a current OS and browser in 15+ year old computers but can't even have an up-to-date browser on an 8 year old device, much less and up-to-date OS.

The author here. It will seem odd to most, but my big concerns about Chrome relate to Android and ChromeOS. In neither environment did Chrome win share competitively. I think this has made them weaker and less useful, and that was mirrored in the tremendous difficulty we had in getting expansions of web capabilities done within the Chrome team, nevermind what I am documenting in this most recent post. Sadly, the CrOS problem will be partially resolved when Google trashes it with Android rebasing in upcoming releases. On the Android side, Google is still withholding WebAPK support from competitors (suppressing PWAs on Android) and has failed to follow Apple's lead on hotseat browser replacement when choice screens are shown in the EU. But neither of the bad effects are nearly as structural or impactful as Apple's out-and-out suppression of the web on mobile, because wealthy people carry iPhones and they have all the power: https://infrequently.org/2025/09/apples-crimes-against-the-internet-co…

But this is exactly the point of the article. That'd be like if I needed to build a car, I started with a rocket blueprint in case I also need to go to space in the future. The cost of speculating a highly interactive site that users will want to interact with is a suboptimal baseline experience until you get there. Provided you get there without losing users, it'll still be a subset of your audience that use your thing in a way that truly offsets all of these costs. If that works for your product/business, then awesome! But if these costs are too high and will hurt your product, then you need to be a lot more deliberate about how you engineer it. I typically approach the problem first and see what tools work best to solve the problem, rather than work backwards from my preferred set of tools. > Once you've dug that hole, you either have to live with it, or face a painful rewrite later. Based on the tools you mentioned familiarity with, wouldn't something like Astro be a happy middle ground? You start as an MPA by default and only add complexity to parts (entire routes or parts of a page) of the application that require it? Also, this hole goes both ways. If you've built your site as a SPA, and you realise that your product just needs to be HTML to stay competitive, it's a painful road to unpick the layers of abstraction you've bought if you don't wanna rewrite it. > dynamic features, anything from basic showing / hiding of content, list / configuration-based rendering,…

Look, it's okay to have a side you root for due to emotional reasons but this is just silly. When the Pixel 6a was introduced in 2022, its performance was somewhere in between the 2017 iPhone 7 and the 2018 iPhone XS. No magical thinking about "scroll speed" is going to make up for that underlying performance gap. Since this is a technical forum, I am going to plug the blog post Alex Russell (not usually described as an Apple fanboy) made about real-world performance for web developers. One of the challenges we have is that normal people hang on to phones for a while and that's especially true for people who buy cheap phones since they often can't afford to buy a new one every year. When a developer testing on an “old” iPhone has a browser which runs code faster than the current flagship Android phone (iPhone XS ~= Galaxy S22), that means that they effectively have no idea what the web is like for a person using a $200 phone which they've had for a few years. There's a great chart here: https://infrequently.org/2022/12/performance-baseline-2023/#devices-1 Now, the Pixel line does have a decent camera so that's potentially a plus but it's not really relevant to the device's capabilities or long-term support situation. It's also unlikely that a single test is telling you that such an old sensor is really the best thing in the world rather than Google's ML pipeline is good at adjusting images to make them appealing to phone users.

I ended up writing a huge wall of text for this, but realized it was too much. The article I think makes too many proclamations without supporting a single one with logic or evidence, and I'm not really interested in articles that put the onus on me to justify the author. Most everything from the article seems to be lifted from the following article, but rephrased without nearly as much justification: https://infrequently.org/2022/06/apple-is-not-defending-browser-engine… And the main thing that stands out to me on the above linked article and the parent article is the focus on WebApps (PWAs) or other restrictions Apple puts on iOS. To which I say "good riddance, toss it out with the rest of the trash", cause I don't need every single website having that much access to my phone and especially notifications. Even on MacOS, the defaults for what can and cannot send notifications are insane and very frustrating, and the less said about Android the better; I don't even use that many apps on my android phone and I'm tired of the countless notifications to dismiss every morning that are just absolute spam. The lack of granularity means that I can't really pick if my delivery app only triggers notifications for actual deliveries versus just random spam notifications; it's either a few useful notifications during a transaction I care about once or twice a week along with dozens of notifications a week, or no notifications at all. The Calendar app default on my phone tries…

Remember just a couple of years ago when you could get root access on a locked device without any kind of password [1] Honestly I’m not that convinced iOS is that much better. It’s reputation is so much better than it should be. The number of emergency patches I’ve seen out of them the past few years for many many trivial bugs is amazing. Just this morning I was reading a post from a Chrome engineer talking about how the fundamental architecture of their security is built around a decision that nobody else has thought of as a good time for many years. [2] It’s only going to get worse over time. Then to make matters worse they have managed to get an absolutely horrible relationship with the security community [3] who now seem to have zero interest in helping them meaning that the main external groups left looking at their security are those who are going to put them on the black market. Prior to that researchers were finding so many bugs that the legit market rate for 0days fell well below Android. [4] I ditched my Mac in 2020 and I’m currently waiting for my current iPhone to no longer be up to the task and I’m officially done with Apple after 10 years of nothing but. [1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/information-technology/20… [2] https://infrequently.org/2021/04/progress-delayed/ [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/09/apple-bug-bounty/ [4]…

It's far worse than "Apple is slow at implementing". I've spent most of the last 10 years with Safari iOS as my primary target platform. I'll try to break down the major issues as unless you are intimately involved with Safari iOS development it can be hard to see the issues by simply using the browser. 1. Bugs Safari is the the most buggy browser with application breaking bugs crossing into every aspect of development, whether your using WebRTC, Audio, Scroll/UI, LocalStorage/IDB... Safari is the most buggy browser. Examples: * LocalStorage / IDB has broken many times over the last 10 years, including breaking for months in production. Normally gets fixed in webkit pretty quick, but takes a month to actually make it to an iOS release. * Viewport/Scroll/UI/Zoom Bugs - As a collection of issues also related to hiding the header on body scroll, zoom etc.. To fix we had reimplement ALL of user scroll including momentum scrolling, bounce etc in userland js. A mammoth 210 hours of hardcore engineering just to get around bugs that have existed for 5 years. * bugs.webkit.org is useless as a bug tracking tool, stuff just doesn't get triaged properly, or is hidden away in radar or whatever Apple is using internally and worst of all it just does not get fixed. Why? It's not the Safari's teams fault, their engineers are all super smart, work hard, care about the web, and some have been building it from the days when Safari was the best browser by far... but you can't build…

I'm not sure what your point is. Web standards have had a turbulent history? Of course that's true. - CSS 2 was originally published as a recommendation in 1998. CSS 2.1 was pushed as a recommendation in 2011. Maybe something was wrong? - "Ignored by vendors" is a bit of an understatement, because your "close to 20 years" includes 5 years of the vendor with 90% marketshare not releasing anything at all. - FWIW, what became flexbox was useable (assuming polyfills aplenty) in Firefox and Webkit browsers 5 years ago[1]. It took some time to standardize, but while frustrating in the present, it's ok to take time to make sure the spec works, because it will be (in theory) around for quite a while. > It makes it 'easy' by introducing yet another weird box modelism that doesn't really fit anything else that's already there What many people don't appreciate about layout in general (and WRT to the web, dynamic layout in particular), is that it turns out to be difficult (and sometimes extremely computationally expensive) to implement an expressive layout system that does what we intuitively think it should. A good example is word wrapping, which is easy to tell when it "looks right" (at least to a trained eye), was done by hand by many when printing was done more manually, but turns out to be difficult to assign a metric that handles all use cases, especially when you're trying to be computationally efficient. Web layout is like a whole set of word wrapping requirements,…

I completely understand the confusion, but "Progressive Web App" or PWA[1], coined by Alex Russell and Frances Berriman[2], has become a specific term for websites that work normally on a pc but can also take advantage of things like push notifications and be installed on the home screen of a phone. You can see a measurable uptick on Google Trends after this blogpost [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_web_app [2] https://infrequently.org/2015/06/progressive-apps-escaping-tabs-withou… [3] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fg%2F11bzxympx6,pwa&d…

> It's not 2010 anymore. Client compute is fast. It's not: https://infrequently.org/2025/11/performance-inequality-gap-2026/

Sure, amongst the wealthy. Suggest reading Alex Russell on this topic: https://infrequently.org/series/performance-inequality/

“PWA” is a bit of a nebulous concept, but it basically grew out of this blog post by Alex Russell, who was working at Google at the time: https://infrequently.org/2015/06/progressive-apps-escaping-tabs-withou… When Apple launched the iPhone, Steve Jobs told people that if they wanted to build apps for the iPhone, they should build them as web apps. This wasn’t specifically about PWAs, just web apps in general. Users demanded native apps, so Apple launched the iPhoneOS SDK and App Store the next year.