The thinking behind the minimal JavaScript framework, Strawberry:
Even without specialized syntax, you can do a lot of what the usual frontend framework does—with similar conciseness—just by using
ProxyandWebComponents.
This is a great way to use a service worker to circumvent censorship:
After the visitor opens the website once over a VPN, the service worker is downloaded and installed. The VPN can then be disabled, and the service worker will take over to request content from non-blocked servers, effectively acting as a proxy.
Tim takes a closer look at this Google Lite thing.
My first reaction to this was nervousness. Of all the companies to trust with intercepting and rerouting page requests, Google aren’t exactly squeeky clean, what with that whole surveillance business model of theirs.
Still, this ultimately seems to be a move to improve the end user experience, and I’m glad to see this clarification:
Lite pages are only triggered for extremely slow sites, so we encourage developers to measure how well their pages are currently performing over slow networks.
Lite pages as a badge of shame (much like AMP in my eyes).
This looks like a terrific use of a Raspberry Pi—blocking adtech surveillance at the network level.
Wouldn’t it be great if the clichéd going-home-for-Christmas/Thanksgiving to fix the printer/wifi included setting up one of these?
There’s an article about Pi-hole in Business Week where the creators offer some advice for those who equate any kind of online advertising with ubiquitous surveillance:
For publishers struggling to survive even with maximum ad surveillance, the Pi-hole team recommends a renewed focus on subscriptions, affiliate links, and curated endorsements for products and services that might truly interest users, similar to the way podcast hosts may talk about how much they personally enjoy a sponsor’s products. There’s nothing wrong with pitching people stuff they might enjoy, the team says. It’s just the constant, ever-intensifying surveillance that needs to stop.
I’m always happy to see a thriving market of competition amongst browsers—we had a browser monopoly once before and it was a bad situation.
(That said, UC Browser has its own issues.)
This looks like an interesting network-level approach to routing around the censorship of internet-hostile governments like China, Turkey, Australia, and the UK.
Rather than trying to hide individual proxies from censors, refraction brings proxy functionality to the core of the network, through partnership with ISPs and other network operators. This makes censorship much more costly, because it prevents censors from selectively blocking only those servers used to provide Internet freedom. Instead, whole networks outside the censored country provide Internet freedom to users—and any encrypted data exchange between a censored nation’s Internet and a participating friendly network can become a conduit for the free flow of information.
The second part of Bruce’s excellent series begins by focusing on the usage of proxy browsers around the world:
Therefore, to make websites work in Opera Mini’s extreme mode, treat JavaScript as an enhancement, and ensure that your core functionality works without it. Of course, it will probably be clunkier without scripts, but if your website works and your competitors’ don’t work for Opera Mini’s quarter of a billion users, you’ll get the business.
But how!? Well, Bruce has the answer:
The best way to ensure that everyone gets your content is to write real, semantic HTML, to style it with CSS and ensure sensible fallbacks for CSS gradients, to use SVG for icons, and to treat JavaScript as an enhancement, ensuring that core functionality works without scripts. Package up your website with a manifest file and associated icons, add a service worker, and you’ll have a progressive web app in conforming browsers and a normal website everywhere else.
I call this amazing new technique “progressive enhancement.”
You heard it here first, folks!
I don’t care about Opera Mini (I’m not its Product Manager). In the same way, I don’t care about walking sticks, wheelchairs, mobility scooters or guide dogs. But I care deeply about people who use enabling technologies — and Opera Mini is an enabling technology. It allows people on feature phones, low-powered smartphones, people in low-bandwidth areas, people with very small data plans, people who are roaming (you?) connect to the web.
The proxy browser Opera Mini is one of the most popular mobile browsers in the world, and rightly so. Ire Aderinokun has put together a handy collection—based on caniuse.com data—of all the features that are unavailable or only partially available in that browser. The point here is not to avoid using these features, but to make sure you’ve got a solid fallback in place:
This isn’t about bashing the problem, but figuring out the solution.
Using Progressive Enhancement makes your site better for all users and enables the 275 million users of Opera Mini worldwide.
I mentioned this a little while back, but it’s worth remembering just how many people are using Opera Mini …and how many more are about to join them.
Bring it on!
Opera Mini is about to be installed as the default browser on a few more million phones.
You might want to think about how your Angular-powered JavaScript-required web thang works in one of the world’s most popular web browsers.
A very clever and tricksy way to sync up multiple devices so that when you refresh a URL or follow a link on one, it happens on all of them. It uses OS X’s Internet Sharing feature combined with locally-hosted Node.js. It’s positively McGyverian!
“Sam! LOWERY!”