Jeremy Keith

I give Apple a hard time. That’s mostly due to how they treat the web on their own mobile devices.

Though iOS ostensibly supports the ability for websites to be added to the homescreen, they make it so difficult for users to do, the functionality is practically worthless. It’s dispiriting to see the web so hamstrung by that decision.

The Webkit team has come in for other criticism too. For a while there, Safari was lagging so far behind in features that people were calling it the new Internet Explorer. Ouch!

But credit where credit is due. The upcoming version 27 of Safari is looking very good.

That’s not because it’s at the cutting edge of the latest web standards. Quite the opposite. Most of the changes listed for this release are bug fixes. That’s what I want to acknowledge and applaud.

Far too often a browser will rush out an implementation of an exciting new web standard that gets plenty of attention. But that initial implementation is rarely 100% correct. Then the next release rolls around and the focus has moved on to a different new web standard. The result is an ever-growing backlog of almost-but-not-quite-supported features.

Clearly the focus for Safari 27 was on that backlog. I bet that wasn’t an easy decision. Like I said, the kudos and recognition tends to go to the browser that ships new stuff, not the browser that goes back to fix long-standing issues.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s some exciting new stuff in Safari 27 too, like styleable select, but it’s great to see the focus on maintenance and repair:

If you look through the lists of features and fixes in Safari 27, you’ll notice that, although there are 58 brand-new features and 525 fixes — the largest pile of fixes in any Safari release in recent memory — most of what is released is not about new things.

Most of this work has been about existing features behaving more correctly, handling more edge cases, and fitting together with other features the way you’d expect.

This in sharp contrast to the most recent release of Chrome that shipped support for the prompt API despite opposition from other browsers and no positive signals from developers. I hope some Googler got a nice promotion for shoving a proprietary technology into a web browser, but they should be aware of the damage they’ve done.

At this year’s CSS Day, the represenatatives from Google Chrome were once again there to talk to developers and ask what we wanted them to prioritise. Those requests rang very hollow. Why should we waste our time and energy telling a browser team what we need if they’re just going to ship whatever crap they want?

The truth is that the folks from Google who were canvassing opinions from the attendees at CSS Day are not the same people who torpedoed the browser with unwanted proprietary tech. This team has spent years doing excellent outreach, documenting web standards, and meeting with developers. They built up an impressive amount of trust, respect, and goodwill.

That stock has now plummeted.

So well done to the Webkit team for Safari 27. And shame on the Chrome team for Chrome 148.

Sarah Canary is an odd book, in the best possible way.

On the one hand, it’s a relatively straightforward narrative. An adventure story set in the Pacific northwest in the late 19th century. The viewpoint shifts from character to character, with one exception. The inscrutable title character is a living macguffin that everyone and everything else revolves around.

That all seems straightforward enough, but if you squint at the story just right maybe it’s a story from a very different genre altogether.

So you can enjoy it on both levels; a well-told series of historical adventures, and a clever subversion of genre expectations. Whichever way you take it, there’s a running thread throughout the book exploring racism, sexism, and colonialism.

Quite the debut novel!

The Field Guide to CSS Grid Lanes

This is a very handy playground for exploring the brand new masonry grid lanes layout.

I’m heading to Amsterdam for CSS Day. It’s one of those events I try my best to get to every single year. I have no doubt that this year will be brilliant as usual.

There’s another event the day before CSS Day: The Web You Want:

What would the web be like if it was up to you?

There’ll be workshops and talks, all absolutely free.

I’ll be giving a talk. It’s supposed to be about the web I want, but I’m going to do my usual shtick of looking back at the history of the web to see what kind of things we wanted in the past. It’s called The Web You Wanted.

Register your attendance and I’ll see you there. Or maybe I’ll see you at CSS Day. Or at the session in Mulligan’s on Wednesday night.

The Session existed in a very basic form since the late 1990s. It was just me posting a different tune every week.

But The Session as it is today—a community website where everyone can add tunes—first went online on June 3rd, 2001. That’s 25 years ago today.

Considering the typical lifespan of a web page, I’m proud of having a website still online and thriving a quarter of a century after launching it.

At this point it’s fair to say that thesession.org is my life’s work. Though, really, I’m just the curator; the site would literally be nothing without all the contributions that people have made to it.

It’s been a great 25 years so far, and I’m looking forward to the next 25.