Richard MacManus

Last week Vercel announced Next.js 12, the latest version of its JavaScript framework based on the React library. Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel and creator of Next.js, positioned version 12 as “the first SDK for the Web” — presumably based on its ever-increasing set of functionalities, which I’ll get into during this column. Also notable, … Read more

jQuery is one of the longest-running and most influential JavaScript libraries on the web. A staggering 78% of the top 1 million websites use jQuery in some way, according to BuiltWith. As for the most talked-about JavaScript library today, React, it’s used by a relatively paltry 14%. jQuery was launched way back in 2006, when … Read more

Earlier this month the PWA Summit was broadcast as a single-day online event. PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) have made significant progress over the past several years, according to a presentation from ​​Ire Aderinokun, co-founder and COO of Nigerian company Helicarrier Studio. Aderinokun made the case that PWAs are ready to be considered as a viable … Read more

The debate about whether the blockchain-centric Web3 architecture is valid continues to rage on social media. Meanwhile, did you know that many current “dapps” (distributed applications) are reliant on centralized web infrastructure? That’s right, despite all the highfalutin talk about Web3 being a decentralized version of the web where you get to “own a piece … Read more

Venture capitalist Chris Dixon ignited a Twitter debate last week with a thread about “Why Web 3 matters.” Dixon, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), is a big believer that “the next wave of computing innovation will be driven by crypto.” His definition of “Web 3” (a term more commonly styled as “Web3”) revolves around … Read more

Prominent Apple blogger John Gruber kicked off a firestorm on Twitter when he suggested recently that web developers “should not be trying to create a ‘native like app’ in a web browser.” Gruber said this in relation to increasing criticism of Apple for not allowing competing browser engines on its iOS platform. By forcing browser … Read more

Decoupled architectures have become a defining trend of this era of web development. We’ve seen it most noticeably with the rise of the Jamstack architecture, exemplified by companies like Netlify and Gatsby. But it’s also been a key theme in the large ecosystem of websites built using the open source WordPress content management system (CMS). … Read more

Last week Automattic, the company behind WordPress, continued its recent run of acquisitions by snapping up a React framework company called Frontity. While the acquisition itself was primarily an “acquihire”, since Frontity’s technology is open source, it also revealed something about Automattic’s plans for WordPress going forward. It’s clear that Automattic now sees WordPress as … Read more

Last week I looked at potential developer platforms for the metaverse, a 3D version of the web that has been much discussed this year. Although Facebook ignited the latest round of hype about the metaverse last month, another company, Nvidia, is much further along in its development of an actual metaverse platform. Nvidia’s Omniverse has … Read more

Last month Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlined his vision for the metaverse, a 3D version of the web, in an interview with The Verge. We’ve had a flurry of metaverse news from other tech companies this year — everything from Microsoft’s “enterprise metaverse” to Nvidia’s “metaverse for engineers.” So the metaverse is the latest catchphrase … Read more

We’re about to transition from the cloud computing era to the “sky computing” era, according to a pair of distinguished computer science professors at University of California Berkeley, Ion Stoica and Scott Shenker. As the name suggests, sky computing is a layer above cloud platforms — and its goal is to enable interoperability between clouds. … Read more

One of the most interesting internet trends of 2021 is the experimentation going on with decentralized technologies. We’re seeing a blossoming of open source, decentralized internet applications — many of them attempting to provide alternatives to big tech products. Privacy breaches, misinformation, black box algorithms, lack of user control — these are just some of … Read more

Aether is one of many new applications in the decentralized social media ecosystem. It’s like a peer-to-peer version of Reddit, with similar news aggregation and community discussion features. Interestingly, Aether is not only decentralizing the technical aspects of its product, but the user governance too. In other words, the users of Aether get to govern … Read more

When Twitter began imposing limits on its API for third-party developers in 2010, it sent a strong signal to developers that centralized platforms weren’t to be trusted. That same year, Diaspora — a kind of decentralized Facebook — was founded by four New York students. Later, in 2017, a federated social network named Mastodon experienced … Read more

The decentralized web has been a promising technology for many years now — and I’m not talking about cryptocurrencies. If anything, the hype and financial speculation around cryptocurrencies has distracted from the very real technical progress being made in decentralization. It’s even starting to be baked into web standards, as we shall explore in this … Read more