Journalism

Instagram Lite, a version of the Instagram app that weighs only 2MB — compared to 30MB for the full iOS and Android apps — was relaunched on Android earlier this month. Curiously, Instagram decided to ditch the previous Progressive Web App (PWA) version of Instagram Lite and re-build it as an Android app using an … Read more

Just over a year ago, Microsoft debuted a new web browser that was designed to replace its long-running — and often controversial — Internet Explorer product. Called Microsoft Edge, the new browser is notable for being based on Google’s open source browser engine Chromium. But despite abandoning most of its proprietary browser software, Microsoft is … Read more

What React is to JavaScript user interface components, LitElement and lit-html are to web components. Well, in the sense that they’re both libraries that help developers build and deploy components for websites and web applications. But there are some key differences between the two sets of technologies; along with questions about interoperability. LitElement and lit-html … Read more

Web Components is an emerging web standard that allows developers to create reusable custom elements for their web pages and apps. Having only recently gained support in the leading browsers, the usage of web components isn’t as well documented as (for example) React components — which have received a lot of attention in recent years. … Read more

Web development in 2021 is dominated by frameworks — JavaScript frameworks like Next.js and Angular, CSS frameworks like Tailwind and Materialize, JAMstack frameworks like Next.js and Gatsby, and many others. But one new company, Yax.com, is advocating for a “no-framework” web standards approach to web development. Upon closer inspection, it offers a refreshing “back to … Read more

Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson recently spoke at a virtual meetup of the Chicago Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Hansson, who has been at the forefront of web development for the past 15 years, talked about the state of JavaScript frameworks today, frontend development trends he’s tracking, and a new framework he helped … Read more

Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) became a trending social media term last week, for all the wrong reasons. When the right-wing microblogging app, Parler, was pulled from the Google and Apple app stores, its users immediately began to search for a browser-based version. Some of them searched specifically for a PWA version, which led to this … Read more

Adobe Flash, the once hugely popular multimedia software platform, was discontinued at the end of 2020 — to a mostly positive reaction across social media and the developer ecosystem. Even though many of us look back fondly at the visual creativity unleashed by Flash in the 1990s, it was clear from the early 2000s that … Read more

As we kick-start 2021 in application and web development, two trends seem destined to continue their rapid growth: serverless and JavaScript development. The outlook for Jamstack, the third trend I covered in last week’s year-in-review post, is less clear — but it too will likely gather momentum. The key driver in internet development now is … Read more

In the kingdom of Cloud Native, the reign of Kubernetes continued throughout 2020. But while there was no challenger to the throne — and the King was sometimes proclaimed to be “boring” — there were some interesting developments further up the royal stack. Serverless, that upstart knight of the realm who hath declared that infrastructure … Read more

Did you know that Amazon leads more than 1,200 open source projects on GitHub? Neither did I until I spoke last week with Matt Asay, the Head of Open Source Strategy and Marketing at Amazon Web Services (AWS). That number, which I got from the Open Source at AWS web page, was confirmed by Asay … Read more

At the two-day Chrome Dev Summit last week, we got a glimpse into Google’s web technology priorities heading into 2021. While much of the event focused on the Chrome browser’s continued improvements to performance, security and privacy — which were positioned as three key pillars — it also became clear that Google is making good … Read more

In the first week of AWS re:Invent 2020, a three-week virtual event by Amazon Web Services (AWS), the database announcements came thick and fast. A common theme soon emerged: AWS really wants to help you migrate off Microsoft and Oracle legacy database systems, and onto its range of “purpose-built” cloud databases. AWS also doubled down … Read more

Honeycomb is sponsoring The New Stack’s coverage of Kubecon+CloudNativeCon North America 2020. In a KubeCon + CloudNativeCon presentation this week, IBM Cloud’s Doug Davis asked: what happened to the promise of cloud computing? The promise for developers, he explained, was that “the complexities of the infrastructure would be abstracted away from us and we could … Read more

At its recent virtual event, Next.js — a leading open source JavaScript framework built on top of the React library — announced that it would be improving what Next.js creator Guillermo Rauch, in his keynote address, called “one of the most important primitives of the web: the image.” Basically, a core tag of the web’s … Read more