browser wars

James Mickens's 2015 Harvard colloquium argues that browsers are bloated and insecure because feature races trump clean interface design. He presents a cleaner, more secure browser architecture (Atlantis) with a much smaller API surface.

In a long live-coding session, Andreas Kling works on making the Cookie Clicker game playable in the Ladybird browser from SerenityOS. He tracks down bugs in the browser engine and fixes them.

Street interviews of over 50 passersby in Times Square, asked what a browser is. Many answers show people confuse browsers with search engines or the internet.

A three-minute side-by-side comparison of scenes from Star Wars (1977) and the WWII film The Dam Busters (1955). It shows how closely the Death Star trench run mirrors the earlier film.

Jake Archibald's JSConf.Asia 2018 talk "In the Loop" explains the browser event loop, covering tasks, microtasks, requestAnimationFrame, and how rendering interleaves with JavaScript. It uses visual walkthroughs to show why code runs in surprising orders and why setTimeout fixes are unreliable.

Jack Moffitt presents Servo, an experimental browser engine written in Rust and designed to be parallel at every level, using multiple cores, the GPU, fork-join concurrency and SIMD. The talk covers motivations, architecture and plans for the project.

The Browser Company's CTO explains how the team is building the Arc browser for Windows using Swift. It covers the de-risking work and why they believe it is feasible.

A video essay on how the editors of Star Wars: A New Hope recut and rearranged the footage to rescue the film. It walks through specific changes that improved pacing and drama.

TechAltar's eight-minute video arguing that Chrome is becoming the new Internet Explorer as Google leverages its browser position. It covers anti-competitive behavior toward other browsers like Firefox and Edge and the role of Chromium.

Jenny Nicholson's roughly four-hour review of her two-night stay on Disney's Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser immersive hotel. She goes through the experience, its story and production, and why it failed.

A roughly three-hour Lex Fridman podcast conversation with Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScript and co-founder of Mozilla and Brave. It covers JavaScript's rushed creation at Netscape, the browser wars, Firefox and Mozilla, and Brave's privacy approach.

A roughly ten-minute scene from the movie The Pentagon Wars showing how the Bradley Fighting Vehicle's requirements ballooned through committee demands into a compromised design. It is a satirical dramatization of military procurement.

The first of seven parts of RedLetterMedia's long review of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. It argues that the film's central flaw is its characters and the lack of audience connection.

An excerpt from a Bay Area Rust meetup on Servo's WebRender, which renders CSS display lists on the GPU at very high frame rates. It explains the approach and demos rendering at around 500 FPS.

Google's 2010 Chrome ad filmed web page rendering with a high-speed camera, comparing it with a potato gun, a pirate ship and lightning. It presented browser speed as Chrome's key selling point.

A demo excerpt from a 2016 Bay Area Rust meetup showing Servo's WebRender drawing CSS on the GPU at very high frame rates. It presents the promise of GPU-based browser rendering.

An Opera browser promotional video from 2010 in which a browser races a potato in a tongue-in-cheek speed test.

A short overview of Tabs Outliner, a Chrome extension that shows browser tabs and windows as a nestable tree. It demonstrates organizing, saving and restoring tabs.

The 1998 HBO dark comedy based on Col. James Burton's book about the 17-year development of the Bradley fighting vehicle. It satirizes how military procurement goes wrong.

A two-minute Microsoft ad for Internet Explorer 10 in which a karaoke-style song addresses people who hate the browser. It is part of the "browser you loved to hate" campaign.

An SNL sketch in which Kylo Ren goes undercover as a radar technician named Matt at Starkiller Base, parodying the show Undercover Boss.

A talk by Yuri Iozzelli at a WebAssembly meetup on CheerpX, an x86 virtual machine running in the browser. It uses a JIT compiler that emits WebAssembly at runtime to run real native applications. It covers the architecture and demos such as porting a multiplayer C++ game.

Jack Moffitt presents the architecture of Servo, Mozilla's experimental browser engine written in Rust, focusing on parallelism across cores, GPUs and SIMD and the safety properties gained from Rust.

Smalltalk pioneer Dan Ingalls presents the Lively Kernel at JSConf US 2012, a live, direct-manipulation programming environment running in the browser. He shows drag-and-drop building of live objects on the web.

Andy Bell's 2022 talk on hinting the browser rather than micromanaging it, using progressive enhancement, CSS layout, fluid type and space, and modern CSS to build resilient front-ends.

Pat Wyatt, a veteran game programmer who worked at Blizzard and ArenaNet, speaks at HandmadeCon 2015 in a conversation with Casey Muratori. He discusses network code and architecture in games he worked on, including mistakes on Diablo and the success of Guild Wars.

A short clip from The Empire Strikes Back in which Darth Vader tells Lando 'I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further.'

An Asianometry documentary-style video on the rise and collapse of China's dockless bike-share boom. It covers the startups, the heavy subsidies and the price wars.

Google's 2008 press announcement of its open source browser, Chrome, featuring Sundar Pichai among the presenters.

A Dutch parody commercial from the Groen Brothers for a supposed Star Wars style mosquito defense system. It mimics the style of infomercials with laser-armed anti-mosquito technology.

A one-minute Robot Chicken stop-motion sketch where Darth Vader keeps altering his deal with Lando Calrissian.

A spoof commercial by the Groen Brothers for a Star Wars-style laser defense system against mosquitoes.

MegaLag investigates PayPal's Honey browser extension, showing how it swaps affiliate attribution and was promoted by large YouTube influencers. It includes technical demonstrations of the affiliate tag replacement in browser dev tools.

A FRONTLINE documentary on whether efforts to fix plastic pollution made it worse. It looks at the battle over plastics and recycling and how little plastic is actually recycled.

The official Kubernetes documentary, part 1, tells how a handful of Google engineers, inspired by Docker's success, built a container orchestrator. It covers the internal resistance to open source and the competition of the container orchestrator wars.

Mozilla's short demo of Unreal Engine 3 running in Firefox, ported by Mozilla and Epic in four days using Emscripten and asm.js.

A 2018 tutorial explaining uBlock Origin's advanced user mode, including how to block scripts and use the dynamic filtering settings. It positions the extension as a replacement for tools like uMatrix.

Paul Irish's Chrome Dev Summit 2016 talk surveys the state of the art in Chrome DevTools debugging. It covers workspaces, diffs, CSS coverage, Node debugging, editor improvements and Lighthouse.

Morten Rand-Hendriksen argues that CSS Grid changes web layout, showing how to place content in cells independent of HTML source order and reshape layouts with media queries. It makes the case for using Grid now that browsers support it.

A one-minute 2012 Microsoft television commercial for Internet Explorer 9, set to Alex Clare's 'Too Close'. It pitches a 'more beautiful web' with fast one-click access to favorite sites.