browser

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 Google Developers Q&A in which Blink engineering leads and the PM answer the community's top questions about the new Blink rendering engine forked from WebKit.

Sam Stephenson's RailsConf 2016 talk on Turbolinks 5, showing how small teams can ship fast Rails apps in the browser and hybrid iOS and Android apps sharing one set of web views.

Morten Rand-Hendriksen's WordCamp Europe 2017 talk presents CSS Grid Layout as a native two-dimensional layout system that changes how web pages are structured, including responsive layouts independent of source order. It was given as browsers began shipping support.

Pete Hunt explains why React's virtual DOM was built, how it compares with databinding-style systems, and what it means for future browser technology. Recorded at FutureJS 2014 in Barcelona.

Jake Archibald argues that URLs are nearly impossible for humans to interpret, especially for security. He walks through what browsers do about it, including highlighting the registrable domain, and floats a possible better design.

Photopea founder Ivan Kutskir talks about developing a free browser-based photo editor, one of the most complex JavaScript programs ever written, and the web technologies behind it.

Dan Callahan presents Mozilla Persona, a decentralized, cross-browser authentication system that removes site passwords, at PyCon 2013. He explains how the protocol works and how to add it to a Python site.

Philip Roberts explains the JavaScript event loop, call stack, callbacks and asynchronous behavior with live visualizations using a tool he built. It demystifies terms like non-blocking and single-threaded.

Svelte creator Rich Harris explains moving reactivity into the compiler and language rather than tracking state at runtime, with a history of spreadsheets as reactive systems and comparisons to React.

Pete Hunt of Facebook and Instagram introduces React at JSConf EU 2013 and explains its design principles. He argues that separating templates from logic only separates technologies, not concerns, and makes the case for components.

Dan Abramov live-codes hot reloading with time-travel debugging at React Europe 2015, debuting Redux and its devtools. The slides themselves are driven by application state.

Brian Lonsdorf explains why Underscore.js falls short as a functional programming library, then introduces currying, composition and point-free style in JavaScript. He argues for data-last argument ordering.

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, talks at Curry On 2015 about user-focused language design. He explains the principles behind Elm and how to make a functional, typed language as approachable as JavaScript.

Evan Czaplicki's Strange Loop 2014 talk surveys the many formulations of functional reactive programming and how they relate historically and theoretically. It then shows how Elm's variant enables hot-swapping and its time-traveling debugger.

Pete Hunt of Facebook and Instagram presents React at JSConf.Asia 2013, explaining its design principles and why they seemed shocking at first. He argues that React separates concerns rather than technologies, and the talk also announces the React Chrome developer tools.

Steven Wittens' JSConf US 2013 talk on drawing with WebGL, using animated visuals to walk through vectors, matrices and the rendering pipeline. Despite the title, it works as a visual primer on the linear algebra behind 3D graphics.

Cheng Lou's react-europe 2016 talk lays out a mental framework for thinking about abstraction levels in JavaScript tooling, from Angular and Grunt to Webpack and React. It uses that framework to reason about the cost of abstractions and how to choose between competing solutions.

Facebook engineers explain why they abandoned the traditional MVC paradigm for a more functional architecture, introducing Flux and React. They use the unread-message-count bug as a case study of the problems of bidirectional data flow at scale.

Lee Byron of Facebook explains how persistent immutable data structures work and how to use them in React apps with Immutable.js. He covers memoization benefits and avoiding coupling through shared mutable state.

A Netflix JavaScript talk on using Reactive Extensions (Rx) for asynchronous UI code. It covers Observables, composing events such as drag and drop, and sequencing Ajax requests.

Alex Russell's Chrome Dev Summit 2016 talk on building web experiences that work on slow, flaky networks and low-power devices. It argues developers should focus on the performance of real-world mobile hardware rather than desktop machines.

A Channel 9 conversation recorded at GOTO 2012 between Anders Hejlsberg (TypeScript) and Lars Bak (Dart). They discuss the two languages and different approaches to making JavaScript development safer, including runtime type checking.

Jordan Walke, creator of React, talks at ReasonConf 2019 about the ideas behind ReasonML and how it extends React's programming model with OCaml. He also discusses why familiar syntax matters.

James Long's dotJS 2019 talk on how CRDTs enable local-first apps and how simple they can be to implement. He shows how to use them to build robust offline-capable frontends.

Node.js creator Ryan Dahl discusses ten design mistakes he made in Node, including package.json, npm, and module resolution. The talk sets out the motivations behind his later project, Deno.

Chris McCord's ElixirConf 2018 keynote introduces Phoenix LiveView, which renders HTML on the server and updates the page over websockets. It includes a demo showing that latency is not the bottleneck one might expect.

David Guillot describes how his team replaced a two-year-old React UI of their SaaS product with Django templates and htmx in a couple of months. The talk gives concrete indicators on code size, performance and team impact.

A JSConf 2014 talk visually breaking down algorithms behind everyday UI patterns, such as dropdown menus that vanish when the mouse drifts and picking the nearest target to the cursor. It shows how these are implemented in JavaScript.

Yaron Minsky of Jane Street shows how the OCaml Incremental library lets trading UIs express data transformations that are easy to read and efficient on streaming data. It includes a live table demo.