Article Roundup - December 21, 2018

Microsoft Edge: Making the web better through more open source collaboration
Microsoft announced that they will be contributing to Chromium, the open source project behind Google Chrome, and will bring Microsoft Edge “to a Chromium-compatible web platform”. I read that as they will begin using the guts of Chromium for many features of Microsoft Edge. This sounds like great news, no more waiting for months or years for Microsoft to implement features other browsers have. Not everyone is happy though, this article was posted on Mozilla’s blog denouncing the move. It’s an interesting issue to discuss, but I don’t see Microsoft reversing course at this point. Here is a more complete summary of the news/issue.

Testing Privacy-Preserving Telemetry with Prio
Most browsers collect some information about users, how they use the browser and any possible issues. The challenge is balancing getting the information they need to fix bugs and add features but not violate people’s privacy. Mozilla is looking to switch up how they collect telemetry data in Firefox and to move to use Prio. Prio was created in Stanford University’s Computer Science department and is available in the public domain and preserves privacy while still providing the needed data.

A Netflix Web Performance Case Study – Dev Channel – Medium
Sometimes the old ways are best. Netflix was able to decrease loading and time-to-interactive by 50% for their landing page. They removed React from the frontend and switched to vanilla JavaScript, along with some other tweaks like prefetching.

Announcing GitLab Serverless
GitLab is releasing a new service on December 22 to help automate Serverless deployments. GitLab Serverless enables deploying serverless functions to Google’s Knative Kubernetes clusters.