Rick Byers

Back in 2024 MDN surveyed web developers on the ability for web apps to be a replacement for native apps. Here's what they said: github.com/web-platform...

I wholeheartedly agree with Philip. Long live the web indeed!

Nom-EU immigration in Brussels is awful! My 3 hour wait is apparently now typical in the morning rush. I could have saved an hour (and at least 2 productive hours) by flying to Amsterdam instead and taking the train!

This is the best explanation of the interplay of specs, tests, and implementations that I've read. The point of both specs and tests is interoperable implementations, but that doesn't mean that implementations are always right when they agree.

Software is becoming intensely personal and disposable. An app built with AI just for me and my use case is becoming "better" than the best generic software. The web is designed to handle this explosive scaling and so is poised to be the dominant platform for the future of personalized software!

🎙️ New Episode of Igalia Chats Join the party and navigate the Origin Trial Google's Johnny Stenback and @rbyers.net join @meyerweb.com and @bkardell.com to chat about Origin Trials www.igalia.com/chats/origin...

I finally know what caused me to have to cancel my BlinkOn 4 trip four years ago!

I'm so impressed and inspired by the team relentlessly pushing and innovating to keep Chrome users safe from vulnerabilities: blog.google/security/chr...

🎙️ Check out Bruce Lawson’s interview with Alex Moore, executive director and co-founder of Open Web Advocacy. They explore OWA’s history, why it exists, and what it’s fighting for: a better, more competitive web 🌐✊ open-web-advocacy.org/blog/bruce-l...

Hey Claude, feel free to just tell me you're pissed off that I'm micromanaging you and getting in your way, I won't fire you I promise. 😂

Oh oh, I seem to have become addicted to Claude tokens! Probably late to the party, but I keep upping my spend limit. I'm at $400 so far this week 😬. This is because I thought I could build my own version of something that cost $2800 to buy, we'll see if I end up saving money or not 😊.

I am a negligent husband! I just discovered my wife's MacBook was running MacOS 10 and so stuck on Chrome 128 and missing 2 years of security patches! If even I fail to keep my family safe online we might be doing something wrong 😕.

Vibe coded a demo of the new navigator.cpuPerformance API in Chromium: rbyers.github.io/cpu-performa.... It's a small thing (returns just 0-4), but for some powerful web apps I think it'll be super useful. Details: github.com/WICG/cpu-per...

CSS Quake (cssquake.com) - no canvas just HTML/CSS using a cool library called PolyCSS (polycss.com). 😀 Playing through the first level brought back a lot of memories. I think I was one of the first to reverse engineer the PAK file format and build an editor days after the game came out.

Given how Chromium and WebKit are always vying for the top spot in Speedometer on MacOS, it's really striking how big the gap is on iOS! And we haven't even really tried to optimize performance for that platform yet! IMHO this is what you should expect to see when there's a lack of competition!

A great analysis! The punch lines: "The trend is clear: for every 100 milliseconds slower a store loads, conversion tends to be about 3.5% lower." "For every 32 milliseconds slower a store responds to interactions, conversion tends to drop by about 1.5%."

I think part of the phenomena here is that it is easy to predict things will fail: most things fail. So, stop energy is much cheaper to produce, because you would be right 99% of the time. Against-everything-for-nothing is a comfortable stance to take, but long term it is the 1% that move forward.

It’s fair to say that the V8 javascript engine runs on billions of devices today. And if you apply to this position on my team, you might get to work on it! Talk about impact!

An interesting lightning talk at BlinkOn about a little experiment @rbyers.net did -- 3 minutes to watch and share your thoughts! Very curious to hear them! youtu.be/b_R3o3VASjc?...

I'm excited about FedCM ambient UI. Balancing tough tradeoffs is one of the hardest things we do in Chrome and the only way to do it well is to experiment heavily and collect user feedback.

Another day, another step down the path of our devices prioritizing their manufacturer's interests over the interests of the device owners. mashable.com/article/appl...

Chrome is announcing that they are moving into a two-week release cycle! Exciting bc the web needs to move quickly- resolving bug fixes, feature improvements, etc. It goes along with devops principles of shipping smaller, more frequent releases for stability developer.chrome.com/blog/chrome-...

How will agentic coding tools impact app platform choices? Lovable says: "web apps cost 40-60% less than native development and reach the market 50-70% faster." lovable.dev/guides/nativ...

6 years and 300+ experiments later, I've concluded that sequencing all the viruses going through my house is actually slightly useful, while still wildly impractical of course! lab.rbyers.ca/essays/20260...

Wow, I am constantly impressed by Google Antigravity and Gemini 3.5 pro. I used it to build a whole blog website, including totally custom Tweet archive, in just a few hours of work! Eg. see lab.rbyers.ca/posts/2024. Code at github.com/Rbyers/lab-b....

My talk at @henrihelvetica.bsky.social's SPDY meetup in Toronto is live: www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq2c.... It's pretty rough and unpolished, but I included some fun stories of the history of performance work in Chrome which you likely can't find anywhere else. Slides: docs.google.com/presentation...

That feeling when a family member shares photos like this 🤬😭. I spent much of Sunday formatting and reinstalling Windows, and formulating a credit card transaction dispute.

I hosted a number of visiting global Chrome leads in Waterloo this week. Several had never seen snow quite like we had today, so of course we had to take them tobogganing. Looks like we'll be doing Chrome leads summits in Canada every winter now 😂.

The Chrome Identity and Payments team in Waterloo Canada is hiring several early/mid-career developers. I'm on the lookout for exceptional candidates with a passion for browsers and/or the identity/payments space! www.linkedin.com/posts/rick-b...

Progressive enhancement is really important for enabling the best possible user experiences for everyone!

✨ Exciting proposal alert: the CPU Performance API. This proposal will add `navigator.cpuPerformance`, a value that measures the broad performance capability of the CPU. That way, we can scale up/down our animations to make sure everyone has the best experience possible for their device. 😄

It was fun to be part of this, thanks Henri! I wasn't able to join the livestream for the rest today but really looking forward to listening to it over the next couple days!