What’s new in web - YouTube
Nice to see Clearleft’s browser support policy get a shoutout from Rachel during her Google IO talk.
Link tags: google
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Pluralistic: With Great Power Came No Responsibility (26 Feb 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
The web is open, apps are closed. The majority of web users have installed an ad blocker (which is also a privacy blocker). But no one installs an ad blocker for an app, because it’s a felony to distribute that tool, because you have to reverse-engineer the app to make it. An app is just a website wrapped in enough IP so that the company that made it can send you to prison if you dare to modify it so that it serves your interests rather than theirs.
google webfonts helper
Google Fonts only lets you download .ttf files meaning that if you want to self-host your fonts (and you should), you have to first convert them to .woff2 files.
Luckily this tool has been online for over a decade, doing what Google Fonts should be doing by default.
First Impressions of the Pixel 9 Pro | Whatever
At this point, it really does seem like “AI” is “bullshit you don’t need or is done better in other ways, but we’ve just spent literally billions on this so we really need you to use it, even though it’s nowhere as good as what we were already doing,” and everything else is just unsexy functionality that makes what you do marginally easier or better. I’m sorry we live in a world where enshittification is being marketed as The Hot And Sexy Thing, but just because we’re in that world, doesn’t mean you have to accept it.
A new path for Privacy Sandbox on the web
This is disgusting, if unsurprising: Google aren’t going to deprecate third-party cookies after all.
Make no mistake, Chrome is not a user agent. It is an agent for the behavioural advertising industry.
Google Now Defaults to Not Indexing Your Content - Vincent Schmalbach
Google search is no friend to the indie web:
Well-known brands often see most of their content indexed, while small or unknown bloggers face much stricter selectivity.
There was life before Google search. There will be life after Google search.
Information that you might search for may never appear in Google’s results. Not because it doesn’t exist, but because Google has chosen not to include it.
Robin Rendle — Instability
The whole point of the web is that we’re not supposed to be dependent on any one company or person or community to make it all work and the only reason why we trusted Google is because the analytics money flowed in our direction. Now that it doesn’t, the whole internet feels unstable. As if all these websites and publishers had set up shop perilously on the edge of an active volcano.
But that instability was always there.
Should I remove this blog from Google Search?・The Jolly Teapot
There was life before Google search. There will be life after Google search.
Google is not a huge source of traffic and visibility. I get most of my visits from RSS readers, other people’s links including fellow bloggers, or websites like Hacker News. It’s hard to tell at this point since I don’t track anything, but that’s an educated guess.
Removing my website from Google would have very little impact, so I was wondering if I should just do it.
How to Turn Off AI Overview in Google and Set “Web” as Default
I don’t use Google Search myself—I use Duck Duck Go—but if you do, here’s how to avoid the slop.
Facing reality, whether it’s about Apple or the EU, is a core requirement for good management – Baldur Bjarnason
The EU is not the FCC. I wish every American tech pundit would read and digest this explainer before writing their thinkpieces.
It’s very common for US punditry to completely misunderstand the EU and analyse it as if it were a US political entity – imagining that its actions are driven by the same political and social dynamics as a protectionist industry within the US.
Browsers Are Weird Right Now – Tyler Sticka
‘Sfunny, I’d been meaning to write a blog post on exactly this topic, but Tyler says it all …and that’s before Apple’s scandalous shenanigans.
Baseline’s evolution on MDN | MDN Blog
These updated definitions makes sense to me:
- Newly available. The feature is marked as interoperable from the day the last core browser implements it. It marks the moment when developers can start getting excited and learning about a feature.
- Widely available. The feature is marked as having wider support thirty months or 2.5 years later. It marks the moment when it’s safe to start using a feature without explicit cross-browser compatibility knowledge.
Hixie’s Natural Log: Reflecting on 18 years at Google
On leaving the company, Hixie compares the Google of old to what it has become today:
Google’s culture eroded. Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision. Transparency evaporated. Where previously I would eagerly attend every company-wide meeting to learn what was happening, I found myself now able to predict the answers executives would give word for word. Today, I don’t know anyone at Google who could explain what Google’s vision is. Morale is at an all-time low. If you talk to therapists in the bay area, they will tell you all their Google clients are unhappy with Google.
Everything about SEO is obnoxious – Chris Coyier
No argument from me.
How Google made the world go viral - The Verge
On the sad state of Google search today:
How did a site that captured the imagination of the internet and fundamentally changed the way we communicate turn into a burned-out Walmart at the edge of town?
Pulling my site from Google over AI training – Tracy Durnell
I’m not down with Google swallowing everything posted on the internet to train their generative AI models.
A principled approach to evolving choice and control for web content
This would mean a lot more if it happened before the wholesale harvesting of everyone’s work.
But I’m sure Google will put a mighty fine lock on that stable door that the horse bolted from.
How Google Reader died — and why the web misses it more than ever - The Verge
Wanna get angry all over again?
(Now do Geocities!)