This reading list is courtesy of Vivaldi browser, who pay me decent money to fight for a better web and don’t moan at me for reading all this stuff. We’ve just released Vivaldi 7.7 for desktop and mobile, with features requested by our users instead of planet-burning plagiarism-filled Generative AI.
- The Performance Inequality Gap, 2026 – “median mobile page is now 70 times larger than the total storage of the computer that landed men on the moon … The result is a web that increasingly punishes the poor for their bad luck while paying developers huge salaries to deliver business-undermining results” writes Big Al Russell
- requestPictureInPicture() (PiP / PinP) does not work in Home Screen Web Apps (PWA) on iOS/iPadOS – “Multiple developers have independently reported this issue over the past four years … This significantly degrades the value proposition of Home Screen web apps compared to the same experience in Safari on the same device, PWAs on other platforms where PiP works in standalone mode”. It’s almost as if Apple want to hobble PWAs just enough to make them unviable, but functional enough to claim to regulators that there is a distribution channel outside the App Store and the Apple Tax!
- Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out – “what most people don’t understand is that GPT likely knows more about users than Google.” Hooray.
- How we’re bringing AI image verification to the Gemini app – “We are increasing content transparency by introducing the ability to verify if an image was generated or edited by Google AI right in the Gemini app.”
- Where Do the Children Play? On the need for a world without us -“Western children are almost comically sheltered. But in digital space, they’re entirely beyond our command; and increasingly, that’s where children spend most of their time. You don’t need me to tell you about the dire consequences of that shift. Why do our children spend more time in Fortnite than forests? Usually, we blame the change on tech companies … I want to suggest an alternative: digital space is the only place left where children can grow up without us”
- Remove Windows Ai – “The current 25H2 build of Windows 11 and future builds will include increasingly more AI features and components. This script aims to remove ALL of these features to improve user experience, privacy and security.”
- Use overscroll-behavior: contain to prevent a page from scrolling while a <dialog> is open says Bramus, and he’s right.
- The world needs social sovereignty – “By making the news and truth contingent on advertising budgets we’ve created an environment where any narrative can win, as long as the storyteller is willing to pay … The promise of the fediverse is the promise of a better way forward: free from ads and manipulative algorithms”
- Block all AI browsers for the foreseeable future: Gartner
- Understanding aria-live timing: a two-layer model by Russ Weakley
- So Long and Thanks for All the Applets – So farewell, Java Applets: “The entire java.applet package has been removed from JDK 26, which will release in March 2026.”
- Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer – a WordPress plugin designed to combat link rot. It automatically scans your post contentto detect outbound links, checks the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for an archived version and creates a snapshot if one isn’t available. When a linked page disappears, the plugin helps preserve your user experience by redirecting visitors to a reliable archived version.
- A big list of things I disable in WordPress and nickable code by Tezza
- SVG Cickjacking – “Clickjacking is a classic attack that consists of covering up an iframe of some other website in an attempt to trick the user into unintentionally interacting with it. It works great if you need to trick someone into pressing a button or two, but for anything more complicated it’s kind of unrealistic. I’ve discovered a new technique that turns classic clickjacking on its head and enables the creation of complex interactive clickjacking attacks, as well as multiple forms of data exfiltration.”
- Top Lobbyists 2025 – Huge congrats to Apple, ACT/ The App Association, AWS, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, who are named in The Hill’s “Top lobbyists of 2025”, along with other loved and trusted brands like Philip Morris, ExxonMobil, Boeing, Occidental Petroleum, Lockheed Martin, and McDonalds.
- Masonry: Things You Won’t Need A Library For Anymore – a nice overview of things that you don’t need JS for, if you’ve been out of Web Platform World for more than 15 mins (eg, in Framework Limbo or Full Stack Purgatory), and a look at CSS Masonry from glamorous Patrick “Edge” Brosset
- Amazon Data Center Linked to Cluster of Rare Cancers – Meanwhile, UK government: “we will take an ambitious approach to building out the UK’s AI data centre capacity. However, our ambitions are not deliverable unless we peel back regulatory frictions”
- One day, AI might be better than you at surfing the web. That day isn’t today – The Verge takes 5 different “AI” browsers through some basic tasks: identifying important emails, summarising and compiling info, transcribing a video, buying some shoes.
- Web Monetization is Still Inching Along, But Still Too Difficult
- WebGPU is now supported in major browsers – “This significant milestone results from years of extensive collaborative development by the W3C GPU for the Web Working Group, with contributions from companies including Apple, Google, Intel, Microsoft, and Mozilla.”
- EU opens antitrust investigation into Meta’s new policy regarding AI providers’ access to WhatsApp – “As a result of the new policy, competing AI providers may be blocked from reaching their customers through WhatsApp. On the other hand, Meta’s own AI service ‘Meta AI’ would remain accessible to users on the platform.”
- Apple to focus on ‘quality and underlying performance’ with iOS 27 next year: report – Rumours that Apple might be about to give a shit about users again
- Who wins when we filter the open web through an opaque system? asks glamorous Hidde de Vries
- The Authoritarian Stack: How Tech Billionaires Are Building a Post-Democratic America — And Why Europe Is Next – “Silicon Valley isn’t building apps anymore. It’s building empires.”
- A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size – Anthropic: “as few as 250 malicious documents can produce a “backdoor” vulnerability in a large language model—regardless of model size or training data volume.”
- Nvidia Replaces Enron On S&P 500 – Data is the “new oil”, you say?
- Meta allegedly buried research showing its products are harming users – “A court filing suggests the company knew that deactivating Facebook lessens depression, anxiety and loneliness”. Some high-tar unfiltered Philip Morris tactics going on here.
- The strangest Excel functions you’ll never use – Starring BAHTTEXT which “converts a number into Thai Baht words”
- Kohler’s $600/month toilet camera uses your turds to train AI – “Kohler Can Access Data and Pictures from Toilet Camera It Describes as ‘End-to-End Encrypted'”
- Sales of AI-enabled teddy bear suspended after it gave advice on BDSM sex and where to find knives
Have a splendid Xmas/ Hannukah/ Saturnalia/ Feast of Saint Taneesha and the Immaculate Rollerskates.