Notices by Alex Russell (slightlyoff@toot.cafe)

How broken is today's frontend culture?

@fugueish points out that the median *mobile* page is now larger than a copy of DOOM (2.6 MiB vs. 2.48 MiB), the P75 page is larger than 2 DOOMs, and the P90 mobile page is 4.5x the size of DOOM:

https://httparchive.org/reports/page-weight

@tedmielczarek learned a lot here, but mostly that I'm not interested in this snack.

Lovely NY friends: if someone comes to your door with a petition to recall Schumer and Jeffries, say *yes*:

https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/11/10/congress/jeffries-backs-schumer-amid-fierce-democratic-backlash-to-shutdown-deal-00644705

ICYMI, servers got *good*, which means that if your data is smaller than ~8TB (yes, TB), it's not "big data", it's "thing you can grep in memory in near real time"

It's gratifying to see the ripples of work from a decade ago continue to improve things as good-spirited folks integrate those APIs into their thinking:

https://htmx.org/essays/the-fetchening/

@whitequark Them's fighting words.

@whitequark What did I just read.

If you haven't already, figure out where your local No Kings event is next weekend and make a plan. Inflatable frog costume totally optional:

https://www.nokings.org/

At a critical moment, the tech press are failing to connect the dots between Apple and Google's craven capitulations and the authoritarianism they have nurtured within their own ecosystems. Apple is now corrosive to democracy itself, and we have to get smarter about the way these forces interact:

https://infrequently.org/2025/10/the-app-store-was-always-authoritarian/

/cc @owa @pluralistic

There's no good billionaire, because all people are flawed. Money flows into the cracks and breaks what little social conditioning made people decent, if imperfect. So think of not having billionaires as a worthy societal goal *for their sake too*.

This tool from Firefox DevRel is *awesome*, and if you care about how much progress the web platform delivers *please* go rank your interests:

https://interop-rank.jakearchibald.com/

If you're using the phrase "builder" in lieu of "engineer", you're signaling lowered aspirations for quality, usability, and responsiveness. And you know what? I'm inclined to take you at your word(s).

@anildash This is a pean to the Jobs of lore, not the Jobs of yore, but I hope it turns some heads.

It's that time of year again: time to support @owa's call to end secret vetoes of Interop proposals. Web developers should at least know *who* is pushing cuts to the web's most effective "TODO" list, if not why. Show your support (politely) here:

https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop/issues/888

Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic) quipped: *"An 'app' is just a web-page skinned in enough IP to make it a crime to add an ad-blocker to it."*,[1] but the native rot goes deeper. Remember when FB rebuffed Apple's offer it couldn't refuse?[2]

Knock me over with a feather, the "privacy wars" were all for show:

https://infrequently.org/2025/08/apple-vs-fb-kayfabe/

[1]: https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/12/market-failure/
[2]: https://www.phonearena.com/news/apple-facebook-almost-worked-together_id141910

At the end of the day, Apple is more anti-web than it will ever be pro-user, which is why stuff like this keeps happening:

https://infrequently.org/2025/08/apple-vs-fb-kayfabe/

Instead of taking you to your browser, FB's IABs load pages in a knock-off browser which doesn't respect your privacy preferences (nevermind a11y customisations, etc.).

Extensions? Gone. And because FB has code on every top site, that's enough.

FB's tracking is so pervasive in modern web pages that it doesn't need to exfiltrate data from the IAB to track you. It just needs to keep you away from your *real* browser, where it might not be able to join up clicks/taps.

IABs are, for FB's purposes, "ad-blocker blockers". Cheat codes for the enterprising panopticon proprietor. You installed a browser, then added an anti-tracking tool to it? And you tapped "do not track"?

Apple sold you up the river. And the mechanism is as simple as it is disgusting.

...and it's the proprietary APIs from app stores that make it so hard to escape one ecosystem for another. The entire point of the exercise is to subvert interoperability, and to do *that*, it's necessary to keep the anchor apps happy. Which is why Apple and Google let FB spy on you via the web.

Apple isn't defending your privacy, it's trying to retreat just far enough into the hedges that it hopes you don't notice it dangling FB and TikTok out to take the fall.

All of this is facilitated by Apple and Google. It's their SDKs and policies that make this not only possible, but wildly profitable for FB (and TikTok, etc. etc.). Denying you browser choice keeps the big app vendors in the app store, which helps Apple and Google corral others into app stores.