The post author mentions in the comments he doesn't like the politics of the Mullvad and Brave creators.
Brave creator Brendan Eich is also the creator of JavaScript, which powers most of the web today. Eich donated to Republicans and pro-marriage causes, yes.
The author thinks that should disqualify his tooling from the open indie web.
I find that kind of political gatekeeping fit for a bygone and dead era. It’s a point of view that says we must cut off from our lives everyone who disagrees with our politics, even in the slightest.
Commercialized sites like Reddit are on the decline in part because of over-zealous mods driven by politics who ban and silence dissent. Facebook and pre-acquisition Twitter were also focused on silencing dissent; so much that they banned a sitting US President.
But the indie web of the ’90s? It was filled with free speech and live-and-let-live libertarians. Reddit originally was a bastion of free speech, and its founders were libertarian-leaning. Their vision has been polluted by the commercialization and big media takeover of Reddit..
The indie web is not likely to revive for many reasons. But it certainly will not revive with the kind of political gatekeeping the blog author is advocating.
Same. I've been running a personal blog for over 20 years. Last year, I couldn't find any links to my blog on Google. Went to Google Search Console to find all my links are "Crawled by not indexed", with no reason given.
Your post is touching on a key question: why write a Windows-specific app?
I'm a developer who has built and published several apps. I want the biggest possible audience for those apps. Why would I limit those apps to Windows? (Or even to any single platform/OS?)
Web apps work everywhere. The web has grown increasingly powerful and capable. Why would I invest in a technology that can only run on a single OS? Doesn't make sense.
Just build for the web. You can package web apps for all the major app stores using PWABuilder[0], no Electron needed. Just fast, lightweight apps distributed by app stores and accessible from the web.
Increasingly, there just aren't enough incentives to write native apps.
This isn't a criticism of the article, but rather a tangential observation about why so many people turn to the web instead of using native toolkits to build apps, and why so many of native toolkits feel uninspired and lacking any real innovation.
If I choose to build an app using web tech, I get:
- Universal distribution
- No download and install process
- No "please wait while we update this"
- Users can easily share my app
- Users can link to individual pages within my app
- Users get autofill for forms and passwords and credit cards
- Users can block ads
- Users can scale and zoom my content
- Users can find text on any page in my app
- No "SmartScan couldn't verify if this app is safe" because it wasn't signed with a cert.
- A clearer security model: web apps prompt the user for access to e.g. microphone, camera, or secure disk locations. Native apps can kinda do whatever they want.
Why would I give up all those things to write a native app? A knee-jerk answer is often "performance", but honestly, most web apps load faster than their native counterparts these days.
Another common answer is app store distribution, but web apps can now be published to the major app stores without Electron or other frameworks. Google Play and Microsoft Store both support PWAs, and iOS App Store supports web apps via web view.
There are some scenarios where a native app is warranted. For example, hooking into some native component or OS API; e.g. HealthKit on iOS. But for many apps, the web is good enough.
More than a small kerfuffle. A supply chain attack by a state actor, believed to be China, resulted in undetected malicious code executions from June 2025 to December 2025.
Yes, I concede the US is partly responsible for Iran's economic collapse. What a wonderful outcome should it result in the Ayatollahs losing their grip on power.
Iran's government is an Islamic fundamentalist dictatorship. It has imprisoned and killed protestors[0], it hung over 700 political dissidents last year[1], it has imprisoned and executed people who have left Islam[2], it has beaten and imprisoned women who refused to wear hijab[3]. As for LGBT rights, Equaldex lists Iran 190th out of 197 nations[4]. Time Magazine reports[5] that some 30,000 people were killed in January for protesting the government.
Even the parent article reports first-hand that the Iranian regime is now labelling protesters as terrorists and calls for their arrests.
This, combined with the drought and economic collapse, has pushed the Iranian people towards revolt.
This is not the fault of Israel, America, Trump, Greenland, white people, or any other boogeyman. It's a feature of Iranian government, and the Iranian people want change.
Jake Archibald has an excellent post about progressive image rendering, including some metrics on JPEG XL compared to AVIF[0].
> "I was also surprised to see that, in Safari, JPEG XL takes 150% longer (as in 2.5x) to decode vs an equivalent AVIF. That's 17ms longer on my M4 Pro. Apple hardware tends to be high-end, but this could still be significant. This isn't related to progressive rendering; the decoder is just slow. There's some suggestion that the Apple implementation is running on a single core, so maybe there's room for improvement.
> JPEG XL support in Safari actually comes from the underlying OS rather than the browser. My guess is that Apple is considering using JPEG XL for iPhone photo storage rather than HEIC, and JPEG XL's inclusion in the browser is a bit of an afterthought. I'm just guessing though.
> The implementation that was in Chromium behind a flag did support progressive rendering to some degree, but it didn't render anything until ~60 kB (39% of the file). The rendering is similar to the initial JPEG rendering above, but takes much more image data to get there. This is a weakness in the decoder rather than the format itself. I'll dive into what JPEG XL is capable of shortly.
> I also tested the performance of the old behind-a-flag Chromium JPEG XL decoder, and it's over 500% slower (6x) to decode than AVIF. The old behind-a-flag Firefox JPEG XL decoder is about as slow as the Safari decoder. It's not fair to judge the performance of experimental unreleased things, but I was kinda hoping one of these would suggest that the Safari implementation was an outlier.
> I thought that "fast decoding" was one of the selling points of JPEG XL over AVIF, but now I'm not so sure.
> We have a Rust implementation of JPEG XL underway in Firefox, but performance needs to get a lot better before we can land it."
What a remarkably misleading copypasta you have there.
Rav Kook was not Israel's first rabbi. He died in 1935 - a full 18 years before Israel's rebirth.
Nor was Kook the founder of Zionism. The belief that Jews should be able to return to our historic homeland has been a belief and conviction for religious and secular Jews for at least two millenia.
That you can find individuals, such as a R. Friedman (not even an Israeli!) with extreme views should not surprise anyone. Nutpicking is easy. Jews, like any other group, have fools and extremists in their rank. Israel is a plural democracy with 2 million Arabs, 7 million Jews, thousands of Christians and Druze, all with representation in the multiparty Knesset.
Hamas's evil, however, is not nutpicking. Hamas' founding charter in its opening paragraphs calls for the destruction of Israel and its conquest of the land in the name of Islam. It is genuinely intrinsic to the organization.
> "Has PWA become popular on unencumbered platforms like Android or Windows? No."
Yes, PWAs have become popular on these platforms. I work for Microsoft on the Microsoft Store (app store on Windows) and I work with the Edge team, and I work on PWABuilder.com, which publishes PWAs to app stores. Some of the most popular apps in the Microsoft Store are PWAs: Netflix, TikTok, Adobe Creative Cloud, Disney+, and many others.
To view the list of PWAs in the Store, on a Windows box you can run ms-windows-store://assoc/?Tags=AppExtension-microsoft.store.edgePWA
I run PWABuilder.com as well, and I can tell you that many, many PWAs get published to the Google Play Store, including some very popular ones.
Gaza (Hamas), the West Bank (Fatah), and Lebanon (Hezbollah) are the reason this technology is needed in the first place: violent religious fundamentalists firing cheap rockets at Jewish cities because of religious hatred. Over 16,000 rocket attacks on Israel last year alone.
Thanks to the Iron Dome technology, nearly 90% of such attacks were intercepted, saving thousands of lives.
This new Iron Beam technology is more precise and cheaper, and will likely save even more lives.
Israel saw over 16,000 rocket attacks last year from fundamentalist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and Yemen. The Iron Dome intercepted ~90% of them, resulting in thousands of lives saved.
Iron Beam is the newer incarnation of this technology that uses lasers to intercept incoming rockets and drones with precision and much lower cost. Wonderful technology.
"An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.” Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,
“Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”"
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/judahgabriel; my proof: https://keybase.io/judahgabriel/sigs/Z-ewmKHcUx-DwrxenW4vnXxbuTytXGlVv7l3GUnnnlw ]