I am in Vancouver, Canada right now and yesterday night the Super VanJS meetup attracted around 160 people to come and see Rebecca Murphy, Robert Nyman, Jim Andrews, Preet Jassi and little me talk about all things JavaScript.

My own talk was the last of the day and was an ad-libbed introduction to a few of the things I coded lately wrapped in a request to reclaim HTML5 as JavaScript developers. The audio of the talk is available on archive.org:

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The links to the demos I talked about are available here and here is a gist of what was covered:

I started by explaining my confusion about Supervan JS as Supervan is a terrible movie from the 70s with very interesting cover and back sleeve art and even more awesome posters.

I then continued to explain my unhappiness about the decline of HTML5. With this I meant that there are lots of marketing demos of HTML5 using a lot of technologies that are actually not HTML5 or use it in a very Flash-intro-ish way. I showed just how annoying it is to play Angry Birds online and how the recent Cut the Rope port looks much smoother. I also pointed out that none of them really use the web to their advantage by for example have feedback mechanisms or allow for level editing.

In essence I wanted the audience to think about bringing HTML5 into the “boring” world of day to day deliveries instead of just games and showcase sites. For this, I showed a few code examples and explained how they can benefit from HTML5 features.

I showed how to move an element to the current mouse position and how you can make this faster by using CSS translate instead of left and top using translateZ(0) to trigger hardware acceleration even when you don’t go 3D. I then showed that you can move things smoothly by adding CSS3 transitions instead of writing a JavaScript animation.

I continued introducing the 3D CSS maker, a tool to play with CSS 3D translation and animation that generates code for you.

The blue beanie maker was next showing how you can use drag and drop to put an image into the browser and manipulate it with Canvas.

The image cropping with canvas demo shows how you can enhance the functionality of browsers without having to write and install extensions. In it you can get a bookmarklet to crop any image on the web in the browser by double-clicking (in Webkit and Opera) or with a context menu (in Firefox).

I then continued to show a demo of less obtrusive video overlays showing how you can add hints for overlays on videos by reading data- attributes in the HTML and reading the current time of the video.

The last demo was a simple game with a an HTML twist that showed using canvas for game animation, touch, orientation and keyboard events to control a game paddle and how to read the necessary game data from HTML and thus making it easy to rebrand and change the game.

I ended with a plea to try some of these things out and play with all the cool APIs and hooks browsers provide us with these days instead of relying on frameworks and libraries for everything or build for one single environment. HTML5 is there for developers, if we allow only marketing people to play with it we do a disservice to ourselves.

I will follow up this with in-depth posts on hacks.mozilla.org and we also shot videos of the talks which will (quality permitting as there were some issues) be released soon.

All in all I had a great time, got lots of good questions and enjoyed the event a lot. Seeing that Vancouver is only a 2 hour flight from the valley there is a big chance I will be back soon.

Canvas is a new HTML5 element which creates a digital “drawing board.” A web developer can use one of these drawing boards along with some JavaScript to create simple shapes, graphs, animations, interactive games, and more. Recently, eighteen creative minds showed us just how powerful and important Canvas is by sharing their work in the November Dev Derby.

Once again, this was a fairly close race, so join us in congratulating the winners:

1st Place: Bouncy and the Apple – Canvas by nklsrh
2nd Place: Rob in Soundland by michal.b
3rd Place: Vandalism by tuxie

Runners-up:
Jump the Wall by avnishkgaur
Cirplosion by Awesome

Thanks to everyone who participated in the November and December Dev Derbies! We love your demos. In the days ahead, we’ll be rounding up the votes on December’s IndexedDB submissions. Now’s the time to get your January Orientation demos built and submitted. Can’t wait to give them a spin (or a tilt).

REMINDER: We recently updated our Dev Derby rules to allow developers to participate in multiple contests until they win 1st place. That means if you’ve submitted awesome demos and come up short in the past, you still have a chance to win that top spot in future Dev Derbies… so keep those demos coming!

Browsers need to overhaul their privacy settings to account for things like localStorage and bring control back to the user. In the days of cookies it was relatively simple for a user to wipe any identifiers (excluding IP address) from their browser. Simply clear cookies.

Firefox has two basic abilities, you can clear cookies, or you can browse and delete cookies. That’s great but not terribly clear that there’s more than cookies.

Chrome as far as I know has no cookie browser like Firefox has, but (edit: Erunno notes in the comments you can via chrome://settings/cookies) explicitly lets you “Delete cookies and other site and plug-in data”. That’s pretty good.

Today, I think Safari’s UI is the closest to perfect. Each hostname shows exactly what it has. My only gripe is that Safari doesn’t let you see what’s there. That’s a “power-user” feature however and I think it does an adequate job regardless.

Websites use more than just cookies these days. I discussed this a little over a year ago. The reason evercookie is controversial is that browsers don’t quite give users the level of control (real or perceived) that they expect for objects other than cookies.

Here is another use case for why this is needed. Google Analytics is used on perhaps half the internet’s websites. It sets a cookie every time. That means 230 bytes added to every http request for a lot of websites. Google could switch to localStorage and free up that 230 bytes. While they technically could do this, in practice, this could create a firestorm of attacks against them. The problem is it would be spun as Google trying to evade cookie deletion and and a privacy violation. The same storm that evercookie created. I suspect that’s why it hasn’t been done to date. The truth is the Google Analytics team has done a lot for improving performance including making it entirely async. But this move would be controversial.

It’s no longer about “cookies”, but “user data”.

Browser wars is a popular (and retro!) topic these days. In this post I’ll discuss another kind of browser war that I’m afraid all browsers are at risk of losing.

One side-effect of a richer web experience with html5, Javascript and CSS is that it becomes increasingly harder for web browsers to stop bad web design practices for the benefit of the user. Firefox is known for putting the user’s needs first and pioneered mainstream use of features designed to make the web experience better for users – the pop-up blocker is perhaps the most notable example.

Features like the pop-up blocker were not designed for web developers — they were designed completely in the interest of users, who were fed up with annoying ads that popped up over and under the web page you were currently visiting. This effectively forced web designers to adjust their practices and keep the users’ interests more prominently in mind. I think this is a wonderful example of how web browsers can change the web for the better. Before the pop-up blocker, web designers were dictating how their web sites should behave, and users had no other choice but to put up with it.

There are of course many other examples of when browser features have helped tame annoying web design practices, such as scrolling text in status bars, disabling the context menu when right-clicking, and blocking third-party cookies — the general theme is that the browser balances the sometimes bad urges of web developers and designers with the actual needs of the user. And as a result, the web becomes a better place. Mozilla has its own spin on this that captures the essence of Firefox: Firefox answers to no one but you.

The yellow pop-up blocker info bar in Firefox. A rare sight these days.

Today, however, you don’t see the little pop-up icon  in the location bar of Firefox very often anymore. This is because “true” pop-ups, (in the traditional/technical sense) are no longer common. It used to be that, in order to display a pop-up, web developers had to use Javascript methods like window.open to tell the browser that it wants a new window to be open so the (usually annoying) ad could be shown.

Back in 2004, when Firefox was first launched, window.open was the way of displaying pop-ups. These kinds of pop-ups are trivial for Firefox to detect, since the web page creates a separate browser window for the ad (this usually happens when a page loads, or at some other event which is straightforward enough for a browser to determine that it isn’t explicitly requested by the user).

Today, most modern web sites have become smarter and use more sophisticated technologies to display pop-up ads embedded within the web page triggering the ad. In fact, a quick anecdotal survey shows that most large, international websites have completely stopped using the traditional pop-ups. You can still find them on smaller or more local websites though (for example, Swedish news sites like aftonbladet.se are typically a year or two behind the more recent web page practices used on websites from the US in general, and the Valley in particular). The original pop-up blocking implementation certainly still matters, but its relevance is decreasing.

New websites use all sorts of clever (and highly annoying) tricks to make sure their ads are not missed by anyone:

• Inline pop-ups — these behave similar to the traditional pop-ups, but the ad content isn’t actually displayed in a separate window. Instead, the ad is embedded in the web page itself. From a technological point of view, a browser is then unable to distinguish the ad from the rest of the web page, so it can’t block it.
• Hover ads — this is similar to inline pop-ups, but taken to an increasingly more annoying level: here, the ad doesn’t just block a particular area of the web page, it follows along on your screen as you scroll down on the page — often with a smooth movement to give the impression that it’s actually hovering over the page. It’s like the ad is trying to say “I’m here! Look, I’m still here!”
• Splash screen ads (I just made this term up) –  these are by far the most annoying ads and are commonly seen on sites like di.se and e24.se (two popular finance websites in Sweden). This is like an ad saying: “Look, I’m not going to let you read the web page until you’ve paid attention to ME!” Web designers do this by overlaying the ad so it completely covers the content of the page (alternatively, it redirects you to a separate page). If you pay close attention, you will see a tiny link to get to the page you actually wanted to visit, but the web designer has usually made it the smallest link on the entire page — despite the fact it’s the link you are most likely going to want to click. These type of web pages clearly answer to no one but the ad provider — certainly not to you.
• Video ads — as videos are getting more and more mainstream, the most common practice today by content providers is to show an ad before playing the video clip you actually requested. This is similar to those “important messages” you see when inserting some DVDs, and just like those messages, you can’t skip these ads. You simply have no choice but to watch the entire thing. (Some content providers add a small clock countdown in the corner to at least let you know how long you have to put up with watching the ad — it’s clear that they’re aware of the inconvenience for the user here.)

All of these types of web ads have one thing in common: it’s next to impossible for web browsers to block them. These ads are, from a technical point of view, integral parts of the web page itself, and as such they’re indistinguishable from the “good” content on the page.

Where do we go from here?

Web browsers make at least a bit of an effort to block advertisement today with their aged pop-up blocker feature, but it’s also clear that they are not able to block all attempts of displaying advertisement on the web. (And should they? Unless we can create a world where advertisement is not just generally unwanted, but also not necessary to make the online economy spin, I would say we probably shouldn’t try to block them all. But that’s a much deeper discussion than I’m aiming for in this blog post.)

More importantly, however, web browsers are no longer stopping bad design practices. Showing an ad as a splash overlay covering the entire page and blocking the user from seeing the actual content of the page is exactly the kind of thing that Firefox effectively stopped in 2004 — but so far there is no solution in place in any web browser on the market to stop the new pop-up behavior that is at least as bad as the traditional pop-ups.

Taking a step back, what is the role of the browser in this new world where web pages are becoming more like web applications that live a life on their own terms? How can we ensure that the browser still acts as a balance that puts the user first? Of course, I don’t have the answers to these broad questions, but it’s definitely something I think must be discussed.