In this Week's Episode
Ember ships Glimmer into Canary, Senongo Akpem explores non-linear narratives, Web Pages break the 2mb limit, Firefox 38 is released, Chrome gets a developer channel on Android, and programmatic copy/paste is coming to Firefox.
GLIMMER OF HOPE
Ember’s new rendering engine, Glimmer, is now in Canary. Inspired by React’s Virtual DOM, Glimmer attempts to improve upon things by only diffing bindings instead of the entire DOM. According to the team, this dramatically improves performance on benchmarks like dbmonster. You can follow this guide to learn more about migrating to Glimmer and Ember 2.0.
http://emberjs.com/blog/2015/05/05/glimmer-merging.html
http://emberjs.com/blog/2015/05/10/run-up-to-two-oh.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o12-90Dm-Qs
FOLLOWING THREADS
Let’s explore storytelling for the collective intelligence. Senongo Akpem, creator of the Pixel Fable project, describes the process of creating non-linear stories utilizing modern technology. He codifies and demonstrates several examples including extra narratives, like An Idea Lives On, parallel narratives, featured in project Moon, and micro narratives, illustrated by his own site, Lost Nigeria.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7GGZwt5yVU
http://unahistoriaquedalavuelta.com/en/
http://lostnigeria.com/air-travel/
BREAKING THE SCALES
Do websites need a diet? Scott Jehl tweets that the avg. webpage now weighs over 2mb, with 62% of that coming from images. Projects like what does my site cost demonstrate, this can translate to serious money for users. New standards like picture and srcset can help combat the problem, but it’s up to developers to start leveraging them.
https://twitter.com/scottjehl/status/595827049136267266
http://httparchive.org/interesting.php?a=All&l=Apr%2015%202015#bytesperpage
http://whatdoesmysitecost.com/test/150416_09_71875497c6009dd92716f8d9aa5f3af6
http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/responsive/picture-element/
https://www.chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/popularity#Picture
FIREFOX 38 RELEASED
Firefox 38 hits stable this past week and with it comes a number of improvements. Best highlighted on the Mozilla Hacks blog, the new release contains support for both picture and img srcset, web sockets in web workers, BroadcastChannel to post message to all open tabs, and some bonus devtools goodies. You can check out the developer release notes over on MDN.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/38.0/releasenotes/
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/05/trainspotting-firefox-38/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/05/14/responsive-images-done-right-guide-picture-srcset/
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Workers_API
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Releases/38
DEV ON ANDROID
Chrome on Android now has a Dev channel. Detailed on the Chromium blog, the new dev channel allows developers to test their sites using an early version of Chrome to find bugs and try out cutting edge features. The new channel is updated at least every week and is already available on the Google Play Store.
https://twitter.com/addyosmani/status/593461414922170369
http://blog.chromium.org/2015/04/dev-channel-for-chrome-on-android.html
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chrome.dev
COPY PASTA
Programmatic copy and paste is coming to Firefox. A recent intent to implement and ship thread indicates that Firefox will add support for copy and paste via the execCommand method in response to a user action. Similar behavior is already supported in Chrome 43, IE 10, and Opera 29. To learn more about copy and paste you can check out this article on HTML 5 Rocks.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1012662
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.platform/oWhmLMvGAD0/3eXWSRjJAZsJ
http://updates.html5rocks.com/2015/04/cut-and-copy-commands
Let us know what you think on Twitter #LazyWebShow
For more news on the Web, check out these resources: JavaScript Weekly: http://javascriptweekly.com/
Open Web Platform Daily: http://webplatformdaily.org/
HTML5 Weekly: http://html5weekly.com/
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