Updated entries

Google’s unfair performance advantage in Chrome

Update (2022-01-02): Chrome now offers third-party partner search engines to opt-in to preconnect. It’s not documented publicly, but the source code is available publicly. This option is not open to non-partner search engines, however. Currently, only Google Search has opted in to using the preconnection behavior (liek…

Microsoft adds Ogg, Theora, and Vorbis media formats to Windows 10

Article updated at 2021-12-28.

Chrome is right to remove the `webRequest` extension API

Update (2021-12-23): Chrome has expanded the declerativeNetRequest API to support regular expressions (regex) and redirects This change should handle many common use-cases for extensions.

How to detect machine-translated webpages

Article updated at 2021-12-21.

Windows now blocks Edge browser competitors from opening links

Update (2021-12-13): Microsoft has backported this change to Windows 10. You can uninstall Windows Update KB5007262 to revert the change. This work-around will only work until the next cumulative update is released.

I’ve turned off on the comment section

Update (2021-12-08): I’ve reopened the comment section. I get too many emails about my articles these days. A quarter of the emails are complaints about the lack of a comment system. I need a place to respond to questions publicly without referring people to Reddit, Twitter, or Hacker News. Look for the new comment but…

EdgeDeflector enforces your default browser setting in Windows

Update (2021-11-10): EdgeDeflector does not work in Windows 11 build 22494 and newer! Microsoft made changes to Windows to block it. It still works in older Windows versions.

Fix the “Your File History drive was disconnected for too long” error

Update (2021-10-11): If you keep experiencing the same issue over and over again, you may want to switch to backing up to a network share instead of a disk or partition. You can use your existing disk or partition as a “local network share”, and Windows will stop complaining about this issue.

Brave reduces the page load performance cost of its adblocker

Update (2021-09-27): An earlier versiom of this article published the wrong figure for the load event timings. (The figure wasn’t corrected for network overhead.) The mistake has been corrected.

A technical and privacy review of Cloudflare Web Analytics

Update (2021-09-16): Cloudflare has finally begun using the all the collected performance data in its Web Analytics dashboard. It has focused on translating the raw measurements into the Google Core Web Vitals. You can learn more about it in the announcement blog post.

What domain name to use for your home network

Article updated at 2021-08-16.

The abysmal state of backup on Android

Update (2021-08-14): The Helium app is no longer available on the Google Play Store.