Tech News - Web Development

At Drupal Europe 2018, Dries Buytaert, the founder and lead developer of the Drupal content management system announced that Drupal 9 will be released in 2020. Yesterday, he shared a much detailed timeline for Drupal 9, according to which it is planned to release on June 3, 2020. One of the biggest dependency of Drupal 8 is Symfony 3 and it is scheduled to reach its end-of-life by November 21. This means that no security bugs in Symfony 3 will be fixed and people have to move to Drupal 9 for better support and security. Going by the plan, the site owners will have at least one year to upgrade from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9. Drupal 9 will not have a separate code base, rather the team is adding new functionalities in Drupal 8 as backward-compatible code and experimental features. Once they are sure that these features are stable, any old functionalities will be deprecated. One of the most notable update will be, support for Symfony 4 or 5 in Drupal 9. Since, Symfony 5 is not yet released the scope of its changes will not be clear to the Drupal team. They are focusing on running Drupal 8 with Symfony 4. The final goal is to make Drupal 8 work with Symfony 3, 4 or 5 so that any issues encountered can be fixed before they start requiring Symfony 4 or 5 in Drupal 9. As Drupal 9 is being build in Drupal 8, this will make things much easier for every stakeholder. Drupal core contributors will just have to remove the deprecated functionalities and upgrade the dependencies. For site owners it will be much easier to upgrade to Drupal 9 than it was to upgrade to Drupal 8. Dries Buytaert in his post said, “Drupal 9 will simply be the last version of Drupal 8, with its deprecations removed. This means we will not introduce new, backwards-compatibility breaking APIs or features in Drupal 9 except for our dependency updates. As long as modules and themes stay up-to-date with the latest Drupal 8 APIs, the upgrade to Drupal 9 should be easy. Therefore, we believe that a 12- to 18-month upgrade period should suffice.” You can read the full announcement on Drupal's website. WordPress 5.0 (Bebo) released with improvements in design, theme and more 5 things to consider when developing an eCommerce website Introduction to WordPress Plugin

Yesterday, Google announced that they are introducing the public class fields in V8 7.2 and Chrome 72 and will be shipping the private class fields soon. These new class fields syntax were introduced by Daniel Ehrenberg and Jeff Morrison in a proposal to ECMA TC39 called Class field declarations for JavaScript, which is in stage 3 now. As per the proposal, declaring fields up-front will ensure that the instances go through fewer state transitions and the class definitions will become more self-documenting. Public class fields The public class fields syntax aims to simplify the class definition. This will also eliminate the need of constructor just to define some fields. Here’s how you can implement a class as per this syntax: class IncreasingCounter {  _count = 0;  get value() {    console.log('Getting the current value!');    return this._count;  }  increment() {    this._count++;  } } Private class fields A field in JavaScript is marked as private using _. This makes the field hidden by convention, but in fact, it is fully public. To make the fields private we can mark them with #, which means that they will not be accessible outside of the class body. class IncreasingCounter {  #count = 0;  get value() {    console.log('Getting the current value!');    return this.#count;  }  increment() {    this.#count++;  } } Though in JavaScript, there is a need for some kind of mechanism to provide private or controlled access beyond closures, this proposal seems very sloppy as some developers believe. One of the Hacker News users said, “This syntax is...odd. It is not expressive and comes off as a "language hack." The only people who would understand it are those who happen to stumble on this article.“ Read more in detail on Google Developers and also check out the proposal on GitHub. 4 key findings from The State of JavaScript 2018 developer survey Why use JavaScript for machine learning? V8 JavaScript Engine releases version 6.9!

Yesterday, the Facebook Open Source team announced that they will no longer be able to contribute to the open source development of the Nuclide extension, Atom IDE, and other associated repos. https://twitter.com/fbOpenSource/status/1072928679695548416 Nuclide is a code editor built as a suite of features on top of the Atom text editor to provide hackability and the support of an active community. Facebook developed Nuclide to provide a first-class unified development environment for React Native, Hack, and Flow projects. Nuclide was first created for Facebook’s internal engineers and then was later open sourced in the hopes that others could also benefit from it too. In their announcement, Facebook told that this decision was made because they were not able to pay much attention to the project. They added, “However, our team has not been able to give this project the amount of attention and responsiveness it deserves and as a result, we’ve made the difficult decision to retire Nuclide and associated repos, such as the Atom-IDE packages.” Though they are not going to contribute to the Nuclide open source project, Facebook will continue to use it internally: https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1072930703065501696 The latest release, that is, Nuclide 0.366 will be the last release by Facebook. They have made its source code available in the Facebook Open Source Archive. The language and debugging services will still be supported in Atom and other compatible IDEs such as Microsoft Visual Studio Code or the clients listed on Langserver.org. Users on Hacker News are speculating that maybe this is the time to adopt VSCode and the main reason is that it provides good integration with TypeScript. Here’s what a user said, “A shame, in an ideal world there would be the benefit of outside contributions that made less internal work needed, so overall would be a win for Facebook. But probably this is related to Atom itself being taken over by VSCode, the number of users (and maybe contributors) appears to be going down.” Read the official announcement by Facebook on Nuclide’s website. Facebook’s artificial intelligence research team, FAIR, turns five. But what are its biggest accomplishments? Facebook AI research and NYU school of medicine announces new open-source AI models and MRI dataset as part of their FastMRI project Facebook plans to change its algorithm to demote “borderline content” that promotes misinformation, and hate speech on the platform

After releasing Firefox 63 in October this year, Mozilla announced the availability of Firefox 64, yesterday. This release comes with support for multiple tab selection, WebVR 1.1 on macOS, and improvements in privacy features. Mozilla has also released Firefox 65 beta with support for WebP, Flexbox Inspector tool, and more. Following are some of the updates Firefox 64 comes with: Support for multiple tab selection Firefox 64 introduces multiple tab selection to make managing windows with many open tabs easier. You can use this feature by simply holding Control (Windows, Linux) or Command (macOS) and click on tabs to select them. After selecting the tab, click and drag to move the tabs as a group, either within a given window or out into a new window. Developer Tools improvements When you hover over text, the Accessibility Inspector will now display the text contrast ratios in the pop-up infobar. Once an element is selected by the Accessibility Inspector, the highlighters show the AA contrast ratio. The infobar will also indicate whether or not the text meets WCAG 2.0 Level AA or AAA accessibility guidelines for minimum contrast. Responsive Design Mode now supports saving device selection between session. JavaScript improvements The well-formed JSON.stringify proposal by TC39 (Technical Committee 39) has been implemented. This will ensure that JSON.stringify does not returns ill-formed Unicode strings. Another improvement is that now the proxied functions can be passed to Function.prototype.toString .call(). New Web API highlights The prefix has been removed from the mozRequestFullScreen API and it is now just the FullScreen API. Also, the requestFullscreen and exitFullscreen APIs now return promises that resolve once the browser finishes transitioning between states. Firefox 64 now supports WebVR 1.1 on macOS. To receive queued worker messages even before page loading has completed, pages with Service Workers can now use the startMessages() API. Better protection with new and updated privacy features Firefox 64 will not trust TLS certificates issued by Symantec. Referrer-Policy now applies to requests initiated by CSS. The non-standard navigator.buidID property will now return a fixed timestamp, 20181001000000, to prevent its potential abuse for fingerprinting Firefox 65 beta release Along with Firefox 64, Mozilla has also released Firefox 65 beta, the stable version of which is planned to be released on Jan 29, 2019. Following are few of the updates introduced in this release: You can now change the display language for the Firefox application in the Options page. WebP, an image format that provides both lossy and lossless compression, is supported. Users can now install Firefox on Windows using an MSI installer. Handoff is supported in Firefox for macOS to continue browsing from your iOS device to your Mac. Tabs can be switched by scrolling in the tab bar in Linux. A new Flexbox inspector tool is added to detect and highlight Flexbox containers and debug Flex items' sizes. Support is added for the Storage Access API on desktop platforms. See the full list of updates on Mozilla’s website. Firefox 63.0 is released for desktop and Android, aiming to give users “greater control over technology that can track them on the web” Mozilla introduces new Firefox Test Pilot experiments: Price Wise and Email tabs

Yesterday, Jean-Baptiste Kempf, VideoLAN president announced dav1d 0.1.0. dav1d is an AV1 decoder from VideoLAN, the same company that offers the popular VLC Media Player. dav1d was first presented in Video Developer Days 2018. The first usable version of dav1d, dav1d 0.1.0 is dubbed as Gazelle. In this release users can use the API, ship the decoder, and expect to receive some support from the developers. New features in dav1d 0.1.0 Since the initial launch of dav1d in September 2018 there has been a lot of work done on it: All AV1 features are now supported, even the ones that are less known 8, 10, 12 bits, and all chroma sub-samplings are supported by dav1d 0.1.0 All AV1 files shared to the developers are supported Developers invested a lot of time to make dav1d 0.1.0 quick, while keeping a maintainable binary size. More assembly for desktop is added. Some assembly for ARMv8, and for older machines (SSSE3) has been merged. In single-thread, on ARMv8, dav1d is now as fast as libaom. With more threads it is even faster. Some more SSSE3 code is being merged. So, dav1d will soon be faster than other decoders, on all platforms. There is also some work being done on shaders, potentially to bring the Film Grain feature. Some benchmarks of dav1d 0.1.0 Biggest advantage dav1d has is its high scalability. The performance gets much better as the number of threads goes up. Results from a 32-core AMD Epyc processor: Source: Medium As you can see. aomdec caps out at 8 threads while dav1d keeps on scaling with higher number of threads. Performance on smartphone processors: Source: Medium On multiple cores, 1080p 30fps can be decoded by most high-end chips released in the past two years. On an Apple A12X, 1440p at 60fps and 4K at 30fps is possible! For more benchmarks and complete comparisons, visit the Medium Post. Presenting dav1d, a new lightweight AV1 decoder, by VideoLAN and FFmpeg A new Video-to-Video Synthesis model uses Artificial Intelligence to create photorealistic videos Mozilla shares how AV1, the new open source royalty-free video codec, works

On April 25, this year, GitHub announced that it will be shutting down GitHub Services in order to focus on other areas of the API, such as strengthening GitHub Apps and GraphQL, and improving webhooks. According to GitHub, Webhooks are much easier for both users and GitHub staff to debug on the web because of improved logging. GitHub Services has not supported new features since April 25, 2016, and they have also officially deprecated it on October 1st, 2018. The community stated that this functionality will be removed from GitHub.com on January 31st, 2019. The main intention of GitHub Services was to allow third-party developers to submit code for integrating with their services, but this functionality has been superseded by GitHub Apps and webhooks. Since October 1st, 2018, users are denied from adding GitHub services to any repository on GitHub.com, via the UI or API. Users can, however, continue to edit or delete existing GitHub Services. GitHub services vs. webhooks The key differences between GitHub Services and webhooks include: Configuration: GitHub Services have service-specific configuration options, while webhooks are simply configured by specifying a URL and a set of events. Custom logic: GitHub Services can have custom logic to respond with multiple actions as part of processing a single event, while webhooks have no custom logic. Types of requests: GitHub Services can make HTTP and non-HTTP requests, while webhooks can make HTTP requests only. Brownout for GitHub Services During the week of November 5th, 2018, there was a week-long brownout for GitHub Services. Any GitHub Service installed on a repository did not receive any payloads. Normal GitHub Services operations were resumed at the conclusion of the brownout. The main motivation behind the brownout was to allow GitHub users and integrators to see the places that GitHub Services are still being used and begin working towards migrating away from GitHub Services. However, they decided that a week-long brownout would be too disruptive for everyone. Instead, they plan to do a gradual increase in brownouts until the final blackout date of January 31st, 2019. The community announced that on January 31, 2019, they will permanently stop delivering all installed services' events on GitHub.com. As per the updated deprecation timeline: On December 12th, 2018, GitHub Service deliveries will be suspended for a full 24 hours. On January 7th, 2019, GitHub Services will be suspended for a full 7 days. Following that, regular deliveries will resume January 14th, 2019. Users should ensure that their repositories use newer APIs available for handling events. The following changes have taken place since October 1st, 2018: The "Create a hook" endpoint that accepted a required argument called name, which can be set to web for webhooks, or the name of any valid service. Starting October 1st, this endpoint does not require a name to be provided; if it is, it will only accept web as a valid value. Stricter API validation was enforced on November 1st. The name is no longer necessary as a required argument, and requests sending this value are rejected. To learn more about this deprecation, check out Replacing GitHub Services. GitHub introduces Content Attachments API (beta) Microsoft Connect(); 2018 Azure updates: Azure Pipelines extension for Visual Studio Code, GitHub releases and much more! GitHub acquires Spectrum, a community-centric conversational platform

Last week, Anthony Gore, a Vue Community Partner shared what he calls a "knowledge map" capturing the key areas of professional Vue.js development. This map lists key areas you should target if you are planning to develop Vue apps in 2019. The following diagram shows the developer map: Source: Vue.js Developers Basics of JavaScript and web development Vue.js is an open-source JavaScript framework, which is used for building user interfaces. As it is a JavaScript framework, developers need to have a basic understanding of JavaScript and also of web development. Essential concepts New Vue developers should first focus on the following concepts: Core features: To begin with, you will need to know how to install Vue in a web page and understand the lifecycle of a Vue instance. Also, learn key features of the core such as reactive data, directives, and interpolations. Components: Components are reusable and isolated UI elements. Learn how to declare components and communicate between them through props and events. To build robust and scalable applications you need to learn how to compose with components. Single-page applications (SPAs): In the SPA architecture a single web page acts like a traditional multi-page website. After creating the "pages" as components, you can map them to a unique path with Vue Router, a tool for building SPAs. State management: As your app grows, managing global state becomes difficult and components become bloated with props and event listeners. A design pattern called Flux keeps your data in a predictable and stable central store. The Vuex library helps you implement the Flux architecture in your app. Building real-world Vue apps The concepts in the previous part guide you in building apps that are high performing and efficient, but on the local server. To make your apps production ready you need to learn the following concepts: Project scaffolding: As you start building frequently in Vue, you will have to do the similar configurations and setups in many projects. To make this process easier, we have a tool called Vue CLI for quickly scaffolding single page applications. Full-stack/authenticated apps: Often apps in production will have data-driven user interfaces and the data will be sourced from a secure API. These API will be made with Node, Laravel, Rails, Django or some other server framework. So, you should also learn the common design patterns used to integrate Vue into a full-stack configuration. Testing: If you want your apps to be both maintainable and stable, you need to provide tests. For testing, you can utilize a tool called Vue Test Utils that enables you to create and run tests on isolated components. Optimization: Once your app is deployed on a remote server, it will not have the same speed and efficiency that it showed while testing. You need to optimize the app by using a variety of techniques including server-side rendering, async components, and render functions. Commonly used tools Senior developers should be familiar with the key tools that will be part of almost every Vue-based project. Some of these tools are: Modern JavaScript and Babel: To take advantage of new browser capabilities, you can build your apps using the latest JavaScript standard, ES2015, and proposed features from ES2016 and beyond. For supporting older browsers, you can use the tool named Babel. Its function is to transpile (translate and compile) your modern features into standard features. Webpack: If your code is written across different modules, you can use Webpack to build them into a single file that is readable by a browser. It also works as a build pipeline, allowing you to transform code before it is built and can also be used to optimize your app with a series of plugins. TypeScript: As reported in October, Vue 3 will be written entirely in TypeScript. This implies that to contribute and understand inner workings of Vue you will need to understand TypeScript as well. Important frameworks Many frameworks are available to automate common tasks and save time. Some of the most widely used and important ones are: Nuxt.js: This framework provides various cutting-edge features like component-based routing, server-side rendering, and code splitting out-of-the-box. Vuetify: It is a material framework for Vue, which is based on Google’s Material Design Spec. Vuetify provides an easy-to-remember semantic design to quickly build Vue apps with Material Design layout and styling. NativeScript-Vue: If you want to use Vue for native mobile interfaces, you can do so with the NativeScript-Vue framework. NativeScript is a JavaScript framework for building apps using native user interface components on iOS and Android. NativeScript-Vue is built on top of NativeScript, providing use of Vue syntax and components. After learning all these concepts and tools, you can develop plugins, learn about animations, or more advanced concepts like progressive web apps (PWAs). To know more in detail about the Vue knowledge map, check out Mr. Gore’s post. Introducing Vue Native for building native mobile apps with Vue.js React vs. Vue.js: JavaScript framework wars Evan You shares Vue.js 3.0 updates at VueConf Toronto 2018

Wasmjit team announced last week that you can now run Nginx 1.15.3, a free and open source high-performance HTTP server and reverse proxy, in user-space on all POSIX system. Wasmjit is a small embeddable WebAssembly runtime that can be easily ported to most environments. It primarily targets a Linux kernel module capable of hosting Emscripten-generated WebAssembly modules. It comes equipped with a host environment for running in user-space on POSIX systems. This allows you to run WebAssembly modules without having to run an entire browser. Getting Nginx to run had been a major goal for the wasmjit team ever since its first release in late July. “While it might be convenient to run the same binary on multiple systems without modification (“write once, run anywhere”), this goal was chosen because IO-bound / system call heavy servers to stand to gain the most by running in kernel space. Running FUSE file systems in kernel space is another motivating use case that Wasmjit will soon support”, mentions the wasmjit team. Other future goals for wasmjit includes introduction of an interpreter, rust-runtime for Rust-generated wasm files, Go-runtime for Go-generated wasm files, optimized x86_64 JIT ,arm64 JIT, and macOS kernel module. Wasmjit running nginx has been tested on Linux, OpenBSD, and macOS so far. The complete compiled version of nginx without any modifications and with multi-process capability has been used. All the complex parts of the POSIX API that are needed for proper implementation of Nginx have been used such as signal handling and forking. That being said, Kernel space support still needs working as Emscripten delegates some large APIs such as getaddrinfo() and strftime() to the host implementation. These need to be re-implemented in the kernel. Moreover, kernel space versions of fork(), execve(), and signal handling also need to be implemented. Also, Wasmjit is currently in alpha-level software in development and might lead to unpredictable substances when used in production. Security issues in nginx HTTP/2 implementation expose nginx servers to DoS attack NGINX Hybrid Application Delivery Controller Platform improves API management, manages microservices and much more! Getting Started with Nginx

Last week, the team at Rocket released Rocket 0.4, a web framework for Rust which focuses on usability, security, and performance. With Rocket, it is possible to write secure web applications quickly and without sacrificing flexibility or type safety. Features of Rocket 0.4 Typed URIs Rocket 0.4 comes with uri! macro that helps in building URIs to route in the application in a robust, type-safe, and URI-safe manner. The type or route parameter that is mismatched are caught at compile-time. With the help of Rocket 0.4, changes to the route URIs get reflected in the generated URIs, automatically. ORM agnostic database support. Rocket 0.4 comes with a built-in, ORM-agnostic support for databases. It provides a procedural macro that helps in connecting Rocket application to databases through connection pools. Rocket 0.4 gets databases configured individually through configuration mechanisms like Rocket.toml file or environment variables. Request-local state Rocket 0.4 features request-local state which is local to a given request and is carried along with the request. It gets dropped once the request is completed. Whenever a request is available, a request-local state can be used. Request-local state is cached which lets the stored data to be reused. Request-local state is used for request guards which get invoked multiple times during routing and processing of a single request. Live template reloading In this version of Rocket, when an application is compiled in debug mode, templates automatically get reloaded on getting modified. To view the template changes, one has to simply refresh and there is no need of rebuilding the application. Major Improvements Rocket 0.4 introduces SpaceHelmet that provides a typed interface for HTTP security headers. This release features mountable static-file serving via StaticFiles. With this version of Rocket, cookies can automatically get tracked and propagated by client. This version also introduces revamped query string handling that allows any number of dynamic query segments. Rocket 0.4 comes with transforming data guards that transform incoming data before processing it via an implementation of the FromData::transform() method. This version comes with Template::custom() which helps in customizing template engines including registering filters and helpers. With this version, applications can be launched without a working directory. In Rocket 0.4, the log messages refer to routes by name. A default catcher for 504: Gateway Timeout has been added. All derives, macros, and attributes are individually documented in rocket_codegen. To retrieve paths relative to the configuration file, Rocket 0.4 has added Config::root_relative() The private cookies are now set to Http and are also given an expiration date of 1 week by default. What can be expected from Rocket 0.5? Support for Rust Rocket 0.5 will run and compile on stable versions of the Rust compiler. Asynchronous Request Handling Rocket 0.5 will feature the latest asynchronous version that will support asynchronous request handling. Multipart Form Support The lack of built-in multipart form support makes handling file uploads and other submissions difficult. With Rocket 0.5 it will be easy to handle multipart forms. Stronger CSRF and XSS Protection Rocket 0.5 will protect against CSRF using effective robust techniques. It will come with added support for automatic, browser-based XSS protection. Users have been giving some good feedback on the Rocket 0.4 release and are highly appreciative of the Rocket team for the efforts they have taken. A user commented on HackerNews, “This release isn't just about new features or rewrites. It's about passion for one's work. It's about grit. It's about uncompromising commitment to excellence.” Sergio Benitez, a computer science PhD student at Stanford, has been appreciated a lot for his efforts towards the development of Rocket 0.4. A HackerNews user commented, “While there will ever be only one Sergio in the world, there are many others in the broader Rust community who are signaling many of the same positive qualities.” This release has also been appreciated for its feel which is similar to Flask and for its capability of using code generation and function's type signatures to automatically check the incoming parameters. The fact that the next release will be asynchronous has created a lot of curiosity in the developer community and users are now looking forward to Rocket 0.5. Read more about Rocket 0.4 in the official release notes. Use Rust for web development [Tutorial] Introducing ‘Pivotal Function Service’ (alpha): an open, Kubernetes based, multi-cloud serverless framework for developer workloads Kotlin based framework, Ktor 1.0, released with features like sessions, metrics, call logging and more

Kweb is a library using which you can easily build web applications in the Kotlin programming language. It basically eliminates the separation between browser and server from the programmer’s perspective. This means that events that only manipulate the DOM don't need to do a server-roundtrip. As Kweb is written in Kotlin, users should have some familiarity with the Kotlin and Java ecosystem. Kweb allows you to keep all of the business logic in the server-side and enables the communication with the web browser through efficient websockets. To efficiently handle asynchronicity, it takes advantage of Kotlin’s powerful new coroutines mechanism. It also allows keeping consistent state across client and server by seamlessly conveying events between both. What are the features of Kweb? Makes the barrier between the web server and web browser mostly invisible to the programmer. Minimizes the server-browser chatter and browser rendering overhead. Supports integration with some powerful JavaScript libraries like Semantic, which is a UI framework designed for theming. Allows binding DOM elements in the browser directly to state on the server and automatically update them through the observer and data mapper patterns. Seamlessly integrates with Shoebox, a Kotlin library for persistent data storage that supports views and the observer pattern. Easily add to an existing project. Instantly update your web browser in response to code changes. The Kweb library is distributed via JitPack, a novel package repository for JVM and Android projects. Kweb takes advantage of the fact that in most web apps, logic occurs in the server side and the client can’t be trusted. This library is in its infancy but still works well enough to demonstrate that the approach is practical. You can read more about Kweb on its official website. Kotlin based framework, Ktor 1.0, released with features like sessions, metrics, call logging and more Kotlin 1.3 released with stable coroutines, multiplatform projects and more KotlinConf 2018: Kotlin 1.3 RC out and Kotlin/Native hits beta

Yesterday, the team at WordPress released WordPress 5.0 (also known as Bebo) to give a seamless experience to users in building a website, revamping a blog or writing a code. Major improvements in WordPress 5.0 Blocks make it easier to work with WordPress This new release will let the users insert any type of multimedia in a snap and rearrange as per the content. The content pieces will be arranged in the blocks which makes the process of uploading easy. Design WordPress 5.0 brings improvements to design and content. While building client sites, users can create reusable blocks which lets the clients add new content anytime. Source: Wordpress Theme WordPress 5.0 comes with the new Twenty Nineteen theme that features custom styles for the blocks.The editor styles are used in the themes to enhance them. Twenty Nineteen features ample whitespace, and modern sans-serif headlines along with serif body text. It also uses the system fonts for increasing loading speed.Twenty Nineteen can work for a wide variety of use cases, be it a photo blog, launching a new business, or supporting a non-profit cause. Classic editor plugin The classic editor plugin is very useful as it restores the previous WordPress editor and the Edit Post screen. WordPress 5.0 for developers Blocks let the users to change the content directly but also ensures that the content structure doesn’t get disturbed by accidental code edits. This lets the developer control the output and build polished and semantic markup that could be preserved through edits. WordPress 5.0 offers wide collection of APIs and interface components that creates blocks with intuitive controls for the clients. These APIs speeds up the entire development work but also provides a usable, consistent, and accessible interface to all users. [box type="info" align="" class="" width=""] WordPress 5.0 is named Bebo in homage to the pioneering Cuban jazz musician Bebo Valdés.[/box] This new release has got some negative reactions from the users. Few think that the blocks won’t make things easier but would make the entire process complicated. Also, the release has received heat for having been announced on the wrong timing, as Christmas is almost around and retailers won’t be able to support the process of teaching the process of the new editor to the staff. Also developers will have to fix client sites broken by the new editor on an immediate basis and this might definitely create chaos. One of the users said, “Okay, I've now tested it on my main site, and I can definitely confirm that it's not a good fit for blog posts/news articles. Took me forever to post a simple 300 word article, in part because of all the random spaces it kept removing when I copied in paragraphs from my text editor.” https://twitter.com/MyFunkyTravel/status/1070848742738276352 https://twitter.com/anandnU/status/1070947019735425025 https://twitter.com/niall_flynn/status/1070762641700937728 The new editor is also causing troubles to existing sites and breaking them down. Few of the businesses have planned to move away from WordPress as they are not finding the change convincing. The users also are unhappy with the UI. Gutenberg: A disappointment? Last month’s Gutenberg release was met with disappointment and many ended up- uninstalling it,  with major issue being the lack of Markdown support. Usually before posting an article, a user writes it on Google docs or Microsoft word and then copies it to WordPress. Gutenberg makes it difficult for users to copy paste content as they must create the blocks multiple times given that every element is considered as a block. Also, it is still somewhere  between a post editor and a site builder plugin. One has to rewrite everything on Gutenberg as the blocks are complex. It could work best for large publishers who are comfortable with complicated layouts. Those working on HTML and CSS might find this jump to Gutenberg which is based on Javascript and React framework, very complicated. The idea of Gutenberg getting integrated with Core won’t be accomplished any day sooner as it has to go under a lot of documentation and work is still pending. https://twitter.com/_l3m35_/status/1070768052202033159 But there is still hope for Gutenberg, as the page builder market might appreciate the efforts taken for this editor. It could work well for the ones aiming for static content. Read more about this news on WordPress. Introduction to WordPress Plugin WordPress as a Web Application Framework WordPress Management with WP-CLI  

Earlier this week it was reported that Microsoft is ditching EdgeHTML for Chromium in the Windows 10 default browser, Edge. Now Microsoft has confirmed this officially yesterday in a blog post. The blog post by Joe Belfiore, VP of Windows stated: “we intend to adopt the Chromium open source project in the development of Microsoft Edge on the desktop to create better web compatibility for our customers and less fragmentation of the web for all web developers.” What does this shift to Chromium mean? Gradually, over the course of 2019, Edge will have under the hood changes. These changes will be developed in open source and the key aspects are: The development of Microsoft Edge will move to a Chromium-compatible web platform for the desktop version. They intend to align Microsoft Edge simultaneously with web standards and also with other Chromium-based browsers. This improves compatibility for everyone and make testing easier for developers. Working on an open-source engine like Chromium allows Microsoft to deliver more frequent updates to Edge. Microsoft Edge is currently available on Windows, this shift can get Edge running on other OSes like Linux and macOS. Microsoft also intends to contribute more to the open-source engine Chromium to make Chromium-based browsers better on Windows devices. A user doesn't have to worry much about this change. If anything this might bring Chrome-like extensions to Edge. If you’re a web developer, you can go to the Microsoft Insider website to try preview builds and contribute. Currently, Chrome holds arguably most of the market share in the browser space. Microsoft had problems working with EdgeHTML and building a browser that would be widely adopted. Perhaps basing Edge on Chromium will actually make people want to use Chrome. Now two tech behemoths will use the same engine to create their browser. This could mean more competition within the Chromium ecosystem. Where does this leave Mozilla Firefox that uses the Gecko engine and Opera that uses Blink? For more details about the engine shift, visit the Microsoft website. Microsoft reportedly ditching EdgeHTML for Chromium in the Windows 10 default browser Firefox Reality 1.0, a browser for mixed reality, is now available on Viveport, Oculus, and Daydream Microsoft becomes the world’s most valuable public company, moves ahead of Apple

Yesterday, the WebKit team announced that Safari Technology Preview 71 is now available for macOS Mojave and macOS High Sierra. This version comes with improvements in Dark Mode, Web Inspector, WebRTC, and more. Apple introduced Safari Technology Preview to give users an early look at the upcoming new features in Safari and to get their feedback. Following are some of the updates in Safari Technology Preview 71: Dark Mode Dark Mode CSS Support is enabled by default in the Experimental Features menu Forcing color scheme in the Elements tab of Web Inspector is supported The media query matching of prefers-color-scheme now better matches the draft spec An experimental CSS property is added called supported-color-schemes Web Inspector Support is added for the tab bar to automatically add a new Audit tab for running page audits when enabled in Web Inspector Experimental settings. Default tests are added to the Audit tab Support is added for the copy keyboard shortcut and context menu to the Cookies table Drag-and-drop support for importing Audits in the Audits tab and Recording in the Canvas tab Secure certificate details per-request in the Network tab is added A button is added to show the system certificate dialog in the Network tab WebRTC For an iframe to use getDisplayMedia, iframe allow="display" is required Support for RTCRtpCodecParameters.sdpFmtpLine, transportStats, and peerConnectionStats is added Enabled setting RTCRtpTransceiver.direction Rendering Compositing updates are now incremental Support is added for dynamic pseudo-classes on elements with display: contents Previously, the caret was disappearing at the end of a password field when the caps lock indicator was shown. This is fixed. Web API Phantom focus events and blur events firing when clicking between text input fields with addEventListener is fixed Content-Type parameter values now allow empty quoted strings The CSS Painting API is updated to allow passing size, arguments, and input properties to the paint callback You can read more updates on Apple’s website. Apple’s security expert joins the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Apple app store antitrust case to be heard by U.S. Supreme Court today Apple has quietly acquired privacy-minded AI startup Silk Labs, reports Information  

Yesterday, Google announced the release of Chrome 71. This version comes with support for displaying relative time, specifying the underline location for vertical text, user activation for speech synthesis, and more. Some of the updates in Chrome 71 are described here: Intl.RelativeTimeFormat() support to display relative time Showing relative time in web apps has become a common practice and many date/time libraries come with localized functions to handle this for us. One of the examples of these libraries is Moment JS. Chrome 71 introduces Intl.RelativeTimeFormat(), a low-level API that allows libraries and frameworks to format relative time in a localized fashion. Specifying the underline location for vertical text Often, browsers are inconsistent with where to put the underline, when it comes to displaying Chinese or Japanese text. This is solved in Chrome 71, as the text-underline-position property now accepts left or right as part of the CSS3 text decoration spec. Speech synthesis requires user activation Sometimes it is quite odd when we open a site and it suddenly starts talking to us. Though autoplay policies prevent these sites from automatically playing audio, they have tried to get around this by using speech synthesis API. To avoid this, in Chrome 71, the speech synthesis API now requires user activation on the page before it will work. If the document has not received a user activation, the speechSynthesis.speak() function now throws an error. Customizable requestFullscreen API Developers can now customize the requestFullscreen API with FullscreenOptions on Android. They can choose between showing the navigation bar or a completely immersive mode where no user agent controls are shown until a gesture is performed. Default credentials mode defaults to same-origin For module script requests, the default credentials mode has been changed from “omit” to “same-origin”. This is done because the previous behavior was misaligned with other high-level features like the Fetch API. Defaulting to origin also caused a second server connection, which is undesirable for developers looking to reduce latency. Deprecations and removals in Chrome 71 WebKitAnimationEvent and WeKitTransitionEvent, the non-standard aliases for two widely supported standard interfaces are now fully replaced by AnimationEvent and TransitionEvent respectively. URL.createObjectURL() has been removed from the MediaStream interface. The document.origin property has been removed as it is now redundant with self.origin which can be used in both window and worker contexts and has wider support. Read more in detail about the Chrome 71 updates on Google Developers blog. Google bypassed its own security and privacy teams for Project Dragonfly reveals Intercept Google Chrome announces an update on its Autoplay policy and its existing YouTube video annotations Project Fi is now Google Fi, will support multiple Android-based phones, offer beta service for iPhone

According to a story by Windows Central, Microsoft is working on a Chromium based web browser. This will likely be a replacement to their current web browser on Windows 10, Microsoft Edge. Edge never took off the Edge Microsoft Edge was launched in 2015 built from scratch with EdgeHTML. Microsoft tried to get it into adoption by making Windows 10 update free for a limited time. However, the browser was not well received at the early stage itself due to a large number of issues. Since then it has not been very stable driving developers and users away from it. Due to this, Microsoft is reportedly abandoning Edge and the EdgeHTML framework for Chromium. Chromium is a rendering engine used in Google Chrome. The new browser’s name is codenamed Anaheim and will be replacing Edge as the default browser in Windows. It is not known if Edge will be renamed and if the UI will be different. But EdgeHTML will no longer be used in Windows 10’s default browser. Using the Chromium engine instead Using Chromium means that the websites on Windows 10 default browser will load as they do on Google Chrome. Default browser users will no longer have to face the loading and connectivity issues that plagued EdgeHTML based Microsoft Edge. For smartphones, nothing will change much as Edge on smartphones already use platform specific engines. Recently, 9to5Google reported that Microsoft engineers are committing code to the Chromium project. This would suggest that they are working on their own browser by using Chromium instead of EdgeHTML. The browser may likely be out next year. Public reactions A comment on hacker news reads: “You[web developers] don't test your work in Edge and because you tell all your friends and family to use Chrome instead of Edge. So stop complaining about monoculture. Many of you helped create it.” Some sarcasm thrown in another comment: “I test my app in Edge, every time a new version is released. When it inevitably fails, I shake my head in disbelief that Microsoft still hasn't paid a dev to spend a couple months fixing their IndexedDB implementation, which has been incomplete since the IE days. Can't expect a small rag-tag group like Microsoft to compete with a rich corporate behemoth like Mozilla, I guess :)” Another comment says: “How can I test Edge when Microsoft don't release it for Mac and Linux? A browser for a single OS? Talk about monoculture.” https://twitter.com/headinthebox/status/1069796773017710592 Another Tweet suggests that this move towards Chromium is about ElectronJS stronghold over app development and not about Microsoft wanting a Chrome like browser experience on its default browser: https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/1069776335336292352 After years of Internet Explorer being ridiculed and Edge not being the success they hoped for, it would be nice to see the Windows default browser catching up with the likes of Chrome and Firefox. Introducing Howler.js, a Javascript audio library with full cross-browser support Firefox Reality 1.0, a browser for mixed reality, is now available on Viveport, Oculus, and Daydream Microsoft becomes the world’s most valuable public company, moves ahead of Apple