Changelog

We were just talking about this on this week's JS Party! A new Chrome feature dubbed “Blink LazyLoad” is designed to dramatically improve performance by deferring the load of below-the-fold images and third party iFrames. Ben Schwarz has a nice overview of the feature and how you can use it today in Chrome Canary (behind two feature flags).

Chrome security has reached a milestone — Chrome will now mark http as “not secure”. Nearly two years ago, we announced that Chrome would eventually mark all sites that are not encrypted with HTTPS as “not secure”. This makes it easier to know whether your personal information is safe as it travels across the web, whether you’re checking your bank account or buying concert tickets. Starting today, we’re rolling out these changes to all Chrome users. Also, check out this episode of HTTP203 with Emily Schechter (Product Manager on the Chrome Security team)

The big question with tools like these is, what can I do with it? Child processes are detected and attached to. You can place breakpoints before the modules are required. You can edit your files within the UI. On Ctrl-S/Cmd-S, DevTools will save the changes to disk. By default, ndb blackboxes all scripts outside current working directory to improve focus. And more.

Waytab connects to your browser bookmark, Github, Twitter, Pocket, Pinterest and Unsplash account to remind you of your stars, likes and bookmarks every time you open a new browser tab. This looks like a good idea, well executed. I've long given up on bookmarking, liking, and starring stuff because I never go back and revisit. Waytab changes all that.

You can screenshot a single element?!! 😱 Select an element and press cmd-shift-p (ctrl-shift-p on Windows) to open the Command Menu then select Capture node screenshot. There are 11 more tips just like this. Some I'm sure you know. Others you likely don't.

Paul Kinlan, developer advocate for Chrome and the open web at Google writes: Chrome implemented window.onappinstalled event. It's triggered when a user installs a progressive web app via the Add to Homescreen API or now more importantly via the manual method of Add to Homescreen. This is a very useful addition because it allows you to see engagement on the prompt vs people who use the system banners or menu buttons to install a progressive web app. Now you can track your PWA's install engagement based on the method of install — via the prompt or manually via a custom prompt. Read the docs for more details. Also, make sure you subscribe to JS Party to hear discussions about PWAs and the web platform.

This was an insta-install for me after Nick gave the project a shout-out on today's recording of JS Party. Comes packaged in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera flavors.

The Chrome DevTools provide an amazing set of tools to help you develop on the Web platform. Here are a few tips you might now know yet. I had no idea you can screenshot a specific element. That is super cool.

Umar Hansa walks through some killer DevTools features for performance tuning.

This web crawler uses Headless Chrome (via Puppeteer) to crawl dynamically generated websites in addition to typical static HTML crawling. It can also be run distributed across multiple machines for speed's sake, but that requires Redis for shared cache storage.

Turns out Netflix enforces its video stream to only be played in 1080p on ChromeOS devices. And it does it by... client-side JavaScript detecting the user-agent! 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♀️ This Chrome extension undoes that for you.

Last week we linked up Tom Warren's "Chrome is turning into the new Internet Explorer 6" from The Verge. This week Chris Coyier is defending this venerable web browser saying... Chrome often leads the pack for good web tech. And that means they are delivering features developers want, but are features not all browser makers want to implement. Web standards.

The #1 feature for AMP? Fix the URLs. Malte Ubl: Search can take advantage of privacy-preserving preloading and the performance of Google’s servers, while URLs remain as the publisher intended and the primary security context of the web, the origin, remains intact. We’re super excited about getting this work under way and we expect the changes to first reach users in the second half of 2018. Basically, this will ship by the end of 2018.