There an amazing app platform out there that iOS/iPad OS half-supports: The Web. But poor Apple wouldn’t get an arbitrary 30% cut from every button pressed by users, so they continue to refuse to reach parity with every other mobile browser.

That sucks.

We should demand better without waiting for EU regulators to intervene.

I've built an open-source auditor for media weight on websites.

It measures how much smaller your files can get (for example src/srcset, quality, format in your CDN or sharp) and tells you the exact best value to use. It checks quality for photos (SSIMULACRA2) and video (VMAF), flags GIFs that should be images or video, flags video autoplay, and covers fonts, compression and more. In short, it optimizes all your media. Once the audit is done, you can hand it to an AI model to apply the fixes.

I ran it on the homepages of 197 sites. The median page loads 630 KB more than it needs to, and across all of them 247 MB of media gets downloaded but never shown.

Try it: npx imgtune scan https://your-site.com GitHub: github.com/indicozy/imgtune Feedback and bug reports are very welcome 🙏

why, can you give some tips, thank you so much

Coding agents know modern HTML and CSS exist, but they keep writing outdated code. So on Tuesday we released the first stable version of Modern Web Guidance, a free and open source skill you install in your coding agent. I help steward it along with Kadir Topal (Chrome), Patrick Brosset (Microsoft), Jake Archibald (Mozilla), and Lea Verou (independent), with Paul Irish (Chrome) as technical lead.

Things agents did without it in our evals:

• click-outside handlers on position: fixed overlays instead of popover

• fade-outs built from class toggles, transitionend, and setTimeout instead of @starting-style and transition-behavior

• opening a new view without moving focus into it, and not restoring focus on the way back

How it works: when the agent is prompted to work on a frontend task, the skill has it search 200+ guides with a small CLI that runs on your machine. It pulls in the best ones, and uses them to implement the task. The guidance is written in plain HTML, CSS, and JS, and adapts to whatever framework you're using.

The guides are written by real people who work on browsers and experts from the web and accessibility communities. They're also published on our docs, so you can read and learn from them yourself. I wrote a few guides, including the one on Enter-to-send misfiring for Japanese and Chinese IME users.

To make sure it helps, we regularly run evals in Claude Code, Codex, and Antigravity against ~2000 checks with and without the skill. On their own, agents pass about half of the checks, and about 90% with it. FWIW the checks test for what the guides recommend, so we're grading against our own answers.

The hardest part is making sure the guides work cross-browser. Everything needs to support Baseline Widely Available by default, so newer features always need fallbacks or have to be clearly marked as progressive enhancements. The guides come with browser support data baked in, and we update it each week. (The CLI commands in the skill are pinned to `@latest` so agents always get the latest version of the guides)

• Install: npx modern-web-guidance@latest install or see https://developer.chrome.com/docs/modern-web-guidance

• Eval data: https://googlechrome.github.io/modern-web-guidance-src/

The CLI sends anonymous usage data to Google by default. DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1 turns it off.

Feedback welcome!

I’ve been building websites for over a decade, and have always tried to do things as vanilla as possible (where applicable).

More recently whilst building components and looking at the libraries out there, I realised that browser technology and CSS has grown to a point where it can do the majority of things we need, without JS (like dialog, detail, and popover tags)

So I started working on modest-ui as a CSS base for all my personal and side projects, and as it’s gotten more stable I’ve recently bumped it to v2.

It’s themeable with CSS vars, can be used as an unobtrusive base layer to built on top of, and can either be used classless (with mdst-ui set on the body) or you can pick and choose classes as needed.

Anyway, it’s open source (MIT), no JS (except for some examples on the site), and currently sits at about 10 kb (gzipped).

https://github.com/thisismodest/modest-ui
https://modest-ui.com

Edit: I forgot to mention it’s ~10kb when gzipped

i'm speaking as someone who has never touched it before. i understand i might not need it at the moment because any site i build could probably handle repeated queries simply because the traffic would be low, but i still want to know when to use it.

Hey r/webdev!

We're a small team of 3 building Betterlytics, an open-source web analytics tool. Over the past year and a half, we've also had contributions from 10 other people, which has been really cool to see.

It puts analytics, session replay, error tracking, uptime monitoring and status pages in one dashboard. Here is what's in it so far:

Visitors: Traffic, referrers, geography, campaigns, custom events with properties, funnels, user journeys, and session replay.

User experience: Real-user Core Web Vitals and JavaScript errors, including the pages and events leading up to them.

Uptime: Monitoring, SSL and keyword checks, public status pages, and alerts via email, Slack, Discord, Teams, or webhooks.

A few more details:

• One tracking script just under 4 KB gzipped.

• No cookies.

• Rust + ClickHouse backend and Next.js dashboard.

• Open source (AGPL) and self-hostable with Docker, every feature included.

• An MCP server so your AI agent can query your analytics data.

The screenshots are from our live demo (the status page is a sample). You can explore without signing up:

Demo: https://betterlytics.io/demo

GitHub: https://github.com/betterlytics/betterlytics

If you click around the demo, we'd love to hear what you think.

Hey everyone!

I'm a Junior Industrial Designer currently taking the first steps towards starting my own business. I'm developing a physical product that customers will be able to customise through an online configurator.

To give you an idea: Imagine something similar to a car configurator, but much simpler. Let's say it's a piece of furniture where customers can choose between different modules, colours, fabrics and finishes, and see how their configuration comes together.

Since I have very little experience with web development, I'm trying to figure out the best way to approach this without spending a fortune, especially at this early stage of the business.

I've come across solutions like Shopify combined with Zakeke, which seem to offer product customisation features without having to build everything from scratch.

My questions are:

1. Would something like this be relatively easy to set up yourself with a bit of time and effort, using tools like Shopify + Zakeke?

2. Are there other platforms, plugins or approaches you'd recommend for this kind of project?

3. What would be the approximate cost of having something like this professionally developed from scratch?

I'd really appreciate any advice, recommendations or experiences from people who have worked on similar projects.

Thanks in advance!

I've built a personal CSS framework for around 3 years. Minium is the cleaned-up, public version, and I finally feel it's finished enough to share.

Plain HTML looks good without classes, and one class adds a layout or a component. It is about 15 KB gzipped, with no JavaScript.

Minium follows the same semantic-first idea as Pico CSS, but with modern CSS: cascade layers, light-dark(), anchor positioning, OKLCH colors and popover. Now that Pico is no longer maintained, Minium may fit if you're looking for a replacement.

I built Minium because I was tired of heavy JS frameworks and the constant churn of their dependencies. I wrote the CSS by hand and used Claude to review docs and find bugs.

• Site and docs: https://minium.style

• Repo: https://github.com/troennes/minium

What would you need before you used Minium in a real project? Honest feedback is greatly appreciated.

I built AnotherExample.com to make CORS easier to troubleshoot. It has a live Playground for testing common scenarios, a guided Debugger for your own requests, and an Error Explainer for those cryptic browser messages.

The screenshot shows one Playground test. Your browser can read the known-good response, but it blocks JavaScript from reading the other one because it’s missing an Access-Control-Allow-Origin header.

To try it, open the CORS Playground, pick Missing allow-origin, and click Run comparison.

I'm having trouble searching for answers to questions related to autofilling the kind of prompt shown in the screenshot. I don't know what to call them when googling for answers. I feel like I should know the name of this specific type but cannot seem to remember.

Thanks

I run a small web studio w 6 client servers, and every one's set up differently: cPanel, Plesk, Webmin + a few that are jus SSH. Last month I got a 2am call abt a dead mail server and spent 40 mins relearning that box's panel before I could even start on the actual issue, so I'm moving everything to BeAdmin (ty for recommending) one client at a time, last week started w the smallest one: one apt command, then Nginx+mail moved module by module, cuz I'd rather lose a weekend now than get another call and have no idea where the logs atttt

Website: https://www.cubistheart.com/

I've been working on a project called Borrowed Time.

The idea is simple: a new clock every day.

Each clock is an experiment in creative coding, typography, animation, video, CSS, and occasionally WebGL/Three.js. Rather than using a conventional clock interface, I try to find an entirely different visual language for representing time every day.

The project has evolved into a fairly extensive React/Vite application, with hundreds of individual clock experiments.

I've recently revised the site's navigation and would appreciate some outside perspective.

I'm particularly interested in feedback from other developers:

• Does the navigation make sense?

• Is the site easy to explore?

• How does the performance feel?

• Are there things you'd change about the architecture or implementation?

• Does the concept communicate itself clearly?

Thanks for taking a look.

Hello! Rock & Hold is a game that runs in the browser on phones and desktops: one HTML file per board on a small runtime I wrote, sprites drawn as SVG in code, sound synthesised with WebAudio.

https://rockandhold.com

Feedback on how it runs on your device is very welcome: load time, smoothness, anything broken.

Thanks!

I've been thinking about how we build UI components and whether we're treating them as bigger units than they need to be.

A dropdown, for instance, isn't just a dropdown. It involves popup positioning, keyboard navigation, focus management, selection, and dismissal. What if these behaviours were independent building blocks that could be combined to create different kinds of components?

I explore this idea in the context of recently released Vercel's UI SDK and, more interestingly, how AI agents could interact with components through something like an Agent Bridge.

It's an interesting direction for component architecture, especially as AI agents become more involved in working with web interfaces.

Would love to hear what you think!

https://amitmerchant.com/what-if-ui-components-were-built-like-modular-phones/

Had this thought jump into my head last weekend about a puzzle game where the goal is the opposite of Minesweeper: build the minefield instead of sweeping it.

Hence Minelayer! https://agameofrolls.com/minelayer

Classic mode has you solving partially-filled minefields starting at 3x3 all the way up to 10x10 endlessly.

Escalation has you seeing if you can beat 10 levels of 3x3 - 10x10.

Dailies have a 6x6 puzzle you can solve and share your attempt's results with other friends!

This initially started out as a small board game idea (the Roll for Mine mode is the latest iteration of that) that I was prototyping on my site where I put up original and fanmade board game adaptations. Then I iterated on it a bit more after deciding to commit to a true digital game to ensure solvable puzzles.

Had a lil’ too much fun building this https://github.com/Shannon-Goddard/movies

No database. No API. No Lambda. No bill. Just a 3MB JSON file and a service worker

Core architecture
• Catalog: One static data/index.json (~3 MB gzipped) holds all metadata (titles, genres, types, eras, series, durations, language flags, etc.)

• Service worker: On first visit it pre-caches the JSON (and app shell). After that, every filter, search, and navigation is pure in-memory array work — no network round-trips for the catalog.

• Client-side SPA: Vanilla JS + hash routing handles filtering (stackable chips for genre/type/era/color), series browsing, watchlist/continue-watching (localStorage), deep links, Google Cast, Media Session API, keyboard shortcuts, etc.

• Delivery: GitHub Pages CDN for the static files. Zero databases, APIs, Lambdas, or monthly bills. Hosting cost is $0.

I recently redesigned my blog in a skeuomorphic style. Would appreciate feedback on the design and how it feels to read longer articles in this layout.

The paper-bending effect distorts live HTML during native browser scrolling, with no JS. It currently only works in Chromium-based browsers.

https://destel.dev

Hey everyone!

I've been working on a project called WebToolsFinder — a platform to help people discover useful online tools without spending hours searching across the internet.

The idea is simple: whether you're a developer, designer, content creator, student, freelancer, or someone looking to get work done faster, finding the right tool shouldn't be difficult.

I'm building this to make discovering useful web tools easier and more accessible.

I'd genuinely appreciate it if you could check it out and share your feedback.

https://www.webtoolsfinder.com/

A few things I'd love to know:

- What categories of tools would you like to see?

- What makes you trust a tool directory?

- What features would make you bookmark and revisit a website like this?

This is an early-stage project, so honest criticism is welcome. I'm looking to make it genuinely useful, not just another directory.

Thanks!

Hi all, our main.com site is built and maintained by engineers. Marketing keeps asking for a visual builder so that we can ship pages without filing tickets. The dev thinks it'll fall apart the moment we need anything custom. Before I push either way just wanted to understand if the Engineering owns the website at your company, what does it run on? Would love to understand the company size and answer. Also if anyone moved to a visual builder and how was the experience