Web and Standards Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 10, 2026

• Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

  • Mere Civilian ☛ My RSS Workflow in 2026

    Another reason, I am posting my response on my blog is because it is my way of documenting the interactions that come about only because I have this blog. I enjoy communicating with people, and it is great that people reach out. Please continue doing so..

  • SusamPal ☛ I Will Not Add Query Strings to Your URLs

    In case you were wondering why I suddenly plugged my project into this post in the previous section, it is because I recently added a dubious feature to that project that I myself was not entirely convinced about. That misfeature is relevant to this post.

    In version 0.4.0 of Wander Console, I added support for a via= query parameter while loading web pages. For example, if you encountered midnight.pub while using the console at susam.net/wander/, the console loaded the page using the following URL: [...]

  • Mozilla

    • Michael Kjörling ☛ Fixing Linux Firefox running slowly with high kswapd0 CPU utilization

      Today, it happened again, and I decided to look a bit more into it. Turned out that the process hogging the system wasnʼt Firefox at all, but rather kswapd0 being solidly parked at very high CPU utilization; a sign of memory pressure, except that the system had lots of RAM free along with virtually all of the swap space sitting unused.

    • Michael Kjörling ☛ Fixing Linux Firefox running slowly with high kswapd0 CPU utilization, take 2

      I have now been running this for about a week and a half, and the system appears stable and Firefox does not suffer the performance degredation it used to with MGLRU turned on with a zero TTL.

    • [Repeat] Thunderbird ☛ Community Office Hours: Contributor Spotlight on Bogomil Shopov

      If you have ever used Thunderbird in Bulgarian, the subject of this month’s office hours is one of the contributors who made that possible! Office Hours hosts Heather and Monica have been lucky enough to chat with long-time localizer Bogamil Shopov at conferences like FOSDEM. Now, they’re sitting down to talk to him about how his contributor story started, and to hear the advice he has for anyone curious about being part of Thunderbird.

      We’ll be back next time, checking in on Thunderbird Pro! It’s been almost a year since we sat down with members of our team making this possible. As we’ve slowly started opening up the service to our Early Birds from the waitlist, it seemed a great opportunity to learn what users can expect, now and in the future!

• Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)

  • Sal ☛ Moving my blog to 11ty and Cloudflare Pages

    I decided to move my blog away from Bear Blog. It's now built with 11ty and hosted on Cloudflare Pages.

    I still very much appreciate and admire Bear. It helped me get back into blogging for the nth time by offering a very low barrier to entry, got me some readers through its discovery pages, and gave me a little community of bloggers to participate in. Thank you, Herman!

    That said, I decided to move for a few reasons.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Kevin Boone ☛ In praise of HTTP

    I’ve spent a lot of time wondering whether it’s possible, even in theory, to develop a protocol that has the scalability of HTTP, but the intentional, intractable rigidity of Gemini. I wondered what additional metadata its requests and responses would have to carry to make it possible to implement, for example, a caching proxy like Squid. In the HTTP world, browsers and proxies don’t have to cache but, by doing so, they become better web citizens, reducing bandwidth requirements and CPU load. This, in turn, leads to reduced energy consumption – never a bad thing these days.

    And this, in turn, led to me looking more closely at how these things are done in HTTP(S). When I did, I found my admiration growing. Yes, HTTP is problematic; but its designers have done a great job of making a protocol that scales, so long as all parties play their parts properly.

  • Joseph Lorenzo Hall ☛ Hacking Time: Spoofing Atomic Clocks with Audio Harmonics

    Time is a fundamental anchor of physics, social life, governance, and business. Humanity’s relentless pursuit to measure time under challenging conditions has shaped history—culminating in innovations and incentives like the Longitude Act of 1714 for marine timekeeping. Early mechanical clocks, driven by weight-based escapements that clicked gears forward one tooth at a time, emerged in the late 13th century, but their fragility limited their practicality. For everyday, robust timekeeping, people relied on ingenious analog methods. For example, nails were stuck into candles so that as the wax melted, each nail would fall and clatter onto a metal plate, audibly marking the passage of hours.

  • Media over QUIC ☛ OpenAI's WebRTC Problem

    If not WebRTC, then what should you use for Voice AI?

    Honestly, if I was working at OpenAI, I’d start by stream audio over WebSockets. You can leverage existing TCP/HTTP infrastructure instead of inventing a custom WebRTC load balancer. It makes for a boring blog post, but it’s simple, works with Kubernetes, and SCALES.

    I think head-of-line blocking is a desirable user experience, not a liability. But the fated day will come and dropping/prioritizing some packets will be necessary. Then I think OpenAI should copy MoQ and utilize WebTransport, because…