Web Browsing, Open Data, and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 31, 2026

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Chromium

    • Matt Fantinel ☛ Give any website a two-pane layout with this new Vivaldi feature

      I've been using Vivaldi since I wrote about it last year, and been having a good time with it. Since then it's received a few new features but they were mostly refinements on the existing experience, rather than actually new things (which is fine, refinement is exactly what it needs).

      Last week's version 7.9 brought the auto-hide feature, so you can hide the tab bar/address bar to have a "full screen" experience, and only show those on hover. That's cool and works well in my experience, but there was something extra on the release notes that flew under my radar because I didn't really understand the point: "Follower" tabs.

  • Mozilla

    • Waterfox ☛ 15 Years of Forking - Waterfox Blog

      Fifteen years ago today, I posted a thread on the Overclock.net forums. I was sixteen, I had an HP Compaq TC4400 that I’d convinced my parents would “improve my school work”, and I was frustrated that Firefox didn’t have an official 64-bit build. So I compiled one myself, called it Waterfox, stuck it on SourceForge and went back to my A levels.

      Within a week it had 50,000 downloads, completely unexpected. Frustratingly, being on an island in the Mediterranean meant there was no support network or anyone to turn to with regards to “what’s next”. Had I been stateside, with the infrastructure and institutional knowledge of “tech”, who knows - I might’ve had a guiding hand on how to manage something like this and work with the momentum. But alas, I would have to learn a lot of painful lessons myself.

      Fast forward to today, 15 years later, and Waterfox is still here. So am I, albeit a bit older and significantly more tired. At best estimates, Waterfox probably has around 1M monthly active users.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • [Old] Thomas Kejser ☛ Joins are NOT Expensive!

    When talking about Data Lakes and how people access them - we must address some of the misconceptions that made them popular in the first place.

    One of the largest misconceptions is this: "Joins are expensive". It is apparently believed (as I discovered from discussions on LinkedIn) that it costs less CPU to turn your data model into a flat table and serve that to users - than it does to join everytime you access the table.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Allen Downey ☛ Have the Nones hit a ceiling?

      The observed percentage of Nones peaked in the 2021 survey and has dropped in the last two cycles. The CES data show a similar pattern, with a much larger sample size. So I’m not going to disagree with Ryan: it sure looks like the rise of the Nones has stalled or even reversed.

      However, since I am developing a model that decomposes trends like this into cohort and period effects, we can use it to check whether the turnaround is a cohort or a period effect. It turns out to be both.

• Standards/Consortia

  • DomainTools ☛ How DNSDB Search Results Are Ordered

    This article tackles a simple question (which actually turns out to have a surprisingly complex-appearing answer): “How are the results from a DNSDB Standard Search ordered?”

    We’ll answer that question in this article and explain why that answer matters to anyone who makes DNSDB Standard Search queries that return large numbers of results.

  • APNIC ☛ The last time

    If you are using a 32-bit signed integer platform, or running 32-bit legacy applications and using a seconds counter with an epoch of 1 January 1970, the counter rollover will occur on 19 January 2038. An unsigned 32-bit time counter will roll over on 7 February 2106. If you are using a 64-bit representation of time, then the seconds time counter will roll on 4 December, in the year 292,277,026,596!