Which browser engine “paints” HTML the smartest on my device? In the clip below; Surf substitutes for Safari and Chromium for Chrome. My blog is the testee since there’s guaranteed cache control and jitter.

Surf and by extension Safari (or any Webkit–based browser) wins imo. Webkit feels smooth (sneakily, too smooth). It’s probably partly why Safari on macOS/iOS feels so fast. Chrome (not Chromium) is almost on par or so I’ve been told. Not exactly web dev but interesting huh?

Strange. In the last few years, I’ve abandoned search engines for most programming related queries by chugging along happily with Recoll. If I had the time I’d sit down and hack out a web front–end for its Python API but the desktop interface supplied with HTML from my own web crawlers works beautifully (medoc92/recollwebui also exists).

Hugo is a gateway for discovering neat golang libraries. Version 0.104.0 introduced a color extraction method that has lots of use–cases. An easy one is to generate basic image gradient placeholders. The browser has its own deferred/lazy loading logic so fancy image gradients (on a static site) require only a few lines of pre–generated CSS styles.

btw if anyone tells you that RSS is dead — they’re in a bubble. Bing is our witness; the hasfeed: prefix returns sites with a feed, the feed: prefix gives a direct feed link. No.. I’m not a secret Microsoft™ agent — DuckDuckGo and others support this too ;-) 38B+ are big boy numbers.

The nix packages collection has a neat library repository. A small nudge can make it completely standalone. Basically it allows experimenting quickly with configuration patterns for custom stuff without an expensive evaluation.

HTML compilation is fun to watch. Here’s what hugo’s --debug output for this blog looks like right now. Rendering takes about 25 seconds on an old laptop. The linearity is easy to see, but that’s the least of my problems ;-)

Kiwi Browser (download) is a Chromium derivative on Android that can directly expose the built–in dev tools on device. Remote debugging is my preference, but it makes quick web development debugging on Chrome for Android just a touch easier.

Finally, basic auto video caching. Posting just got a tad bit easier…

Browsers are on a slow march towards fully adopting user options for standardized/algorithmic color stylesheets. Great debates over what color to paint the bike shed (website) will eventually end. Paint it (mostly) whatever color you want.

In addition to the invert filter, another way of quickly bootstrapping a dark mode CSS stylesheet is to use Chromium’s auto dark mode emulation as an initial reference.