What do a recent A List Apart article, the ad blocker discussion of a few months back, and my browser testing plans have in common?

Free content entitlement, that’s what.

I’m seriously questioning the idea that all content on the web ought to be free. I think it’s an essentially accidental initial state of the web that quietly became the default. By now, consumers (also of web development blogs) feel they have a right to to free content, and producers (including me) do nothing to disabuse them of that notion.

As a result, free content and services have become an entitlement — an unearned privilege. There’s nothing inevitable about content and services being free, although we collectively chose to make free content a cornerstone of the web. That choice, I now think, is the web’s original sin.

I’m wondering if it’s time to significantly revise our thinking on free content and services. In order to explore this problem I wrote this rather long and rambling, but totally FREE, essay. I hope there’s a point hidden somwhere, but you get what you pay for.

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Yesterday I retested the resize event on touchscreen devices. Where the 2013 tests mostly showed a chaotic jumble, right now it’s becoming more clear where the resize event is heading.

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On 16th and 17th of June we will organise the fourth CSS Day in Amsterdam, preceded by HTML Special, a one-day conference on HTML. The programme is here, and you can buy tickets here.

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Instead of the work I was supposed to do I spent about a day and a half on the alpha version of a viewports visualisation app that, oh irony of ironies, only works on desktop browsers because of the necessary space.

It’s already been very useful to me, since figuring out how the viewports actually work is necessary for full understanding. I hope it does the same for you.

It also contains an example of absolute, fixed, and device-fixed position so that you understand the difference.

The app is by no means ready; there’s a ton of features I’d like to add. Still, for now I’ve run out of time, and as long as it’s impossible to actually make money with such apps I’m not sure how much time I’m willing to spend on it.

Last week I found out that as of Chrome 48 window.innerWidth/Height no longer exposes the dimensions of the visual viewport. Instead, it now exposes the dimensions of the layout viewport, and is thus a copy of document.documentElement.clientWidth/Height.

I’m not happy with this change. So it’s time for me to don my ceremonial robes as Guardian of the Viewports and ask the Chrome team to revert this change and restore the visual viewport to its rightful place.

There are three reasons why I think Chrome is making a mistake here:

1. It breaks the web. ALL other browsers support this.
2. It takes one simple trick for web developers to avoid problems with these properties, so the change is not necessary.
3. It chokes innovation, in particular zoom-based layouts.

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After my recent post about updating Chromium WebViews I was contacted by Scientia Mobile, the company behind the WURFL database, and was offered actual real-life stats!

The situation is less dire than I assumed. About 90% of the users do in fact use the latest Chromium WebView. This number is based on several hundred million hits in December 2015, primarily from North America and Europe.

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This week I received my first gift phone in ages, and since the sender wants me to test it I had to go through all my dozen Android phones and update them as well, so that I can run tests against the latest installed Chromia.

During this process I began to have serious doubts about the update process of the Chromium WebView especially, though the same problems also crop up with regular Google Chrome.

TL;DR: Although, as promised, the Chromium WebView can be updated as a stand-alone app from Android 5 on, I doubt if consumers actually do so because Android’s update process is badly broken. Thus a wide variety of WebViews may be in use right now.

Fair warning: if you are unable to contemplate the simultaneous existence of several Chromium versions running on the same device without suffering from existential angst the reading of this article is discouraged until you’ve consulted your psychiatrist.

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