LinksJanuary 2026

Well... there's that. After Vercel owning running Next.js, Nuxt, and Svelte, Google running Angular, and now Cloudflare snatching Astro, it looks like all (meta) frameworks are "taken".

Is that a good thing? I doubt it, but it clearly shows that open source by itself isn't sustainable... bummer.

I'm no fan of Vercel, but this list of best practices is details, well thought through and very actionable.

An interactive guide to how browsers work — love it!

Short 'n' sweet: Firefox 145 improved the CSS properties panel and now hides unused CSS properties. Let's hope Chromium follows eventually because this tiny feature makes debugging sites with lots of tokens much easier.

I must admit I've never questioned what happens when I use navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition. As it turns out, browsers use third-party services to figure out the user location. Very obvious, in hindsight.

But geolocation isn't the only "Web API" calling online services. Kilian lists more than a handful and summarizes the current state:

The promise of web standards is that you write code once and it works everywhere. But the above APIs are really thin wrappers around vendor-specific services.

The interface is standardized, but the implementation, its dependencies, limitations, and privacy implications are not.

I already knew that using JavaScript dependencies from the npm ecosystem without using a bundler is painful. How do you get node_modules into the public? How do you deal with module dependencies? And how do you import files then?

Normal things like loading dependency code are surprisingly complicated in the "vanilla web".

Lea analyzed all the technical options to build for the web without a bundler, and the current state sucks.

Not using bundlers in any nontrivial application does seem like an exercise in masochism.

It's a good overview (and rant) on the current state of the web.

GitHub published a bold statement about the poor UX and accessibility of toast elements.

Toasts pose significant accessibility concerns and are not recommended for use.

This might become a reference piece for every web developer!

What should go wrong when you set up AI agents with abstract goals like "raise money for children" or "do random acts of kindness"? That's right; the machines will go out into the world and do nothing but wasting everybody's time.

No one wants to receive personalized "thank you" emails written by ChatGTP or a robot "doing good" standing on their door step.

What a fucked up world we live in...