The Dev Times #46

Halfway through each month, our newsletter for developers: The Dev Times, brings three reads that our own developers found interesting on the web, and two Transloadit updates that may interest you.

HTTP/3 from A to Z - core concepts part 1

After almost five years in development, the new HTTP/3 protocol is nearing its final form. Earlier iterations were already available as an experimental feature, but you can expect the availability and use of HTTP/3 to ramp up in 2021. This article series talks about the protocol with some nuance. While HTTP/3 has several promising new concepts, sadly, their impact will likely be relatively limited for most web pages and users (yet potentially crucial for a small subset). HTTP/3 is also challenging to set up and use correctly, so take care when configuring the new protocol. Read the post ›

Stay alert

A short while ago, Chrome broke the web by disabling alert(), confirm() and prompt() dialogs from cross-origin iframes. The justification was that "the current UX is confusing, and has previously led to spoofs where sites pretend the message comes from Chrome or a different website". Removing the feature was deemed preferable to fixing the UX, but this meant legitimate uses were affected, too. Users of CodePen suddenly discovered that they were unable to use these functions in their projects, since CodePen runs your code inside a cross-origin iframe to guard against XSS attacks. Reports from other sites soon followed. Thanks to the community feedback, the Chrome developers have decided to postpone this deprecation until at least January 2022 to give time to do more outreach and propose alternatives to sites that rely on this behavior, and to give website owners more time to explore alternatives. Check it out ›

Next.js 11.1

As announced at Next.js Conf, the mission of the Next.js team is to make development faster and more enjoyable. By leveraging cutting-edge technology like ServiceWorker, WebAssembly, and ES Modules, Next.js Live puts the entire development process in the web browser. This opens up possibilities like collaborating and sharing instantaneously with a URL, without a build step. For developers, this means a faster feedback loop, less time waiting for builds, and real-time peer programming and editing within the browser. Read more ›

Introducing the OCR Robot

As the adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. With the introduction of our /image/describe Robot, we already allowed programmers to unlock the "visual cortex" of AI models trained by prominent cloud vendors. We are now taking this a step further by not only recognizing objects in images, but also reading any words present. I'm afraid I can let you do that, Dave. Check it out ›

Uppy 2.0

We are tail-waggingly excited about the release of Uppy 2.0. This latest version of Uppy is on average 25% smaller and (in specific use cases) up to a thousand times faster, thanks to dropping support for IE11 and a lot of refactoring work. We’ve also upgraded many dependencies, most notably Preact 8 to Preact X, greatly improved TypeScript support and screen reader accessibility, paid technical debt, and added support for multiple messages in the Informer plugin. Now more than ever, Uppy is your best friend in file uploading! Check it out ›