Stackoverflow and Firefox are Dead?

Welcome to Syntax. Today, we've got a whole bunch of web development news for you. Stack Overflow is officially dead. Is is that the case? Why did it die? There's a new JavaScript runtime in town, which is not what you would expect.

There is an open source CloudFlare workers that's written in Rust. Kinda interesting.

Can Firefox survive all of these new in the new age of AI? Fractured JSON, new spec for formatting JSON.

Apple now has to allow browser engines in Japan, which is kinda interesting, and then a new pop up you may have seen popping up in your Google Chrome recently. We're gonna explain what that all is. So some pretty good stuff. My name is Wes Bos. I'm a web developer from Canada with me as always. Scott, how are you doing today?

I'm doing good, man. Yeah. Just hanging out, feeling good. Just, working on little projects here and there. I'm getting a lot of joy out of the stuff that I'm building all all the time right now. So the problem is I have too many little projects, which Men. Oh, that's a killer.

Story of my life. I like I I was, like, sitting down, like like, looking at, like, what I should do during the Yarn, and, like, that's like, the my biggest Achilles heel Oh. Is that I love and am interested in too many things. Too many. And I love learning. I love going down all these rabbit holes, but there's, like, a certain balance of, like, actually finishing stuff.

Yeah. And finishing stuff. Through. And, actually, like, dedicating

all of your focus to one particular thing for a period of time.

Like, over over the break, I I probably spent, like, five days in my my basement in one room in my basement, and I, you know, went through all of it's like our storage room, which Wes don't store a ton of stuff, but I, like, went through every single tub we had, pulled it all out, did all that stuff, built a workshop, did everything organized, three d printed a ton of stuff. And it was just like, I spent so many days just dedicated to that one thing. And it was, like, the the most focused time I've had on a single project in quite a little while, and the results spoke for themselves. I yeah. It came out really good. So

I think the AI has made the software project,

like, who look a squirrel It's been so much worse. It's made my stress around it worse.

Yeah.

Yeah. I get, like, stressed out by how many, term windows and stuff and projects I have running at once.

Ain't easy. Ain't easy.

Ain't easy.

Alright. Let's get into the first one, which is Stack Overflow officially dead. This is, from Stack Exchange website itself. Stack Exchange is the company that owns Stack Overflow and the thousand other, like, question and answer websites.

And they have the ability to just simply query the data.

And this is from when Stack Overflow started to current day, how many questions per day have been asked. And it's crazy to see that it's just been spiraling, trending to several thousands, per day. Today, that three twenty one, that's that's just today. Right? But, like, we're currently only having thousands of questions asked per day, whereas, like, at the peak, you can see, like, the peak of COVID during lockdown, They were getting, what, almost 200,000 Wes. And and maybe in 2014, they had had that as well, and they've just been spiraling right on the way down, which is kinda sad, but also just, like,

that's the way the cookie crumbles. And I'm I'm curious. What do you think? Like, why did this happen? Yeah. Well, you know, obviously, the answer is AI. Most of the things that you would ask on Stack Overflow, the the way that it would work is that you'd post on Stack Over first of all, maybe you'd search on Stack Overflow, and maybe there would be an answer or maybe there would be maybe there would be a question and then possibly an answer possibly an answer that is accepted and not correct or accepted and not relevant or no answer accepted at all. Or you would see, okay. This question hasn't be asked. Let me post it on here and then wait, like, a week for somebody to possibly respond to it. And if they did potentially help you, like, that that loop has been replaced by just asking AI, which honestly is is better in in my my opinion. The way I use this stuff, I I found it, the loop to be so much more efficient.

And you're not gonna get some snarky nerd who thinks they know everything, who wants to use this as an opportunity to, you know, flex instead of be truly helpful. Now Stack Overflow the thing. Yeah. Yeah. It's that I stopped using Stack Overflow

probably, I don't know, maybe eight, ten years ago.

That was probably at the height. You know? Like, ten years ago, that was, what, 2016. This is probably when I stopped using it. Yeah. And I stopped using it just because of the moderators would would be, like didn't ask the question properly or not enough info, and they would just shut it down or duplicate question, which is the most frustrating thing in the world.

And a lot I think a lot of those people moved to Discord, Reddit, all of that type of stuff. So while it was a really good spot, I used to spend all day on Stack Overflow answering people's questions, trying to get my points up, and it was so fun to try to beat people to it. The the answer questions were answered very quickly on there. But Yeah. Sometimes. I think the combination of AI like, when when did the AI stuff really pop off? Node, god. Like, 2013?

Yeah. That's the big Yeah. That's the yeah. You could see right on this graph exactly Wes. Because even, like, for simple questions and then once the AIs got access to the Internet, once they got access documentation, it was so much easier to to to get a question answered that way by pasting in the link to the the source code and asking questions of the source code. Because I I do think that is, like, such a a thing for me. I Wes, admittedly, always on the cutting edge of stuff in a way that was negative on Stack Overflow. Because if I wanted an answer on this beta software, there's no I I'm I've

my answer is to look in the source Node myself and figure it out. Yeah. You're not finding anyone to Yeah. To help you there. Yeah. One other thing about AI answering the questions for you is that like, we've said it ourselves on this podcast many times JS if you want help, you have to make a a distilled example of the the re you gotta reproduce it outside of your project, and you gotta, like, make a whole case Yeah. That'd be great. It out. And often often while you're doing that, you'll find the bug. But AI is really good at finding the bug in context for for what you're actually doing, and and sometimes that's often, that's way better. Yeah. I agree. Stack Overflow, it is sad,

because that's such a place ESLint time. What could Stack Overflow have done to have prevented this? They could have implemented an AI solution that would have answered a or attempted to answer the question instantly or something.

Right, and then make that public. But, ultimately, like that they provided all the data

for everybody to to sort of eat their lunch. They were sitting on a gold mine, and it doesn't look like they did much with it, unfortunately.

Yeah. It's crazy. I you you gotta wonder, like, what they could have done differently because it does from an outsider's perspective, it seems like they just kind of sat there and watched the, the trend go downward.

Like, the the writing's been on the wall for years for them, so I think they've had an opportunity that, either they just didn't care to to solve or weren't able to come up with something.

Mhmm. And if you want to see all of the errors in your application, you'll want to check out Sentry at sentry.io/syntax.

You don't want a production application out there that, well, you have no visibility into in case something is blowing up, and you might not even know it. So head on over to sentry.io/syntax.

Again, we've been using this tool for a long time, and it totally rules. Alright.

Next one we have here is micro quick JS. So this is from the creator of FFmpeg, and we've talked about quick JS, in the past. So Fabrice Bellard, he's the author of FFmpeg. He just said, I'm just gonna write an entire new JavaScript engine called QuickJS.

Absolute genius. Like, really knows how how a lot of these lower level things work.

And now he has put out another thing called micro Mhmm. JS. And this is a JavaScript engine targeting embedded systems, meaning that you can then run JavaScript on a microprocessor.

So imagine you're running this on, like, an Arduino or a, ESP 32. We've talked about the the very, like like like, $510 little microcontrollers or running in very memory constrained applications, which is absolutely nuts. It's not full JavaScript. Right? There's no browser in it. It doesn't even have e s six. So it's a support of a subset of JavaScript close to e s five. Mhmm. It implements stricter mode, which is, more error prone and inefficient.

So why why would somebody want to run JavaScript on a microcontroller? Do you have any any thoughts there?

Because they like to put JavaScript into everything. No. Honestly, I don't do any work with microcontrollers, so I'd be interested, in what you would have to say here more than what I would. Yeah. So

in the microcontroller world, if you wanna program one of these things hold on. Let me grab something. Alright. So I got this is something that I got I got for Christmas, and it's basically a little robot that can, walk and and run around. Very cute. And it it has, like, lots of different IO outputs. Right? There's a little LED screen. There's two little proximity sensors on it. There is a little, speaker on it. There is four servos.

You can kinda hear it so that it will be able to walk, and there's a whole bunch of different input outputs. And the whole thing is powered by this little microcontroller. This is a what is this? Raspberry Pi Pico. Right? And the code that runs on this type of thing and and same thing with the badges at GitHub Universe. Do I I have mine. I got mine somewhere too.

The badges that run, on from GitHub Universe, this is running a r p 32 something, and similar the years before the on GitHub Vercel, they had another Node, which also has a similar Raspberry Pi, controller. Like, these are not like the Raspberry Pis that run Linux. These are, like, lower level microcontrollers.

And in order to code on these, you you sort of have a couple options. You can go, like, the Arduino route, which is what a lot of people do. In in that case, you're writing some c in order to make it happen, or you're going to be loading them. The GitHub badges run MicroPython.

And the benefit to that is when you're running MicroPython, it's a little bit easier to actually write this stuff because not everybody is is as well versed in writing and compiling c and being able to reach out for libraries, but they are pretty good at writing Python.

Yeah. So I think the whole idea with this micro quick JS is that you'll be able to run this on on microcontrollers with writing JavaScript. So a lot of people in the comments of of the release of this thing were saying, like, this is a good plug in scripting language. So if you want to allow people like, let's say you're writing an LED controller and you want to allow people to write a plug in that will do things, they could then author that in JavaScript, and you could just run it. There's no compile step. Like, you're not gonna upload c to a microcontroller that's already running, but you might upload a little bit of bit of JavaScript to that. Right? It's a really nice scripting language. So it's easy to write. It's sandboxed, meaning that, like, there's no network, there's no file system. You can allow people to just give you JavaScript, and it will run it in a sandbox. So it's kind of a an interesting space. I'm sure in the, like, industrial controls automation world, aside from, like, the, like, hobbyist tinkerers that we are, I'm sure there's a lot more use cases for it as Wes. So I may keep my eye on this. Yeah. Yeah. I I'm I'm interested, but I also

man, there's just one more thing that I don't have time for is honestly what it is.

Holy cow. Yeah. Alright. The next one here is open workers.

Have you liked the idea of Cloudflare workers but also like to self host? So OpenWorkers, what it does is it lets you run JavaScript in a v eight isolate in your own infrastructure.

It's basically the exact same experience as Cloudflare workers, except for you're not locked in to the CloudFlare platform, which, again, I think this JS, like, a nice for the the type of person who might be interested in something like Coolify, the self hosting, owning your own infrastructure, those types of things, while also keeping, the more modern kind of development flow, being able to have individual functions that are are running the way these are. It also does more than just it seems like it does KV storage. It does, Postgres. It does r two, S three, cron scheduling. Bindings. Yeah. It it it does feel like a a CloudFlare a an open CloudFlare replacement of sorts.

Pretty neat. I I I actually haven't seen this, before you brought this to my attention, but is this something that you would take on yourself wise? Kinda interesting because

people always people always talk about, like, the Vercel lock in. Yes. But, like, Cloudflare, as much as I love them and I'm I'm a Cloudflare stan currently. Same. Yes.

It it it kinda is lock in, meaning that, like Oh, it definitely does. A lot of stuff locally. They've allowed you to, like, reproduce it locally and whatnot. But when you want go to deploy, that that's kind of your your option. Right? You gotta deploy it to Cloudflare. And and the beauty of Cloudflare is that they have all these bindings. Right? You need a database.

You need key value. You need, like, blob storage, some place to put your files and your images.

They have all these things that would Scott just work together, and it it works really Wes, and it's really, really nice. But, like, the the thing that a lot of people don't talk about is that, like, yeah, you're you're kinda locked into hosting on Cloudflare. And that has not been a problem for, like, probably not anyone, I'll say, but for a lot of people. Like, my bill is is almost nothing. We went over that a couple shows ago as well.

But, like, there's always that thing of, like, what happens, if they decide to three times the price or or whatever. You know? They there's if there's any rug pull, and you're locked in. Now They do a rug pull. I'm I'm toast with Cloudflare because, yeah, I host a lot of stuff there. But but here's the thing that I think about this stuff is that the way that I'm building my apps that run on Cloudflare is I'm not directly using the, like, Cloudflare async fetch and enb.kv.get and all of their explicit bindings directly like this. What I'm doing is I'm building them in some sort of standard framework, Hano, Eliza, Remix, whatever, and then I'm using an adapter that will then expose those things.

Wacko is what my own current or Wacko is what my currently, my website runs on, and that's hosted on Cloudflare.

There's a thin layer that sort of exposes those bindings to the thing. So, like, my database adapter, I'm not using e n v dot d b. Yeah. I'm using, Yes. Drizzle. And Yep. And then I have a an adapter that Drizzle will connect to the CloudFlare binding. And then if I wanted to move that thing somewhere else, no problem. You know? I build everything on web standards. CloudFlare implements web standards on all this, and I would be able to move that thing somewhere else with very little work. So this is cool. I like this,

but I don't really see a a huge use case for this type of thing. I think it's just people who wanna own it. Building. Yeah. They just wanna own it. They wanna throw it up on a a VPS and and own it. They wanna throw it on their own machines and own it, but they don't wanna Yeah. Have to host everything as a StreamUp Node app. I can still do that with all of my stuff, and that's just because you're not coding things. Anytime you use, like,

an API that is thinking looking like lock in, you just, like, look at, like, how do I how do I make this so that it is has an abstraction layer so I can switch it to something else? Yeah. This is really cool that somebody figured out how to do this as well.

Node love the process to production yet. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. I I mean, this is definitely for hobbyists. It's for experimenters. It's for for, the one that's been getting me JS hyperdrive. I have to use hyperdrive if I'm deploying something on workers that uses a Postgres DB outside of, like, Neon or something like that, something that's not a, distributed d DB. And that's obnoxious as hell. I'll tell you that. Because you need to get the hyperdrive URL from the event, like, process in in the time of like, you Sanity just grab it from an ENV variable. I find the hyperdrive thing to be pretty annoying, personally. But, yeah, that's one thing I could do without as far as Cloudflare goes. Yeah. And that's because

Cloudflare doesn't have sockets in their implementation. So if you want to connect to something outside of the Cloudflare ecosystem, you either have to use HTTP, which is sometimes okay, but usually not for stuff like real time databases and whatnot, or you have to use their their TypeScript adapter.

Yeah. But this also solves a problem of your database living somewhere where your code is not running because that's where a lot of latency happens. Yeah. Yeah. And turns out Cloudflare, has fat pipes to most of the Internet, so they're able to sorta,

make those connections as extremely fast between the two. I just wish the the workflow development like, I don't wanna use Wrangler locally while I'm building locally for some reason. Like, I just don't wanna do all that stuff. That's my feedback for Cloudflare team all the time JS that I don't wanna do weird stuff

locally to make this work.

Yeah, don't make me do weird things. Don't make me do weird things. Because then I gotta do an if statement. If it's local, then use the normal one. Otherwise, use hyperdrive

and yeah. It's a it's a Luckily, a lot of that they're implementing a lot of their APIs.

When Wrangler runs locally, it it runs it actually runs their JavaScript engine locally. Mhmm. And why why am I freaking the name of it? Worker d. That's what it is. I'm forgetting it. So Worker d is their JavaScript engine that runs, and that is open source as Wes. So that will run locally. But the all of the bindings, most of them will run locally, but some of them still have to like, browser rendering will still have to reach out to the the cloud and and and run it there.

Next one, React ARIA just got some new docs, and I think this is fantastic.

So React ARIA is a React library for building components, and it has absolutely everything, you know, like auto complete, breadcrumbs, button, calendar, checkbox, color like, there's Yeah. What, probably 80 of them here.

And the cool thing about React ARIA is it's a 100% headless, meaning that it simply just brings the functionality.

And then you you bring the divs.

You bring the, you bring the CSS.

And they just redid their documentation to be a bit more like because, like, people people want that, but they also just wanna slap a Shad c n Yeah. Yeah. Component in there and and call it a day. So they've redone you've always been able to do that with React Area, but they've redone their documentation so that it is dead Scott simple on how to get this to work. So you can you can choose vanilla CSS or Tailwind, and then it also uses ShadCN to install the component, which I thought ShadCN is so interesting JS people love ShadCN installing things. Yeah. Now things that are not ShadCN are now using the tool to actually just, like what it does is it downloads the component to the component folder, and then you can go in there and poke around and and change it however you want. That's really the way to go that rather than importing something from a package and using it that way. Exactly. Yeah. I man, I had a a slight spat with somebody on Twitter over the holidays where Oh, boy.

Somebody was like there was a whole thing about using, components to do buttons as links and all this stuff.

And either way, long story short, they they wrote this really obtuse and just, like, nasty looking React component just to simply output a link that could be styled as a button. Like, that's it. And I I like, I've been left with this thought lately that it's like, this component could just be a class. Like, come on. I get the isolation.

I get all of those things. But when you have a component that is simply just a link style JS a button, you have lost the dang plot. Like, this list box, this stuff is exactly what components are for. But stuff that is just a button link, like, come on. You're importing a stupid class. Like, just make this component could have been a class. That's the hill I'm gonna die on. I hate the over abstraction

of components where it's like you make like, oh, you wanna have a link? You wanna have text? You wanna have like, the browser comes with these things built in. You don't need a component for that. It's yeah. Just slap a class on it or slap some styles on it if you want, but don't overabstract these things because it's such a pain in the ass to debug.

Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. And and it had some, like, really dismissive things to say about my opinion on it. Like, this person just clearly doesn't understand, like, modern web development.

It's like, brother, it's a freaking link. It is a link that's styled as a button.

Get over yourself.

It's crazy to me. Yeah. I

I have a component somewhere in my personal website where I have, like, an as.

Yeah. And I can I can pass an as property, and then it will render as a, I think, a div or a span, or it can also be a link? And in that case, it's it's good because it's it's stylistic.

Some it needs to look like something, but in some cases, it needs to be, like, a proper link. And in that case, I think that's fine.

But, yeah, in so many cases, no. No. Thank you. Yeah. No kidding.

Cool. Alright. Next one.

Firefox.

Can Firefox survive? Firefox had a big old, thing about putting out, well, AI into their browser.

And that pissed off what like, the the the one two 1.2%, 2% of, people who are still on Firefox, which is like their core audience is exactly the type of person who doesn't want AI shoved into the browser.

Yeah. And so they were pretty tone deaf in just saying, guess what, everybody? All the, the people who are still stuck on Firefox, we're putting AI in your browser, and you're gonna love it.

And, then they had to walk back and say, okay. You can turn it off. But you have a whole thing about the new Firefox CEO here in addition to that. I I'm just like The Firefox shot themselves an announcement. Yeah. So the new CEO comes in,

to sort of, like, save the currently plummeting Mozilla Firefox. You know? They just been haven't been doing great for a number of Yarn, and then they just released this huge rebrand.

And, I don't know, maybe six months ago, they also released they changed their terms of service to say we will not I what was it? It was it was personally said, we will not sell your personal data, and they changed it to something like Mozilla doesn't sell data about you.

And people lost their minds over that, which is I understand that as well. So, like, the Mozilla's not been been doing great for people using that. And then the new CEO comes in here ready to shake things up, and he's like, look. Like, we're an AI not we're an AI browser, but, like, that's essentially what they're going to be doing. Put an AI And everybody lost their minds. Yeah. And, honestly, I don't think you guys should be giving Mozilla a hard time to be doing this thing because I think there's probably two outcomes here.

Mozilla keeps and I say this as a huge Firefox user. I love Mozilla as as, like, a browser engine. I think we JS web developers need it, and it is so important to the web ecosystem, but most people don't care. They do not care about that type of stuff, and people are not choosing Firefox because of their Flexbox frames per second animations or things like that. People are choosing browsers based on on features, on on what they do for them. And if Firefox is going to be able to survive this, right, there's two options.

Firefox continues to be the browser that they are, and they're going to slowly lose money. Most of the money come from Firefox comes from Google Ads.

More people are using AI. They're not searching Google for these things. So that money is gonna go away, and then Firefox will just cease to exist. Right? So you we we could keep going that way, but that will probably only be another year or two, and then Firefox will no longer be a thing at all. The other option is is, like, can we actually try to get some users that care about this stuff? We have the neck beards and the techies, but you can't run a business on on those people. You need actual people who like, regular users who care about features of the browser. And and privacy is is one of them, but, unfortunately, regular people just wanna do things like shop and and get discount codes and have pages summarized for them and all of these types of things as well. So as much as it kills me, literally every other browser is going to be doing this as Wes, and I think it's kind of necessary in order

to to keep it up. Yeah. Firefox is damned if they do and damned if they don't. Because if they add this stuff, their core audience, which is the only people still left using Firefox, they're going to get, pissy about it. They're not going to be happy about it, and all of the TypeScript in the comments are going to go nuts.

If the if they if they don't add this stuff, like you said, the users are just going to keep on leaving because other browsers, more better features, more hype, whatever.

What what were their choices here? Like, if if they like I said, they don't do it, what they're holding on to this? Yeah. It's it's the same kind of predicament that, like, Arc had, where Arc was a niche browser for Node, and I loved Arc. I I Arc is my favorite thing. But the Arc team, the browser company, realized that they were never going to get this big market share in their current nerd focused way. Now Mhmm. Their goals could have been, oh, we'll just make a paid browser. We'll have this thing serve a niche Sanity. But they wanted to reach more people, So they took an approach and and made something different that had more mass appeal. I would argue that it's not been successful for them. But, like, in in the same regard, that was the choice. It's like, do you keep your nerd audience who, you know, demands privacy? They demand, you know, all of the things that Firefox brings you, or do you do you try to go out and get a bigger piece of the pie? And they made their choice. So yeah. I I I don't know. I wasn't gonna use it either way. So for me, this is like I I this to me is like they're they're trying, at least. They're trying to to survive.

Totally. And I I think from a browser engine perspective, I really hope they make it out. Because as as much as I get mad that Firefox is is lagging on CSS Anchor, We don't wanna be in a world where there's only one browser engine. Oh, no. Yeah. I wish it was just Chrome. And then as soon as you get that, oh, now this one company has has control over over everything. And and I trust Google for that type of stuff, but, that happened with with IE as well. We don't want that for the web. No. And I don't know that a lot of these new browsers are are being good stewards of that. You know? Like No. There's a lot of people forking Chrome right now, which which is taking a lot of people off of using Chrome.

And, like, what does that mean for the resources that are are, like, are they Google spends billions of dollars on engineers to actually develop Chrome. You know? Like, hopefully, OpenAI is actually putting some engineering talent on on pushing this stuff back, you know, and and upstreaming a lot of the their fixes

back into Chrome. I don't know if that's the case yet or not, but we'll see. I know. I feel like it it Although nobody's using the OpenAI browser, you know, that thing sucks. Yeah. That sucks. Yeah. I actually yeah. I know. I know. I I'd like I said, I didn't even download Node. And I'm I have I have literally 30 browsers downloaded on my computer, and I didn't even download the OpenAI one. I do not care about it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaking of alternative browser engines, Apple now is allowing alternative browser engines in Japan. So under Japan's Mobile Software Competition Act, Apple must permit iOS browsers in Japan to use browser engines other than WebKit, such as, obviously, Blink or Gecko. Those are the other two big engines. Blink is is Chromes. Gecko is Firefox.

So this is kinda interesting.

Although let's talk about it. This happened I looked it up two years ago. Years ago. Yeah. The EU mandated that this exact same thing in the European Union and guess how many alternative browser engines there Yarn? Not browsers.

Browser ESLint, meaning that, like, alternative browsers that use different something not WebKit on on iOS. Guess how many? I'll tell you. Zero. Yeah. And there's a good reason for that. There's a good reason for that. It's that

because that's the EU, and now it's EU and Japan. So maybe there's a bigger opportunity there. But until The US has has this available to them, there is no there's zero incentive for Google to develop a web alright. Not a web kit. A ESLint version of Chrome just for those markets.

Right? Yeah. You're right. That's two different Now they have two now they're fork in their browser with two different rendering engines, just for mobile.

I want WebKit gosh. I Google used to Chrome used to be WebKit. I'm still, like my my brain is still there. I want You can't change that. I want Blink on iOS. I do. I seriously do. And maybe Gecko. I don't really want Gecko on iOS if we're being honest, but I want Blink on iOS.

And, like, come on. In the current US political landscape, there JS 0% chance of any regulation happening to make Apple do this. And Apple is not going to do this without a regulation telling them to because there's no incentive for them. They want to own the mobile space on on on Bos.

And JS long as Apple owns the mobile rendering space on iOS, you're missing out on the world of browser APIs and experiences that you could have off of WebKit.

Like, come on. Duh. Come on. Bluetooth? Mini, all kinds of stuff. Like yeah. It it drives me nuts. And then and then we all have to support, you know, Safari's jank and issues, all the time on every mobile browser, and there's really no incentive to use other mobile browsers other than Safari unless, of course, you, like, want to sync your bookmarks and stuff, and then you just pick the browser. They're all the dang same. I it's annoying.

Yep.

I will say one good thing that has also come out of these things is the part of these mandates is not just being able to use different browser engines, but it's also to make the users have a choice. So you set up an iPhone, you choose which browser you want to use. You don't just default to Safari, and you have to go download a new one.

And I think that's good. I think that's even though they're still rendering with WebKit under the hood, I do think that there's Oh, of course.

Way better, experiences when you're switching between between the two. I use Edge on everything right now, but maybe I should switch for for, 2026.

Yeah. You use Edge on your phone.

Yes. Yeah. I I do that because I just I want my history synced. You Node if I'm if I'm like, oh, I was on a website the other day, I wanna be able to start typing it in and Yeah. I get that. I found that. Or if I I have something on my phone, I can open it up on my desktop really easily.

I was using Yarn Mobile, which honestly sucks.

They had, like, a so weird feature where, like, a phone dialer would pop up even it's like their ARC assistant. Oh my god. Whatever they were doing with it, it Wes it's just idiotic.

But I I've just been on Safari, and I don't get my bookmark synced. And I'm just been, you know, living with Apple Pay.

The one killer thing that happened maybe six months ago is you can now use Apple Pay in other than Safari. Okay. Yeah. Wes. I hate when when web checkouts don't have Apple Pay, and then the, like, the one password credit card never works on a mobile. You know? And then the, like, Chrome or I I have the, like, Edge Chrome autofill as well for my credit card, and then ask me for, like, the three digit number. I don't know that number.

Bro. Yeah. Fill the whole thing in. Just You've got the information.

Pay is so beautiful.

Yeah. I know. Man, I'm using, Helium as my my browser on a day to day basis, and I would love just a Helium on iOS because, really, what's it what's it gonna do? It's just sync just to sync my bookmarks. That's specifically it. But Yeah. Yeah.

On a lighter note, this is really simple. Fractured JSON JS is a JSON formatter that formats JSON in a way that is is human readable.

Yay. And I absolutely love this. You do. The one thing I hate about Prettier and and all of those, like, Prettier compliant ones Mhmm. Is they put a raise on, like, one item per line, and that drives me nuts. Mhmm. Especially when you have things like like latitude, longitude or, like, you've got coupled values.

This formats it in a way that is much more human readable. And and as humans, we often read JSON. So this is pretty little Your code still? Sometimes. You know? Sometimes I read it. Yeah.

That's a little joke.

Is does this work with Prettier or any of that stuff, or is it just a dumb thing? I was just looking into it, and I was like, someone's gotta write, like, a plug in for

Oxlint or what is the other one that we're that clip got pretty popular over the over the holidays. Biome. Yeah. Someone's gotta write like a it's in JavaScript. Someone's gotta write a plug in for Biome or Oxlint that does this because I love this. And let me choose if I want my arrays to go on one ESLint. Or, like, I don't necessarily want them on one line. Sometimes they do because they wrap.

But I I wanna set, like Yeah. I don't know. Put put five items on a line and then wrap to the next line. Make it a dang matrix. Let me look at that thing. Yeah. Exactly.

I thought I would cover this as I've seen this pop up several times. This is a new Chrome permissions dialogue.

Look and they'll say, like, this website wants to look for and connect to any device on your local network, and that's kinda spooky when that pops up. So this is a new ish Wired software. Just been rolling out in Chrome.

Permission for local network access.

So when a website wants to be able to ping, fetch, whatever, like, a a local domain name on your network, it's going to now ask for that. And you might be saying, like, what the hell JS the point of that? Turns out, bad people were were using this for for malicious intent and for ad tracking, because a website like wire.com I don't know why this is popping up on wire.com, but they are obviously doing a fetch request to, like, a +1 92168 or, like, a dot local domain name or a local host. And if things on your network are not locked down or or if you simply just wanna check if they have them there, right, because you might get, like, a course error, but you know, oh, that device does exist there, then you know things about that your user's local network.

So like local routers, you could ping, IoT devices that you know have security vulnerabilities, you could ping that don't have core setup, lot of stuff like that. So this, in my opinion Interesting.

Is a very good because Oh, yeah. Almost never does a website actually need to access your local host. And if it does, then then you would know. Yeah. Of course. Like, I'm using this, WLED app, and it's gonna search my network for other instances of this LED controller. Or, I'm gonna try to connect to, like, a local printer or, I'm I'm running this thing on this port, but my back end is on, like, local host four five six eight. And and that's in development mode. That's that's gonna be fine.

Yeah. This is great. Yes. I I do I do like this. As much as I hate pop ups for all kinds of things, I certainly wanna know Node wired.com is trying to access

something on my local network for some reason. Do wish that like, you know, on on macOS, when you get a prompt or on iOS, when you get a prompt, they have a little description of why they want to use this.

I do wish you could put that in. But then, I guess, like, websites probably could maliciously

be like, we would we do this to pet bunnies. Yeah. Like, something's We're not trying to do it. We're not trying to, footprint you or whatever. Yeah.

Footprint

fingerprint.

Don't you leave footprints?

No. Like, I guess. But the word is fingerprint.

They did not leave foot footprints.

Footprints. Bread there's breadcrumbs. Is that what you're thinking about, like Hansel and Gretel? Leaving breadcrumbs,

footprints in the Sanity. Like

Yeah. I can see it. Yeah.

So that is the news for you today. What do you think? Do you think Firefox has shot themselves in the foot, or do you think it was totally necessary? Do you think we'll actually see an alternative rendering engine on iOS sometime soon? Let's say even within 2026, leave your predictions below. Let us know what you think. Let's get into sick picks and shameless plugs. I got a sick pick for you today, Wes.

I got a little it's a terminal e ink screen.

Oh.

And this thing is is dope. There's a little battery that lasts a long time, like months.

And the reason why this lasts months is because this thing is not updating often. It JS, like, hitting the web once every x amount of times. And the less you have it hit the web, the more, the more battery you're going to gain from it. But I have it set up with a number of plug ins, and it will change the screen every fifteen minutes or something like that. This one is our YouTube stats.

And so Oh, man. This will have our YouTube stats. It will have my calendar.

It will have, the the the web there's a web app where you can connect plug ins. You can write your own easily enough. I have my GitHub contributions.

I have how many days are left in the year. I have when is the next hockey game. I have all kinds of stuff on here.

That it just sits on my desk, and it's a just a nice little e ink screen.

And it it's just kinda cool. It's a nice little thing to have there with with no backlight and no concern about keeping it charged, like,

at all. I've charged it once since I got it. Just been sitting there. Really cool. Those e ink screens are so so cool. I often I look at them at the at the grocery store. You know? They've got them as the price tags at all of our grocery stores.

Yeah. And you you guys have that. Right? All your your price tags are in e ink now? I don't think so. Node Wes yeah. Not where I've been shopping. Yeah. Not at at Kroger or Costco.

In Canada, I would not not Costco, but pretty much the rest of our stores have e ink, which also drives me crazy because it means that they can run an algorithm on how much are people buying and just change the prices. Change dynamic pricing? Willy nilly.

I you know, I haven't been to Whole Foods or, as my in laws call it, Whole Paycheck.

I haven't I haven't been to Whole Paycheck in in a little while, so

there's a chance that they have it there. I don't know. But, yeah, at at at Koger or Costco, I don't see them. But I see them at the grocery store all the time, and I've I've looked into whether you can just use those because they're relatively cheap if you just put them in your pocket.

I'm joking. They're on on you can buy them on eBay relatively cheaply as well.

But still in ink screens? Node.

But they're, like, it's Take the paper. Deno nobody has cracked the encryption, which is probably also good that someone can't come into a store and just send,

like, data to these these screens. Oh, yeah. I would love it when you see, like, somebody has hacked the road signs to, like, change, you know, change it to say fart or something. Who knows? That that's always really good to me. Yes.

I'm gonna sick pick this little Arduino kit that I got for Christmas from my mother-in-law. This was really cool to build. So it's a little kit that allows you to build a cat, and it comes with a Arduino. It's actually an older Arduino, but it's it's still worked totally fine.

And then it comes with, like, tons of different IO pnpm, and I this was a very good learning opportunity.

I'm fairly comfortable with this stuff, but being able people are always asking me, like, what do I what do I do to to learn, like, microcontroller stuff? And I feel like this is probably a good kit, because it takes you step by step, but it also gives you appreciation for writing the Node, with all of the different IO inputs. You know? Like, how do you control a speaker with a microcontroller? How do you control servos? How do you control a little LED matrix? There's, I don't know, probably seven or eight different IO GPIO inputs on here, and it was really fun. The kids loved doing it with me. And, it's one of those things that Node that it's done, I'm sure I'm just gonna start pulling parts off of it for other stuff that I wanna work on. Sick. Cool. Let's shamelessly plug the Syntax on YouTube. If you're not watching this on YouTube, check us out at Syntax.

We're at Syntax FM on YouTube. We do more than just the video podcast. We do all kinds of stuff. We do fun, competitive coding games.

We do, just hijinks.

CJ Reynolds does incredible videos where he goes deep on topics. He he's got, one on dev containers. He's doing all kinds of really cool stuff this year. So follow us on YouTube.

And if you're watching this on YouTube and you're not subscribed, go ahead and just just pound that subscribe button. Like, subscribe, thumbs up, hit the hype button. There's, like, 18 buttons now you can hit hit them all. That'd be great for us. Thank you so much.