Posted at May 6, 2014 by Nicholas C. Zakas Tags: Browsers, Internet, URLs Last week, there was a fair bit of furor when Jake Archibald wrote an article1 describing an experimental feature in Chrome that hides all but the domain name of the URL you’re on. The idea is very similar to what already happens in the iOS 7 version of Safari: once navigation is underway, the URL is hidden and only the doma

Posted at October 7, 2013 by Nicholas C. Zakas Tags: Architecture, JavaScript, Node.js, Web Server Front-end engineers have a rather long and complicated history in software engineering. For the longest time, that stuff you sent to the browser was “easy enough” that anyone could do it and there was no real need for specialization. Many claimed that so-called web developers were nothing more than g

Posted at September 19, 2011 by Nicholas C. Zakas Tags: JavaScript, Performance, Timer Those who have attended my talks on JavaScript performance are familiar with my propensity for using setTimeout() to break up long scripts into smaller chunks. When using setTimeout(), you’re changing the time at which certain code is executed, effectively yielding the UI thread to perform the already-queued tas

Posted at August 10, 2010 by Nicholas C. Zakas Tags: Asynchronous Download, Blocking, JavaScript It was just a couple of years ago that Steve Souders introduced the concept of blocking vs. non-blocking into the common lexicon of web developers around the world. His big focus was pointing out how <script> tags block the rendering of the page as well as the downloading of other resources. Obviously,

Posted at March 13, 2012 by Nicholas C. Zakas Tags: JavaScript, Strict Mode ECMAScript 5 introduced strict mode to JavaScript. The intent is to allow developers to opt-in to a “better” version of JavaScript, where some of the most common and egregious errors are handled differently. For a while, I was skeptical, especially with only one browser (Firefox) initially supporting strict mode. Fast forw