The New York Times ran an article last Friday about the struggles people have had using all those vaccination-appointment web sites. The biggest complaint? The sites “crash” because they have too much traffic. I’ve worked at a company that runs scaled-up web technology. We have a customer with a vast seasonal rush, with millions of users active at any time… Read more →
Year: 2021
Testing web apps that require https, like WebRTC and getUserMedia
You’re developing a web app on localhost. It uses one of the many Web APIs that require your page to come from an https origin (or from localhost). getUserMedia(), WebRTC, and the Web Authentication API are examples. The hard way Now you want to show it to a friend. Now what? Do you have to do all this? Register a… Read more →
Firefox has limited ability to handle H.264
The Firefox browser’s WebRTC and MediaRecorder functionality can handle H.264 (Advanced Video Codec) coding and decoding, but only with H.264’s constrained baseline profile. Other, higher, profiles just don’t work. And in Firefox’s WebRTC implementation (v87) attempts to use higher profiles fail more-or-less silently. Firefox works around all the patent issues with H.264 by using an automatically downloaded plugin called “OpenH264… Read more →
The WebRTC standard has landed. At last!
The WebRTC (browser-to-browser realtime conferencing) standard landed as a W3C recommendation version 1.0 on 26-January-2021. Thanks everybody who worked on it! Maybe there’s a future without adapter.js ! Read more →
Web Beacon API
There’s a sweet little function in web browsers called the Web Beacon API. It’s a simplified version of the XHR or Fetch API that does a fire-and-forget POST operation to a server. It’s nice for a few reasons. First, browser Javascript (front-end Javascript) can use it without any need to process results coming back. Just call navigator.sendBeacon(). If your page… Read more →
Something I learned
This is a series of posts about something new I learned. Read more →
Javascript exception tracebacks
Working with browser Javascript on mobile devices, I found myself needing to report exceptions back to a server. (It’s hard to see the browser console log on a mobile device without connecting it to a desktop machine). Here’s what I did to make a suitable object that can be serialized. To use this you’ll need stacktrace.js loaded in your web… Read more →
