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Anselm is a freelance front-end developer who cares about sustainable front-end experiences and ethical choices in life. He writes the WDRL, and is co-founder … More about Anselm…

Web Development Reading List #186: Tor 7, Designing Depth, And Mac Ransomware

Quick Summary

Design is one of the most controversial things in our industry. There are barely any redesigns that aren’t discussed heavily in the community. Changing a well-working design is even harder as people tend to dislike anything new, but if we give them a bit of time, they might start to see things from a different perspective. Instead of following what everyone else is doing, we shouldn’t hesitate to leave the beaten tracks when designing — by creating a contrast-rich, deep design without using drop shadows, for example. Whatever you do, be sure to explore new options whenever you can.

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Design is one of the most controversial things in our industry. There are barely any redesigns that aren’t discussed heavily in the community. Changing a well-working design is even harder as people tend to dislike anything new, but if we give them a bit of time, they might start to see things from a different perspective.

Instead of following what everyone else is doing, we shouldn’t hesitate to leave the beaten tracks when designing — by creating a contrast-rich, deep design without using drop shadows, for example. Whatever you do, be sure to explore new options whenever you can.

Further Reading on SmashingMag:

News

  • Chrome 60 beta is available and brings us the Paint Timing API, CSS’ font-display property, the Web Budget API, and Credential Management API improvements.
  • Firefox 54 is out — and, thanks to a new multi-process architecture, with huge performance improvements. The update also brings us the new Web Extension APIs as well as CSS clip-path improvements with basic shapes.
  • A new version of Tor Browser was released, too: Tor Browser 7.0. The new version is based on Firefox 52 ESR and, thus, has multi-process mode and sandboxing on Linux and macOS (Windows coming soon) enabled.
Firefox Multi-Process Architecture
Its new multi-process architecture allows Firefox to run many simultaneous content processes in addition to a UI process. (Image credit)

Concept & Design

Designing Depth
Designing depth without any drop shadows? Scott Jensen shows how you can do it. (Image credit)

Security

  • Patrick Wardle found evidence that there’s a macOS ransomware spreading and wrote up the key facts about it. This shows that the Mac platform is growing and attackers start targeting users as well. Better be safe and have a valid, usable backup.

Work & Life

—Anselm