IDLE detection API is now enabled by default in Chrome 94
Chrome dominates the desktop and mobile browser market despite the existence of a few interesting alternatives. Google Chrome is now more like a platform, kind of like a web virtual machine that runs the majority of business applications. So whatever happens in the Chrome engine, stays with almost the entire enterprise landscape of apps.
This time, despite privacy concerns raised by Mozilla and others, Google enabled user idle detection by default.
From a user experience perspective, it gives developers the option to react to the fact that the user is not interacting with the application and the browser. It can be used to reduce the frequency of refreshing the background information and thus be beneficial in reducing bandwidth and energy consumption.
→ Explore more how Avenga is a sustainable company
From the privacy perspective, it means that the user can be controlled even more than before. For example, the user going to grab a coffee, etc. can now be easily detectable and transmitted to the application owner/operator. I can already imagine additional telemetry and the source of terabytes of data to further build our digital native twins.
AWS makes ARM-powered Lambda functions generally available
In a quest toward more energy-efficient computing, the ARM architecture is being more and more embraced by the biggest players in the world. ARM64 moved from mobile devices to laptops and computers thanks to Apple with their M1 line. In the meantime, cloud vendors have enabled more and more workloads using better energy-efficient chips based on the ARM architecture.
This time it is Amazon enabling ARM Lambda functions on their famous serverless platform.
→ We dived deeper into Serverless computing, its promise vs reality
Let’s also treat this event as an important reminder for all of us about the multi-architecture future of business applications. It is still neglected in the majority of projects, but there’s a new option to switch/add ARM support and there will also be others soon.
Nice move towards greener computing. Of course, we also know there’s an economic reason behind it so I shed no tears of emotion, but maybe next time. Thanks nevertheless.
Windows 11 UX controversies
After the surprising announcement (Windows 10 was supposed to be the last version) of an update and the miscommunication about which hardware is going to be supported, now we are very close to the first public release of Windows 11.
Windows 11 looks beautiful . . . the visual clues from MacOS Big Sur, rounded corners, etc. all make it look very modern and fresh.
The dark side of the release is the amount and significance of … removed features. A highly advertised continuity feature called “timeline” has now disappeared, for example.
Placing the start button at the bottom center raised some controversy, but most of the people thought “ok, that’s the default, but I will move it wherever I want it”, but no, they won’t be able to do that (the only option is to move it to the bottom left).
Contrary to Ubuntu Linux, Google Chrome OS, Windows 10, Windows 7, and even MacOS (Apple is supposed to be the king in limiting customizability after all) . . . you cannot move the taskbar anymore to the left, top, or right of the screen. It always consumes precious vertical space now no matter if the user wants it or not.
Of course, the majority of users won’t probably care about it, but many will.
More than twenty thousand enraged users reported this as an issue using a feedback tool from Microsoft and demanded this feature be restored. There’s a lot of discussion about “why” and the main hypothesis is that Microsoft developers were unable to deliver it on time. The other is that one of their UX experts lost contact with the reality of the power users.
Many pro users, especially those with wide screens, are hoping Microsoft will listen to the feedback. Limiting the options for customizability in the operating system, which had them like . . . forever, is a real surprise but it also is affecting the vendor-customer relationship aspect.
We all like the new, more open, and friendly image of Microsoft, which took a long time to build, but the removal of so many features came as a surprise.
This entire release hasn’t started well for Microsoft, from a PR perspective. Something for IT marketing teams to learn from for the future.
I hope time and listening to feedback will heal the reputation of the most popular OS for business purposes.
There are so many fans of Microsoft at Avenga, including myself, and we are keeping our fingers crossed for a successful Windows 11 launch.
GNU wget2 is here
Wget is a tool known to all developers, DevOps, and administrators all over the world. It started in the dark ages of the internet when internet connectivity was unreliable and slow.
For those less technical, it’s a command-line Linux tool that automatically downloads files and web pages from the web. Now it’s available on MacOS and Windows.
It’s already a standard part of many automation scripts, installation guides, docker files, etc.
The venerable tool finally has a successor which has been written from scratch, based on modern standards, and with support for the newest protocols. A better modern wget2 will gradually replace wget.
The significance, from a business point of view, is not groundbreaking but the original wget was released in 1996, so it looks like it happens only once per quarter of a century.
So, rarely do we admit that our modern digital experiences are built on top of very reliable, proven, and open-source components which date back to … the 1990s.