Phones are not made to be addictive. The gambling machines we happily install on them are. They employ simple psychological tricks to get you in, maximize your time spent and ensure that you return. It’s time that we become aware of these tricks, their repercussions, and fight back. — We were enjoying a lovely summer night, sitting on the seashores, talking and drinking beer. Moments passed just by us admiring the beautiful scenery. Then–a sound, my friend’s phone. An email was waiting for him on the lock screen. An email with bad news–work related. His mood shifted, he was…

HTML5’s responsive image implementation provides a fantastic tool to address the performance issue of image-heavy websites. But there is a crucial feature that is still missing. — Originally published at fabianstiehle.com. If you don’t know how responsive images work I recommend you read Eric Portis’ article on Smashing Magazine as I won’t go into the mechanics in detail. However, to remind you, a simple markup would look like this:

The iPhone X will replace Touch ID with Face ID; But what are the mechanisms that for years have been storing our fingerprints so safely? I took a close look. — Originally published at fabianstiehle.com. More and more data needs to be stored on mobile devices as users demand more and more convenience. However, this convenience comes at the price of privacy. The most prominent example of this contradiction might be the fingerprint sensor on many popular mobile devices.

Crucial for website performance is the critical rendering path, this article shines a light on browser rendering and provides tools and strategies to optimize for it. — Originally published at fabianstiehle.com Certain resources on websites are render blocking, the browser can’t paint the website without downloading and evaluating these resources. On many websites, the browser spends precious first-page-load time downloading and evaluating resources not necessarily needed for the rendering of the initial page. For good performing websites…