Tech News - Front-End Web Development

Last month, Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo, a Debian contributor and developer talked about the Debian GNU/Linux riscv64 port at the RISC-V workshop. Debian, a Unix-like operating system consists of free software supported by the Debian community that comprises of individuals who basically care about free and open-source software. The goal of the Debian GNU/Linux riscv64 port project has been to have Debian ready for installation and running on systems that implement a variant of the RISC-V (an open-source hardware instruction set architecture) based systems. The feedback from the people regarding his presentation at the workshop was positive. Earlier this week,  Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo announced an update on the status of Debian GNU/Linux riscv64 port. The announcement comes weeks before the release of buster which will come with another set of changes to benefit the port. What is RISC-V used for and why is Debian interested in building this port? According to the Debian wiki page, “RISC-V (pronounced "risk-five") is an open source instruction set architecture (ISA) based on established reduced instruction set computing (RISC) principles. In contrast to most ISAs, RISC-V is freely available for all types of use, permitting anyone to design, manufacture and sell RISC-V chips and software. While not the first open ISA, it is significant because it is designed to be useful in modern computerized devices such as warehouse-scale cloud computers, high-end mobile phones and the smallest embedded systems. Such uses demand that the designers consider both performance and power efficiency. The instruction set also has a substantial body of supporting software, which fixes the usual weakness of new instruction sets. In this project the goal is to have Debian ready to install and run on systems implementing a variant of the RISC-V ISA: Software-wise, this port will target the Linux kernel Hardware-wise, the port will target the 64-bit variant, little-endian This ISA variant is the "default flavour" recommended by the designers, and the one that seems to attract more interest for planned implementations that might become available in the next few years (development boards, possible consumer hardware or servers).” Update on Debian GNU/Linux riscv64 port Image source: Debian Let’s have a look at the graph where the percent of arch-dependent packages that are built for riscv64 (grey line) has been around or higher than 80% since mid-2018. The arch-dependent packages are almost half of Debian's [main, unstable] archive. It means that the arch-independent packages can be used by all the ports, provided that the software is present on which they rely on. The update also highlights that around 90% of packages from the whole archive has been made available for this architecture. Image source: Debian The graph above highlights that the percentages are very stable for all architectures. Montecelo writes, “This is in part due to the freeze for buster, but it usually happens at other times as well (except in the initial bring-up or in the face of severe problems).” Even the second-class ports appear to be stable. Montecelo writes, “Together, both graphs are also testament that there are people working on ports at all times, keeping things working behind the scenes, and that's why from a high level view it seems that things just work.” According to him, apart from the work of porters themselves, there are people working on bootstrapping issues that make it easier to bring up ports, better than in the past. They also make coping better when toolchain support or other issues related to ports, blow up. He further added, “And, of course, all other contributors of Debian help by keeping good tools and building rules that work across architectures, patching the upstream software for the needs of several architectures at the same time (endianness, width of basic types), many upstream projects are generic enough that they don't need specific porting, etc.” Future scope and improvements yet to come To get Debian running on RISC-V will not be easy because of various reasons including limited availability of hardware being able to run Debian port and limited options for using bootloaders. According to Montecelo, this is an area of improvement from them. He further added, “Additionally, it would be nice to have images publicly available and ready to use, for both Qemu and hardware available like the HiFive Unleashed (or others that might show up in time), but although there's been some progress on that, it's still not ready and available for end users.” Presently, they are beyond 500 packages from the Rust ecosystem in the archive (which is about 4%) which can’t be built and used until Rust gets support for the architecture. Rust requires LLVM and there’s no Rust compiler based on GCC or other toolchains. Montecelo writes, “Firefox is the main high-level package that depends on Rust, but many packages also depend on librsvg2 to render SVG images, and this library has been converted to Rust. We're still using the C version for that, but it cannot be sustained in the long term." Apart from Rust, other packages use LLVM to some extent, but currently, it is not fully working for riscv64. The support of LLVM for riscv64 is expected to be completed this year. While talking about other programming languages, he writes, “There are other programming language ecosystems that need attention, but they represent a really low percentage (only dozens of packages, of more than 12 thousand; and with no dependencies outside that set). And then, of course, there is a long tail of packages that cannot be built due to a missing dependency, lack of support for the architecture or random failures -- together they make a substantial number of the total, but they need to be looked at and solved almost on a case-by-case basis.” Why are people excited about this? Many users seem to be excited about the news, one of the reasons being that there won’t be a need to bootstrap from scratch as Rust now will be able to cross-compile easily because of the Riscv64 support. A user commented on HackerNews, “Debian Rust maintainer here. We don't need to bootstrap from scratch, Rust (via LLVM) can cross-compile very easily once riscv64 support is added.” Also, this appears to be a good news for Debian, as cross-compiling has really come a long way on Debian. Rest are awaiting for more to get incorporated with riscv. Another user commented, “I am waiting until the Bitmanip extension lands to get excited about RISC-V: https://github.com/riscv/riscv-bitmanip” Few others think that there is a need for LLVM support for riscv64. A user commented, “The lack of LLVM backend surprises me. How much work is it to add a backend with 60 instructions (and few addressing modes)? It's clearly far more than I would have guessed.” Another comment reads, “Basically LLVM is now a dependency of equal importance to GCC for Debian. Hopefully this will help motivate expanding architecture-support for LLVM, and by proxy Rust.” According to users, the architecture of this port misses on two major points, one being the support for LLVM compiler and the other one being the support for Rust based on GCC. If the port gets the LLVM support by this year, users will be able to develop a front end for any programming language as well as a backend for any instruction set architecture. Now, if we consider the case of support for Rust based on GCC, then the port will help developers to get support for many language extensions as GCC provides the same. A user commented on Reddit, “The main blocker to finish the port is having a working Rust toolchain. This is blocked on LLVM support, which only supports RISCV32 right now, and RISCV64 LLVM support is expected to be finished during 2019.” Another comment reads, “It appears that enough people in academia are working on RISCV for LLVM to accept it as a mainstream backend, but I wish more stakeholders in LLVM would make them reconsider their policy.” To know more about this news, check out Debian’s official post. Debian maintainer points out difficulties in Deep Learning Framework Packaging Debian project leader elections goes without nominations. What now? Are Debian and Docker slowly losing popularity?  

Yesterday, the team behind PrimeNG, a collection of rich UI components for Angular, announced the release of PrimeNG 8.0.0. This release comes with Angular 8.0 support, a new feature called FocusTrap, and other quality improvements. Here are some of the updates in PrimeNG 8.0.0: Compatibility with Angular 8 The main focus behind this release was to support Angular 8. Currently, PrimeNG 8.0.0 does not come with Ivy support as there are various breaking changes for the team to tackle in 8.x. “It is easier to use Ivy although initially there are no significant gains, for library authors such as ourselves there are challenges ahead to fully support Ivy,” the team wrote in the announcement. This compiler is opt-in right now but in the future release, probably in v9, we can expect it to become the default. Currently, there are “no real gains” of using it, however, you can give it a whirl to check whether your app works right with Ivy. You can enable it by adding "enableIvy": true in your angularCompilerOptions, and restart your application. Another issue that you need to keep in mind is Angular 8’s web animations regression that breaks your application if you add import 'web-animations-js'; into polyfills.ts. PrimeNG 8.0.0 users are recommended to use a fork of web-animations until the issue is fixed. Other new features and enhancements A new feature called FocusTrap is introduced, which is a new directive that keeps focus within a certain DOM element while tabbing. Spinner now has the decimalSeperator and thousandSeperator props. A formatInput prop is added to Spinner that formats input numbers according to localSeperators. The FileUpload component uses HttpClient that works with interceptors. This is why the team has removed onBeforeSend and added onSend. Headers prop for FileUpload are introduced to define HttpHeaders for the post request. The ‘rows’ of Table now supports two-way binding. Read more about PrimeNG 8.0 on its official website. Angular 8.0 releases with major updates to framework, Angular Material, and the CLI 5 useful Visual Studio Code extensions for Angular developers Ionic Framework 4.0 has just been released, now backed by Web Components, not Angular

Yesterday, Google released Chrome 76 beta with number of features which includes blocking Flash by default, a dark mode, and making it harder for sites to detect when you’re using Incognito Mode to get around paywalls. https://twitter.com/GoogleChromeDev/status/1139246837024509952 Blocks Flash by default The Chrome 76 beta by default blocks Flash in the browser. Users still have the option to switch back to the current “Ask first” option in [chrome://settings/content/flash]. Per this option, explicit permission is required for each site after every browser restart. Changes to Payments API Chrome 76 has released a fix in the FilesystemsAPI to address how websites are able to detect if you’re using Incognito to get around a paywall. FileSystem API is updated so that “detect private mode” scripts can no longer take advantage of that indicator. Chrome 76 Beta now also makes it easier to use the payments APIs for self-signed certificates on the local development environment. https://twitter.com/paul_irish/status/1138471166115368960   Additionally, PaymentRequestEvent has a new method called changePaymentMethod() and the PaymentRequest object now supports an event handler called paymentmethodchange. You can use both to notify a merchant when the user changes payment instruments. The former returns a promise that resolves with a new PaymentRequest instance. Improvements for Progressive Web Apps Chrome 76 Beta makes it easier for users to install Progressive Web Apps on the desktop by adding an install button to the omnibox. On mobile, developers can now replace Chrome’s Add to Home Screen mini-infobar with their own prompt. PWAs will also check for updates more frequently starting with Chrome 76 - checking every day, instead of every three days. New Dark mode Chrome 76 Beta also adds the Dark Mode. Websites can now automatically enable dark modes and respect user preference by adding a little bit of extra code in the prefers-color-scheme media query. Other improvements Browsers prevent calls to abusable APIs (like popup, fullscreen, vibrate, etc.) unless the user activates the page through direct interactions. However, not all interactions trigger user activation. Going forward, the escape key is no longer treated as a user activation. Chrome 76 beta introduces a new HTTP request header that sends additional metadata about a request's provenance to the server to allow it to make security decisions. Lazyload feature policy has been removed. This policy was intended to allow developers to selectively control the lazyload attribute on the iframe and img tags to provide more control over loading delay for embedded content and images on a per origin basis. The stable release of Chrome 76 is tentatively scheduled for July 30th. You can read about additional changes on Google’s Chromium blog post. Is it time to ditch Chrome? Ad blocking extensions will now only be for enterprise users. Google Chrome will soon support LazyLoad, a solution to lazily load below-the-fold images and iframes. Mozilla puts “people’s privacy first” in its browser with updates to Enhanced Tracking Protection, Firefox Lockwise and Monitor

Last week, Mozilla, in an interview with German media outlet T3N, revealed its plan of launching paid subscription services in Firefox by October. By subscribing to this service, users will be able to access “premium” features like VPN and secure cloud storage. In the interview, Chris Beard, Mozilla’s CEO did not go much into details about the cost or new premium services and features that we may see in Firefox. However, he did mention two services: VPN and cloud storage. He said, “You can imagine we'll offer a solution that gives us all a certain amount of free VPN Bandwidth and then offer a premium level over a monthly subscription.” He further clarified that no costs will be charged for the currently free service. Mozilla started testing the waters last year by introducing a few paid subscription services. In October, it partnered with ProtonVPN to introduce a paid VPN service. This service was offered to a randomly-selected small group of US users at $10 per month. In February this year, it partnered with Scroll, a news subscription service that allows you to read your favorite news websites by paying a monthly fee. Now, the company is expanding its catalog to offer more subscription services in Firefox. “We want to add more subscription services to our mix and focus more on the relationship with the user to become more resilient in business issues,” said Chris Beard. Explaining the vision behind this paid offering, Dave Camp, senior vice president of Firefox, said in a statement, “A high-performing, free and private-by-default Firefox browser will continue to be central to our core service offerings. We also recognize that there are consumers who want access to premium offerings, and we can serve those users too without compromising the development and reach of the existing products and services that Firefox users know and love.” This news triggered a discussion on Hacker News. Going by the thread, we can say that many users are happy that Mozilla is upfront about this new business model. Several other users also commented about the list of features and services they would want in Firefox before they are convinced enough to pay for the subscription. One of the users commented: “Can confirm, I would pay for a version of Firefox with just four "features": - No Pocket anywhere in the code - No telemetry/experiments/ Normandy anywhere in the code - No network connections to third party hosts (other than websites I'm viewing) - No "discovery" feed / whatever they're calling the activity stream sponsored content thing now anywhere in the code Just let me monthly subscribe via Paypal or whatever, and give me a private build server link and tar.gz of the source.” You can read the entire interview on T3N’s official website. Mozilla makes Firefox 67 “faster than ever” by deprioritizing least commonly used features Mozilla’s updated policies will ban extensions with obfuscated code Mozilla puts “people’s privacy first” in its browser with updates to Enhanced Tracking Protection, Firefox Lockwise and Firefox Monitor

Last week, Mozilla announced the release of Firefox 67, with many performance enhancing features to make Firefox “faster than ever”. On Thursday, Nathan Egge and Christopher Montgomery wrote a blogpost explaining the importance of high performance, royalty free AV1 video decoder, called ‘dav1d’. This feature is now enabled by default on all desktop platforms of Mozilla (Windows, OSX and Linux) for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems. AV1 allows high-quality video experience with very less network usage. It’s files are 30% smaller than today’s most popular web codec VP9. AV1 is also 50% smaller than its widely deployed predecessor H.264. AV1 has the potential to transform how and where we watch videos on the internet. ‘Dav1d’ allows developers to rewrite critical sections in highly-parallelized SIMD assembly allowing higher performance and greater efficiency. This enables smooth playback of AV1 video in the browser with significantly less CPU utilization. In 2018, Matt Frost, head of strategy and partnerships for Chrome Media at Google had predicted that it would take another two years for AV1 to adopt wide scale. He had said, “Hardware support will likely come in 2020, as chip development typically takes two to three years”. However statistics prove that ‘dav1d’ can turn this prediction upside down. In the last few months, Firefox Beta has seen a remarkable growth in video playback after implementing AV1. Firefox Beta latest figures show 11.8% of playback proportion in April 2019, up from 3% in March and 0.85% in February. Looking at this growth, more websites are expected to take advantage of this next-generation video codec AV1. Image Source: Mozilla Hacks With its immense advantages, Mozilla has decided to invest in the future of AV1. Mozilla and Xiph.Org are jointly developing a clean-room encoder named rav1e (the Rust AV1 Encoder). This will help in increasing encoding gains, i.e., reducing the signal-to-noise ratio which in turn will allow software encoding fast enough for real-time applications like WebRTC. Rav1e will develop methods to make AV1 encoding tools 1000x faster by finding new algorithms, rather than simply optimizing existing code. https://twitter.com/waxzce/status/1132924406278307840 A user on Hacker News comments, “AV1's been making good progress in Firefox. A 1080p60 video has gone from being essentially unplayable in AV1 to now being almost perfect on my 5-year old, AVX2 enabled laptop in Firefox 68 beta” Visit the Mozilla Blog to know more about dav1d and rav1e. Firefox 67 will come with faster and reliable JavaScript debugging tools Firefox releases v66.0.4 and 60.6.2 to fix the expired certificate problem that ended up disabling add-ons Mozilla developers have built BugBug which uses machine learning to triage Firefox bugs

Yesterday, the Tor team announced the release of Tor Browser 8.5, which marks the first stable release for Android. Tor Browser 8.5 was also released for other platforms with more accessible security settings and a revamped look. https://twitter.com/torproject/status/1130891728444121089 The first alpha version of Tor Browser 8.5 for Android came out in September last year. After being in the alpha testing phase for almost 8 months, this version aims to provide phone users the same level of security and privacy as the desktop users enjoy. Announcing the release, the team wrote, “Tor Browser 8.5 is the first stable release for Android. Since we released the first alpha version in September, we've been hard at work making sure we can provide the protections users are already enjoying on the desktop to the Android platform.” The browser ensures security by preventing proxy bypasses. It comes with first-party isolation to protect users from cross-site tracking and fingerprinting defenses to prevent digital fingerprinting. Though the Android version was released with various security features, it does lacks some Desktop features that we will see coming in the subsequent releases. Across all the platforms, this version comes with improved security slider accessibility. Earlier it was behind the Torbutton menu, which made it difficult to access. Along with this change, the Tor Browser also comes with few cosmetic changes. The user interface is similar to that of Firefox’s Photon UI and also has redesigned logos. The team further shared that, the other most popular mobile operating systems, iOS will not be getting Tor Browser any time soon as it is too restrictive. Users can instead use the Onion Browser. Read also: Understand how to access the Dark Web with Tor Browser [Tutorial] You can download Tor Browser 8.5 from the Tor Browser download page and distribution directory. The Android version is also available on the Google Play Store. Read the full announcement on Tor’s official website. Mozilla makes Firefox 67 “faster than ever” by deprioritizing least commonly used features Firefox 67 will come with faster and reliable JavaScript debugging tools Mozilla developers have built BugBug which uses machine learning to triage Firefox bugs  

Yesterday, Mozilla announced the release of Firefox 67. For this version, the main focus of the Mozilla community has been to make Firefox “faster than ever” and also bring more privacy controls to the users. The updates include deprioritizing least commonly used features, suspending unused tabs, feature for blocking fingerprinting and cryptomining, and more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzqJ09_cn28 New updates in Firefox 67 Performing tasks at an optimal time by deprioritizing least commonly used features To make the browsing experience better, Mozilla identified the least commonly used features that could be delayed until the page is loaded. The updates include delaying setTimeout, a method used in JavaScript for timing events, to give more priority to executing scripts for things that users want to see first. The idea of delaying setTimeout for certain features has helped make the main scripts of sites like Instagram, Amazon, and Google searches execute 40-80% faster. This boost in performance is also because the browser now scans for alternative style sheets once the page is loaded and loads the auto-fill module only if there is a form to complete. Suspending unused tabs to prevent computer slow down We are all guilty of opening a number of tabs, which eventually slows down our computers. With this release, Firefox will be able to identify whether your memory is less than 400 MB and suspend unused tabs. If you want to visit the web page again, you just need to click on the tab and it will be reloaded where you left off. Fighting against online tracking by blocking known cryptominers and fingerprinters Last year in August, Mozilla announced that it will be introducing a series of features in Firefox to prevent online tracking. Living up to that promise, it has introduced a new feature through which you can disable fingerprinting and cryptomining. Browser fingerprinting refers to the technique of collecting various device-specific information through a web browser to build a device fingerprint for better identification. Cryptomining is the method of generating cryptocurrency by running a script in someone else’s PC, which leads to slowing down your computer and draining your battery. To use this feature, navigate to Preferences| Privacy & Security| Content Blocking. Then select Custom and check “Cryptominers” and “Fingerprinters” so that they are both blocked. Another way for enabling this feature is by clicking on the “i” icon in the address bar and under Content Blocking click on the Custom gear at the right side. Source: Mozilla Private browsing gets the convenience of normal browsing Private browsing prevents websites from tracking your online activity to some extent by automatically erasing your browsing information as soon as the session is over. Along with better online privacy, users will now be able to enjoy some of the convenience that you get in a typical Firefox experience. You will be able to access saved passwords and enable/disable your web extensions. Along with these improved user-facing features, this release also comes with faster and reliable JavaScript debugging tools for web developers. Visit the Mozilla Blog to know more in detail. Mozilla’s updated policies will ban extensions with obfuscated code Mozilla re-launches Project Things as WebThings, an open platform for monitoring and controlling devices Mozilla introduces Pyodide, a Python data science stack compiled to WebAssembly

Yesterday, Microsoft officially made the canary builds of Chromium-based Microsoft Edge available for macOS 10.2 and above. This announcement follows the release of canary and developer previews of Microsoft Edge for Windows 10 users last month. https://twitter.com/MSEdgeDev/status/1130624513035591680 Edge for Mac already surfaced online, earlier this month. A Twitter user, who goes by the name WalkingCat, shared download links for the developer and canary builds even before the official release. https://twitter.com/h0x0d/status/1125607963282948096 Updates in Microsoft Edge for macOS The macOS preview build comes with essentially the same features as the Windows one but is tweaked according to macOS conventions. These updates include changes in the fonts, menus, keyboard shortcuts, title casing, and other areas. This macOS version has rounded corners for tabs, which Microsoft plans to bring to Windows as well. Microsoft has also taken advantage of the macOS hardware features to provide user experiences exclusive to macOS. The macOS exclusive features include website shortcuts, tab switching, and video controls via the Touch Bar. Users will be able to access these features through the familiar navigation with Mac trackpad gestures. Source: Microsoft With this release, Microsoft aims to provide web developers with a consistent platform across different operating systems. This version comes with support for Progressive Web Apps that you can debug using the browser developer tools. Microsoft in the announcement wrote, “For the first time, web developers can now test sites and web apps in Microsoft Edge on macOS and be confident that those experiences will work the same in the next version of Microsoft Edge across all platforms.” Microsoft Edge Insider Channels Similar to Windows 10, the macOS preview builds will be made available through three preview channels: Dev, Beta, and Canary, that are collectively called Microsoft Edge Insider Channels. Source: Microsoft Canary builds are the ones that will receive updates every night. Developer builds are much more stable than the Canary builds and will be updated weekly. Beta builds are the most stable ones when compared to the three and will receive updates every 6 weeks. Right now only the Canary Channel is open, from which you can download the canary builds of Microsoft Edge. Microsoft says that the Dev channel builds will be available “very soon” to run alongside the canary version. You can share your feedback with Microsoft via the “Send feedback” smiley. To know more in detail, visit Microsoft’s Blog. Microsoft makes the first preview builds of Chromium-based Edge available for testing Microsoft confirms replacing EdgeHTML with Chromium in Edge

Last week, the Firefox DevTools Debugger team shared the recent updates in Firefox DevTools to make debugging of modern apps more consistent. They have also worked on making the debugger more predictable and capable of understanding common tools in web development like webpack, Babel, and TypeScript. These updates are ready for trying out in Firefox 67, which is planned to be released tomorrow (May 21). The team also shared that Firefox 68 will come with a more “polished” version of these features. https://twitter.com/FirefoxDevTools/status/1129066199017353216 Today, every browser comes with a powerful suite of developer tools that allows you to easily inspect and debug your web applications. These tools enable you to do a bunch of things like inspecting currently-loaded JavaScript, editing pages on-the-fly, quickly diagnosing problems, and more. The Firefox team has introduced many improvements and updates to these tools and here are some of the highlights: Revamped source map support Source maps provide a way to keep your client-side code readable and debuggable even after combining and minifying it. The new debugger comes with revamped support for source maps that now “perfects the illusion that you’re debugging your code, not the compiled output from Babel, Webpack, TypeScript, vue.js, etc.” To help developers generate correct source maps, the team and the community has contributed patches to build tools like Babel, a JavaScript compiler and configurable transpiler. Predictable breakpoints for effortless pausing and stepping This improved debugger architecture solves several issues that developers were commonly facing like lost breakpoints, pausing in the wrong script, or stepping through pretty-printed code. Now, they will also be able to easily debug minified scripts, arrow functions, and chained method calls with the help of inline breakpoints. Console debugging with logpoints Developers often resort to console logging (using console.log statements for printing messages to the console) when they want to quickly observe their program’s flow without having to pause the execution. However, this way of debugging can become quite tedious. This is why starting from Firefox 67, developers will have a new breakpoint called ‘logpoint’ that dynamically injects ‘console.log()’ statements into your running application. Better debugging for JavaScript Workers A web worker is a script that runs in the background without having any effect on the main execution thread of a web application. It takes care of all the laborious processing allowing the main thread to run without being slowed down. Firefox will now come with an updated Threads panel through which you will be able to switch between contexts and also independently pause different execution contexts. This will allow workers and their scripts to be debugged within the same Debugger panel. These were some of the highlights from the long list of updates and improvements. Check out the official announcement by Mozilla to know more in detail. Mozilla developers have built BugBug which uses machine learning to triage Firefox bugs Mozilla adds protection against fingerprinting and Cryptomining scripts in Firefox Nightly and Beta Mozilla is exploring ways to reduce notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

Yesterday, the team at TensorFlow introduced TensorFlow Graphics. A computer graphics pipeline requires 3D objects and their positioning in the scene, and a description of the material they are made of, lights and a camera. This scene description then gets interpreted by a renderer for generating a synthetic rendering. In contrast, a computer vision system starts from an image and then tries to infer the parameters of the scene. This also allows the prediction of which objects are in the scene, what materials they are made of, and their three-dimensional position and orientation. Developers usually require large quantities of data to train machine learning systems that are capable of solving these complex 3D vision tasks.  As labelling data is a bit expensive and complex process, so it is better to have mechanisms to design machine learning models. They can easily comprehend the three dimensional world while being trained without much supervision. By combining computer vision and computer graphics techniques we get to leverage the vast amounts of unlabelled data. For instance, this can be achieved with the help of analysis by synthesis where the vision system extracts the scene parameters and the graphics system then renders back an image based on them. In this case, if the rendering matches the original image, which means the vision system has accurately extracted the scene parameters. Also, we can see that in this particular setup, computer vision and computer graphics go hand-in-hand. This also forms a single machine learning system which is similar to an autoencoder that can be trained in a self-supervised manner. Image source: TensorFlow We will now explore some of the functionalities of TensorFlow Graphics. Object transformations Object transformations are responsible for controlling the position of objects in space. The axis-angle formalism is used for rotating a cube and the rotation axis points up to form a positive which leads the cube to rotate counterclockwise. This task is also at the core of many applications that include robots that focus on interacting with their environment. Modelling cameras Camera models play a crucial role in computer vision as they influence the appearance of three-dimensional objects projected onto the image plane. For more details about camera models and a concrete example of how to use them in TensorFlow, check out the Colab example. Material models Material models are used to define how light interacts with objects to give them their unique appearance. Some materials like plaster and mirrors usually reflect light uniformly in all directions. Users can now play with the parameters of the material and the light to develop a good sense of how they interact. TensorBoard 3d TensorFlow Graphics features a TensorBoard plugin to interactively visualize 3d meshes and point clouds. Through which visual debugging is also possible that helps to assess whether an experiment is going in the right direction. To know more about this news, check out the post on Medium. TensorFlow 1.13.0-rc2 releases! TensorFlow 1.13.0-rc0 releases! TensorFlow.js: Architecture and applications  

Yesterday, on the first day of Microsoft Build 2019, the team at Microsoft introduced WSL 2, the newest architecture for the Windows Subsystem for Linux. With WSL 2, file system performance will increase and users will be able to run more Linux apps. The initial builds of WSL 2 will be available by the end of June, this year. https://twitter.com/windowsdev/status/1125484494616649728 https://twitter.com/poppastring/status/1125489352795201539 What’s new in WSL 2? Run Linux libraries WSL 2 powers Windows Subsystem for Linux to run ELF64 Linux binaries on Windows. This new architecture brings changes to how these Linux binaries interact with Windows and computer’s hardware, but it will still manage to provide the same user experience as in WSL Linux distros With this release, the individual Linux distros can be run either as a WSL 1 distro, or as a WSL 2 distro, and can be upgraded or downgraded at any time. Also, users can run WSL 1 and WSL 2 distros side by side. This new architecture uses an entirely new architecture that uses a real Linux kernel. Increases speed With this release, file-intensive operations like git clone, npm install, apt update, apt upgrade, and more will get faster. The initial tests that the team has run have WSL 2 running up to 20x faster as compared to WSL 1, when unpacking a zipped tarball. And it is around 2-5x faster while using git clone, npm install and cmake on various projects. Linux kernel with Windows The team will be shipping an open source real Linux kernel with Windows which will make full system call compatibility possible. This will also be the first time a Linux kernel is shipped with Windows. The team is building the kernel in house and in the initial builds they will ship version 4.19 of the kernel. This kernel is been designed in tune with WSL 2 and it has been optimized for size and performance. The team will service this Linux kernel through Windows updates, users will get the latest security fixes and kernel improvements without needing to manage it themselves. The configuration for this kernel will be available on GitHub once WSL 2 will release. The WSL kernel source will consist of links to a set of patches in addition to the long-term stable source. Full system call compatibility The Linux binaries use system calls for performing functions such as accessing files, requesting memory, creating processes, and more. In WSL 1 the team has created a translation layer that interprets most of these system calls and allow them to work on the Windows NT kernel. It is challenging to implement all of these system calls, where some of the apps don’t run properly in WSL 1. WSL 2 includes its own Linux kernel which has full system call compatibility. To know more about this news, check out Microsoft’s blog post. Microsoft introduces Remote Development extensions to make remote development easier on VS Code Docker announces collaboration with Microsoft’s .NET at DockerCon 2019 Microsoft and GitHub employees come together to stand with the 996.ICU repository      

Yesterday, Mozilla announced that according to its updated policies, extensions with obfuscated code will not be accepted on its add-ons platform. It is also becoming much stricter regarding blocking extensions that fail to abide by its policies. These policies will come into effect from June 2019. Last year in October, Google also announced a similar policy, which came into effect with the start of this year, to prevent malicious extensions from reaching its extensions store. If you do not know what obfuscated code means, it is basically writing code that is difficult for a human to understand. Common practices of writing obfuscated code include replacing function or variable names with weird but allowed characters, using reversed array indexing, using look-alike characters, etc. “Generally speaking, just try to find good coding guidelines and to try to violate them all,” said a developer on Stack Overflow. However, obfuscated code should not be confused with minified, concatenated, or otherwise machine-generated code, which are acceptable. Minification refers to the act of removing all unnecessary or redundant data that do not have any effect on the output, such as whitespaces, code comments, or shortening variable names, and so on. “We will no longer accept extensions that contain obfuscated code. We will continue to allow minified, concatenated, or otherwise machine-generated code as long as the source code is included. If your extension is using obfuscated code, it is essential to submit a new version by June 10th that removes it to avoid having it rejected or blocked,” Caitlin Neiman said in a blog post. If your code contains transpiled, minified or otherwise machine-generated code, you are required to submit a copy of human-understandable source code and also instructions on how to reproduce that build. Here is a snippet from Mozilla’s policies: “Add-ons are not allowed to contain obfuscated code, nor code that hides the purpose of the functionality involved. If external resources are used in combination with add-on code, the functionality of the code must not be obscured. To the contrary, minification of code with the intent to reduce file size is permitted.” Mozilla also plans to take stricter steps for those extensions that are found to violate its policies. Neiman said, “We will be blocking extensions more proactively if they are found to be in violation of our policies. We will be casting a wider net, and will err on the side of user security when determining whether or not to block.” If users are already using the extensions which have obfuscated, once the policies are employed, these extensions will be disabled. Many developers are supporting this decision. One Redditor commented, “This is great, obfuscated code doesn't really belong anywhere in the frontend, since you have access to the code and can figure out what the program does given enough time, so why not just make it readable.” Read the announcement on Mozilla blog and to go through the policies visit MDN web docs. Mozilla re-launches Project Things as WebThings, an open platform for monitoring and controlling devices Mozilla introduces Pyodide, a Python data science stack compiled to WebAssembly Mozilla developers have built BugBug which uses machine learning to triage Firefox bugs  

Uber’s design and engineering team has introduced a universal system called Base Web design system, which was open sourced in 2018. Base Web is a suite of React components implementing the “base” design language quickly and easily creating web applications. At Uber, developers, product managers, operations teams, and other employees have to interact with different web applications on a daily basis. As all of these web applications function differently, it puts an additional overhead of learning how to interact with them most effectively. To reduce this time and effort, Uber wanted an universal system, which will act as “a foundation, a basis for initiating, evolving, and unifying web products”. Having a universal design system helps teams of engineers, designers, and product managers to easily work together. It also helps new engineers and designers to quickly get an hang of the possible components and design tokens used by a given engineering organization. One of the key reasons for introducing Base Web was to make it easy for developers to reuse components. Uber’s design and engineering team after talking to its engineers determined that they mainly needed access to: Style customizations The ability to modify the rendering of a component So, they introduced a unified overrides API, which comes with the following benefits: Eliminates top-level properties API overload There is no longer extra properties proxying inconsistently across the composable components Allows you to completely replace the components. Uber is now using Base Web across teams to create its web applications. “Open sourced in 2018 to enable others to experience the benefits of this solution, Base Web is now used across Uber, ensuring a seamless development experience across our web applications,” reads the announcement. To read the official announcement, visit Uber’s official website. Uber open-sources Peloton, a unified Resource Scheduler Introducing ‘Quarkus’, a Kubernetes native Java framework for GraalVM & OpenJDK HotSpot Uber and Lyft drivers strike in Los Angeles  

In January this year, Brave announced that it is previewing its new advertising feature, Brave Ads. It opened this feature to all users of its desktop browser for macOS, Windows, and Linux yesterday. Brave Ads is an opt-in digital advertising feature built with user privacy in mind. https://twitter.com/brave/status/1121081425254473728 Previously, we have seen many pay-to-surf sites, but most of them eventually disappeared because of the dot-com bubble. However, Brendan Eich, the CEO, and co-founder of Brave software is pretty confident about his plan. He said, “With Brave Ads, we are launching a digital ad platform that is the first to protect users’ data rights and to reward them for their attention.” He further adds, “Brave Ads also aims to improve the economics and conversion of the online advertising industry, so that publishers and advertisers can thrive without the intermediaries that collect huge fees and that contribute to web-wide surveillance. Privacy by design and no tracking are integral to our mission to fix the Web and its funding model.” Brave is working with various ad networks and brands to create Brave ads catalog inventory. These catalogs are pushed to available devices on a recurring basis. The ads for these catalogs are supplied by Vice, Home Chef, Ternio BlockCard, MyCrypto, eToro, BuySellAds, TAP Network, AirSwap, Fluidity, and Uphold. How Brave Ads work? Brave is based on Chromium that blocks tracking scripts and other technologies that spy on your online activity. So advertisements are generally not shown by default when one uses the Brave browser. Now, Brave Ads puts users in control by allowing them to decide how many ads they would like to see. It ensures user privacy by doing ad matching directly on the users’ device so that their personal data is not leaked to anyone. Out of the revenue generated by viewing these ads, users will get a 70% share and the remaining 30% will go to Brave. This 70% percent cut is estimated to be about $5 per month according to Eich. Users will be paid with Brave’s bitcoin-style "cryptocurrency” called Basic Attention Tokens (BAT). Users can claim these tokens at the close of every Brave Rewards monthly cycle. To view Brave Ads, users are required to enable Brave Rewards by going to the Brave Rewards “setting” page (brave://rewards/). Those who are already using Brave Rewards will get a notification screen to enable this feature. Once a user opts into Brave Rewards, they are presented with offers in the form of notifications. When users click on these notifications, they will be directed to a full page ad in a new ad tab. Right now, users can auto-contribute their earned rewards to their favorite websites or content creators. The browser will soon allow users to use BAT for premium content and also redeem it for real-world rewards such as hotel stays, restaurant vouchers, and gift cards. It also plans to bring an option that will let users convert their BAT into local fiat currency through exchange partners. Brave Ads have received a very mixed reaction from the users. While some compare its advertising model with that of YouTube, others think that the implementation is unethical. One user on Reddit commented, “This idea is very interesting. It reminds me of how YouTube shares their ad revenue with content creators, and that in turn grows YouTube's network and business...The more one browsed or shared of their data, the more one would get paid. It's simple business.” A skeptical user said, “I'm a fan of Brave's mission, and the browser itself is great (basically Chromium but faster), but the practice of hiding publisher's ads but showing their own, which may or may not end up compensating the publisher, seems fairly unethical.” For more details, check out the official announcement by Brave. Brave introduces Brave Ads that share 70% revenue with users for viewing ads Brave Privacy Browser has a ‘backdoor’ to remotely inject headers in HTTP requests: HackerNews Brave 0.55, ad-blocking browser with 22% faster load time and is generally available and works on Chromium

Yesterday, the Svelte community announced the stable release of Svelte 3. In this version, the team has worked towards moving reactivity into the language. Developers will now be able to write components in Svelte with significantly less boilerplate. Svelte is a component framework, similar to JavaScript frameworks such as React and Vue, but comes with an important difference. In the case of traditional frameworks, the major part of the work happens in the browser. On the other hand, Svelte shifts this work into a compile step that happens at the time when your app is built. Instead of relying on techniques like virtual DOM diffing, with this framework, you can write code that surgically updates the DOM when the app state changes. Rich Harris, the Svelte developer, says Svelte aims to be more like spreadsheets. “Spreadsheets are pretty cool and we should be more like them...Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the tools we use to build the web becomes as accessible as spreadsheets are? And, that is one of the Svelte’s overriding goals to make web development accessible...” What’s new in Svelte 3? With the introduction of hooks to React, many other frameworks also started to experiment with their own implementation of hooks. However, Svelte realized that ‘hooks’ was not the “direction they wanted to go in.” Explaining the reason behind not implementing hooks, Harris said, “Hooks have some intriguing properties, but they also involve some unnatural code and create unnecessary work for the garbage collector. For a framework that's used in as well as animation-heavy interactives, that's no good.” Because of these reasons, the team has reached the conclusion that Svelte does not require any API and has chosen to go with no API at all. “We can just use the language,” shared Harris. Not only just components, but the team has also given a completely new look and feel to Svelte in this release. They have also updated the logo, website, and also updated their tagline from 'The magical disappearing UI framework' to 'Cybernetically enhanced web apps'. To know more detail, check out the official announcement by Svelte. Applying Modern CSS to Create React App Projects [Tutorial] React Native development tools: Expo, React Native CLI, CocoaPods [Tutorial] React Native 0.59 is now out with React Hooks, updated JavaScriptCore, and more!