Brian Grinstead

The Visual Web Arena reddit app is a comprehensive reproduction of a forum website, with realistic content and a functional backend using Postmill. These sorts of web-environments-in-a-box are useful for both agentic evaluations and browser testing, where test cases often resist isolation into a static page, and testing on the live web is not reliable or reproducible.

The Visual Web Arena classifieds app is a comprehensive reproduction of a classifieds website, with realistic content and a functional backend. These sorts of web-environments-in-a-box are useful for both agentic evaluations and browser testing, where test cases often resist isolation into a static page, and testing on the live web is not reliable or reproducible.

I have some thoughts about what’s next for the Speedometer benchmark, after the Speedometer 3 launch a few months back.

While querying Custom Metrics in HTTP Archive it can be convenient to use JavaScript instead of SQL. Luckily there's a way to do this with BigQuery, which I learned reading the queries for the Web Almanac (link to all the SQL used to generate reports for the 2022 edition).

Here's a quick analysis I did for Speedometer 3 about the size of the DOM for some common news sites, in order to support the development of a test covering interactions within a complex news-like site.

Here are my notes from publishing https://bgrins.github.io/editor-tests/ from https://github.com/bgrins/editor-tests. There's an action at https://github.com/peaceiris/actions-gh-pages that makes this easy without setting up additional API tokens, but there are a few Vite specific steps worth noting.

Simple way to fetch the latest copy of a given URL from the wayback machine, without including the banner.

This is the twentieth edition of the XUL/XBL Replacement Newsletter. As of last week, we have 0 xul files in mozilla-central. We’ve also been scoping out the work remaining in "XUL Replacement", and have an update on post-XBL cleanups.

A couple of weeks ago, we landed a commit that took years of effort at Mozilla. It removed “XBL”, which means we’ve completed the process of migrating the Firefox UI to Web Components. It wasn’t easy - but I’ll get to that later.

This is the nineteenth edition of the XUL/XBL Replacement Newsletter. Lots to share this time - we're making progress on the remaining XUL replacement work, while also clearing out the XBL implementation from mozilla-central.