1) The idea of the web is that the boundary between consumer and creator is very blurred. It is a world-wide, distributed environment. Making the tool you consume also the tool to create empowers a lot of people. Consider yourself a budding publisher on a very bad connection in an emerging country: you download a browser to surf the web, and that one now also enables you to create something for it. Downloading xCode or Android Studio would take ages. For developers, this is also an advantage: you use the same browser your end users have. In the past developer add-ons interfered with the rendering of the page and the performance of the browser. This gave you false results.
2) Whilst devtools make any browser bigger in initial file size (including Chrome and IE), it is not a large part of the main download (fonts are actually a huge one). The performance hit is to the overall computation (much like a standalone tool would) but isn't impeding on the browser performance itself.
Not really comparable. Composer was a WYSIWYG editor for web pages; the WebIDE is an editor, but more importantly it manages the packaging and creation of manifest files of apps for you. I started with Composer and the output was so awful that I learned HTML instead. This doesn't hide any code from you or generates things you don't want. The templates of the apps are maintained by the community on GitHub.
X-Tag leverages the joint polyfill Google is the general maintainer of (Mozilla contribute code to it). It's the same one at the base of the Polymer stack.
Polymer, in comparison to Brick has a much more ambitious approach to being the framework to build apps with instead of aiding the creation of apps. Comparable with Dojo or .NET instead of jQuery.
I don't think that's really true about Polymer. It's still just a framework for creating custom elements. What features are you thinking of to compare to Dojo?
The big difference that I see is the template binding portion of Polymer which allows you to define an elements markup with data-binding template sort of like Angular.
This is one of the ads I have on my blog that came through an ad affiliate program. So yes, I have ads on my blog, which is my right as a content creator. You can, of course see this as a conspiracy or something evil. :)
I don't view it as a conspiracy, only a very strange thing to observe, for a number of reasons:
1. The only thing which clearly marks this as an ad is the comment just above it in the HTML. Which is strange for two reasons...
2. The lack of nofollow strongly suggests this isn't just an affiliate link, but a 'paid link exchange'. Of course, you could just be profiting from the affiliation alone, but I'm sure you are aware as an experience web designer that most search engines tend to frown on this sort of thing.
3. By not clearly marking the element as an advert, you are effectively using one of the same tactics that the "most aggressive and horrible ads" use. Yes, plain text is small font is utter love, thank you for that, but given you've just written a blog post about ad blockers, I'm guessing you must have also carefully considered this
4. You outright talk about "dark interaction patterns" - not labelling adverts clearly is one of them ;)
5. A core theme in your post is "think about what appears on your page and how it affects your design". I see no obvious topical connection, and if anything, essay writing services exist for quite the opposite reason typically.
Yes, I'm over-analysing this, and yes, I fully support your attempts to gain a little more income. To be honest, the biggest issue I have is the nature of the link - having many friends working in academia, and being white hat typically myself, I have serious ethical issues with essay writing services, and I do think the juxtaposition of that link with your article is rather strange.
You are totally right, I have moved the blog from my old domain wait-till-i.com to my name about a year ago and realised in November that all my ads got killed that way (see how I game that system) :)
This was the first to come in, and I felt rather torn about it. It was needed to get one in to get the affiliate program (which changed owners in between, another thing that is kind of fishy) kickstarted again.
The good bit about these is that all they want is a link. No JS, no Flash, nothing, which is why I considered them in the first place anyway.
Utterly fair points though, so here's a fat header above them and a nofollow on the link.
Frankly, I just messed this up as my job takes 120% of my time and I hardly ever have a good connection to mess with the internals of the blog. I'd rather write :)
