Some good questions to ask: Can they show you some examples of past projects they've built in Webflow? Do some checking if their work looks good on smaller devices (Webflow cascades styles down from desktop, so mobile design can sometimes get overlooked) Are they using a class framework (e.g., Client-first, Mast, Lumos, or custom)? And are they comfortable building the site with a level of modularity that enables easy reuse of sections, components, and styles? This approach simplifies future design updates and makes it easier for your team to manage and expand the site after the handover. What's their approach to SEO in Webflow? What do they do to ensure performance and loading speed are optimized? Do they have a process QA and testing before launching a site? How do they handle client feedback and revisions? Do they have a process for educating you on how to use and manage the site they built?

A web browser that's a "user agent" is a comforting thought. An agent's job is to serve you and your interests. When you tell it to fetch a web-page, your agent should figure out how to get that page, make sense of the code that's embedded in, and render the page in a way that represents its best guess of how you'd like the page seen. For example, the user agent might judge that you'd like it to block ads. More than half of all web users have installed ad-blockers, constituting the largest consumer boycott in human history

The user agent is loyal to you. Even when you want something the page's creator didn't consider – even when you want something the page's creator violently objects to – your user agent acts on your behalf and delivers your desires, as best as it can.

A "faithless" user agent is utterly different from a "clumsy" user agent, and faithless user agents have become the norm. Indeed, as crude early internet clients progressed in sophistication, they grew increasingly treacherous. Most non-browser tools are designed for treachery.

By design, apps and in-app browsers seek to thwart your preferences regarding surveillance and tracking. An app will even try to figure out if you're using a VPN to obscure your location from its maker, and snitch you out with its guess about your true location.

A canny tech company can design their products so that any modification that puts the user's interests above its shareholders is illegal, a violation of its copyright, patent, trademark, trade secrets, contracts, terms of service, nondisclosure, noncompete, most favored nation, or anticircumvention rights. Wrap your product in the right mix of IP, and its faithless betrayals acquire the force of law.

The shift to platforms dominated by treacherous user agents – apps, mobile ecosystems, walled gardens – weakens or removes that constraint. As your ability to discipline your agent so that it serves you wanes, the temptation to turn your user agent against you grows, and enshittification follows.

We keep making it harder for bank customers to make large transfers, but so long as it is possible to make such a transfer, the scammers have the means, motive and opportunity to discover how the process works, and they will go on to trick their victims into invoking that process. Beyond a certain point, making it harder for bank depositors to harm themselves creates a world in which people who aren't being scammed find it nearly impossible to draw out a lot of cash for an emergency and where scam artists know exactly how to manage the trick. After all, non-scammers only rarely experience emergencies and thus have no opportunity to become practiced in navigating all the anti-fraud checks, while the fraudster gets to run through them several times per day, until they know them even better than the bank staff do.

additional security measures are trivially surmounted hurdles for dedicated bad actors and as nearly insurmountable hurdles for their victims

when a company can override your choices, it will be irresistibly tempted to do so for its own benefit, and to your detriment.

Cities are commonly mapped and surveilled like the internet, said to be made up of “networks” and clusters of “users.”

A City Is Not a Tree can provide us with some answers. As Alexander argued almost 60 years ago, our minds are inclined to categorize the world as a tree, but an organic society and city actually resembles a semilattice. And just like with a city, organizing the internet like a tree stifles it completely.

The internet hasn’t become a tree, but there are certainly those who would like it to resemble one. Both leading tech platforms and governments believe themselves to be capable of containing information and separating its parts. The process started in earnest after the Arab Spring (2010-2012), when it became clear that online activity could produce shocks with real-world consequences. A growing pessimism about technology in the hands of the public developed at the top, as the interests of both “public safety” and profit converged to more deliberately plan the internet and mediate its branches. Simply put, complex systems are easier to surveil when information is neatly siloed into branches. It also simplifies data collection for advertisers.

Overlap on the internet is made possible through search and indexing which has, in almost all cases, badly declined.28 Google, as the leading indexer, has been the prime target of enshittification despite its market dominance increasing.29 Additionally, most platforms are walled gardens that are not easily searchable, their content only being found because it was reposted in another walled garden. Platforms have an interest in making sure users stay in their domain as much as possible. This makes overlap especially difficult by design, and so much of the internet now exists as islands on the periphery as a result. Effectively, that which would make a semilattice of the internet dynamic and alive is being dismantled.

Like a city, the internet is a receptacle for life, and how it organizes itself has consequences for the psychological well-being of its users.

Replacing the lock icon with a neutral indicator prevents the misunderstanding that the lock icon is associated with the trustworthiness of a page, and emphasizes that security should be the default state in Chrome. Our research has also shown that many users never understood that clicking the lock icon showed important information and controls.

Every software framework you've ever used is in the abstraction game: it takes a general-purpose tool, picks a specific set of common use-cases, and puts up scaffolding and guard rails that make it easier to build those specific use cases by giving you less to do and fewer choices to think about. The lines between these three are blurry. Popular abstractions become standardizations.

This is also a very good reason to avoid viewport units, like vw or vh, when setting font size. Those are also static, and impossible to override by the user. At most, a value like calc(1rem + 1vw) might be acceptable, since that still contains rem as a base. Even then, however, I’d recommend using clamp() or media queries to set minimum and maximum values, as screen sizes often go far beyond what we might expect or test.

To differentiate between the two: 1rem is always equal to the browser’s font size—or, more accurately the font size of the html element. rem stands for “root em,” and the root of a webpage is the <html> tag. So, 1rem = whatever the document font size is. (Which, again, by default, is 16px, but can be overridden by the user.) em, on the other hand, is the font size of the current element.

1px is equal to whatever the browser is treating as a single pixel (even if it’s not literally a pixel on the hardware screen).