Hi, I'm Patrick, a product manager on the Edge web platform team at Microsoft. I'm responsible for developer relations, which means you'll typically find me publicly talking about the good work which our team is doing in Chromium and for the web.
Previously, I worked at Mozilla, on the Firefox DevTools team.
I'm part of the Open Web Docs governing committee and a co-chair of the W3C WebDX community group. I also run DevTools Tips.
I have 20+ years of working experience with the web and have worked as a designer, web developer, software engineer, browser engineer, engineering manager, and product manager.
One transparency value to rule them all, with CSS alpha()
The CSS alpha() function is now Baseline Newly available, so all 3 major browser engines support it, e.g. alpha(from red / 0.5). This fake OS uses it to drive a bunch of borders, backgrounds, and shadows that all react to the same transparency value in different ways.
Who shipped first?
Which browser engine, Chromium, Gecko or WebKit, shipped web features first? Totals, trend over time, and a feature list, built from the web-features dataset.
Fun never gets old: 30 years of creative constraints on the web
The early web was a playground. We hacked table layouts, sliced images, and spent hours on rounded corners. The tools were limited, but we made things anyway. Constraints fueled our creativity. That spirit is the web's most important legacy. In this talk, we'll trace an arc from Netscape-era hacks to modern web techniques, showing how creative abuses of technology can become the standards of the era. Along the way, we'll push today's newest features in ways they probably weren't designed for. Because it's fun and fun is how we learn, but more importantly, because that's how we make the web better together.
WebMCP: Stop scraping the web, start calling it (W3C TPAC developer meetup, Dublin)
Back to WebMCP, this time for the W3C developer meetup alongside TPAC in Dublin. Fitting, since WebMCP is being standardized at the W3C. Agentic browsing today works despite websites, not with them: agents scrape the DOM, guess where to click, and break when the UI changes. In this short talk, I argue that agentic browsing should be built by web developers, and show how WebMCP lets websites expose tools, where it shines compared to server-side MCP, and how to try it in Edge today. Come join the community group and help shape it!
Slides.
Help us shape device audio capture on the web
Capturing device audio only on the web today isn't great. getDisplayMedia doesn't only share audio, and forces users to select a screen to share. We want to improve this experience, and we have a proposal for a new API. Let us know what you think!
Opening the can of tooltips
Tooltips seem simple, until you look closer. The title attribute can't be styled and isn't accessible to everyone, while custom tooltips come with plenty of complexity. What would it take to build a native tooltip that's customizable, accessible, and easy to use, from plain text to rich HTML?
Blurry before beautiful: image previews for the web
Showing blurry previews while images are loading on the web is a very common pattern which we'd love to standardize at the browser level, so that all developers can use it with very little code and complexity. Let us know what you think!
