Hello. I am Paul Kinlan.

I lead the Chrome and the Open Web Developer Relations team at Google. Exploring the intersection of modern web design and future-facing technologies.

AI and Web Development

I've been thinking alot about how AI impacts the web

3 min read

Quick Console bookmarklet for Desktop and Mobile

This blog post introduces a simple bookmarklet that provides quick access to a webpage's JavaScript console logs, warnings, and errors directly on desktop and mobile devices. It eliminates the need for connecting to Chrome DevTools, especially useful for quick debugging on mobile. The bookmarklet creates a small, expandable element at the bottom of the page that displays console outputs and keeps a running tally. It intercepts calls to console.log, console.warn, and console.error, displaying the messages in the created element while preserving their appearance in actual DevTools. While not a full DevTools replacement, it's a handy tool for quick insights and debugging on the go.
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1 min read

Use Bookmarklets on Chrome on Android

For years, I thought bookmarklets weren't supported on Chrome for Android. Turns out, they are! You just need to access your bookmarks through the address bar, not the Bookmarks menu. This method retains the page context, allowing your bookmarklets to execute JavaScript properly. This opens up new possibilities for customizing web pages on Android.
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2 min read

Quick Picture in Picture Bookmarklet

I created a simple bookmarklet for quickly enabling Picture-in-Picture mode for videos, even on sites that disable it. Drag the "Quick PIP" bookmarklet link to your bookmarks bar. When clicked, it activates PIP for the first actively playing video on the page or in any same-origin iframe. The bookmarklet's code is concise and avoids polluting the global scope. It efficiently finds the first playing video and requests Picture-in-Picture mode.
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1 min read

Getting a list of Blink Components

This post provides a quick way to retrieve and filter the list of Blink components from a JSON file hosted by Chromium. The provided JavaScript snippets demonstrate how to fetch and process the component list, filtering for entries that begin with "Bli". The next step is figuring out how to programmatically get a list of OWNERS.
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1 min read

River Dee in Llangollen before and after heavy rain

I love driving through North Wales, especially Llangollen, a town nestled by the River Dee. In summer, the river's flow is gentle enough to paddle in (with caution!). But after a recent heavy rain (post-Storm Dennis), the river transformed! The power and height of the water were incredible, almost reaching the footpath wall. Check out Llangollen - it's worth a visit, rain or shine!
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2 min read

Scroll to text bookmarklet

Just saw that Scroll To Text Fragment is launching in Chrome 81! This feature lets you link to specific text within a page, which is awesome. I created a bookmarklet that grabs your selected text and generates a link using the new :~:text= fragment identifier. Drag the "Find in page" link to your bookmarks bar to try it out. The bookmarklet currently selects whole words, but I'm planning on adding some logic to handle partial word selections better. You can also easily modify the bookmarklet to copy the generated link to the clipboard instead of opening a new window.
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2 min read

What do you want from a Web Browser Developer Relations team?

Celebrating my 10th anniversary at Google working on Chrome and leading a Developer Relations team. As we plan for the next few years, I'm reflecting on how we can improve Developer Satisfaction. Inspired by recent feedback on Apple's developer relations, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on what a web browser developer relations team should prioritize. What can we do more of? Less of? How can we best support you and your team? Share your opinions, especially broad strategic ideas.
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4 min read

Thinking about Developer Satisfaction and Web Developers

This post discusses the importance of developer satisfaction, particularly for web developers, and how the MDN Web Developer Needs Assessment has influenced Chrome's web platform priorities for 2020. My hypothesis is that improving the web platform will lead to increased developer satisfaction, more content creation, and happier end-users. Based on the MDN survey data, key areas for improvement include browser compatibility, testing, documentation, debugging, framework integration, and privacy & security. Chrome is committed to working with the web ecosystem to address these challenges and increase developer productivity and satisfaction. We'll share more specific plans in the coming weeks and welcome your feedback on these focus areas and how Chrome can better engage with the developer community.
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2 min read

Hiring: Chrome Privacy Sandbox Developer Advocate

It's looking like 2020 will be a big year for Privacy across the web and our team (Chrome) is no exception.

Chrome has a rather large number of projects that are coming in the following years that will continue to improve the privacy of all users on the web and we need the help of an awesome Developer Advocate to ensure that the entire cross-browser privacy story is heard, understood and implemented across the web.

The Developer Advocate role will help to accelerate the adoption of security and privacy related primitives from all browsers (think about all the great work browsers like Firefox, Safari, Brave etc are doing) across the web ecosystem and to make sure that our engineering and product teams are prioritising the needs of users and developers. It's not going to be easy, because a lot of these changes impact the way developers build sites today; for example, the Same-Site change that is landing in Chrome imminently requires developers of widgets and anything that is hosted on a 3rd party origin meant to be used in a 1st party context, to declare that the correct SameSite attribute, lest they be automatically set to SameSite=Lax, which will restrict their usage slightly.

There's going to be a lot of work to do, so being able to work with companies, frameworks and libraries in the ecosystem is going to be a key part of this role.

If you're interested, my email is paulkinlan@google.com - or you can apply on the Job posting directly.

1 min read

Correct image orientation for images - Chrome 81

Chrome 81 finally fixes a long-standing bug where images taken in portrait mode on phones were displayed in landscape. Now, images will respect the orientation from the EXIF data by default, unless overridden with the CSS attribute image-orientation: none. Check out the demo!
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