The Bike Shed

473: Mental models for browsers

The Bike Shed

Show Notes

Joël prepares to write his new book by asking Sally some fundamental questions about Web browsers.

Together they look to answer the deceptively simple question of what is a browser, examining what they are at their core, what they’re capable of beyond basic functions, the nuances of programming for the web across different systems and devices on the front and back end, as well as unpacking the surprising benefits of different forms of browsers like the terminal text based platform Lynx.

—

Thanks to our sponsors for this episode Judoscale - Autoscale the Right Way (check the link for your free gift!), and Scout Monitoring.

Your hosts for this episode have been thoughtbot’s own Joël Quenneville and Sally Hall.

If you would like to support the show, head over to our GitHub page, or check out our website.

Got a question or comment about the show? Why not write to our hosts: [email protected]

This has been a thoughtbot podcast.

Stay up to date by following us on social media - YouTube - LinkedIn - Mastodon - BlueSky

© 2025 thoughtbot, inc. Support The Bike Shed

More from The Bike Shed

Oct 13, 2026

Debt metaphors abound! In this week’s episode of The Bike Shed, Aji and Joel ponder the question, what are risks in a code base?

Oct 6, 2026

Joël takes Bike Shed out onto the conference floor at RailsWorld as he interviews programer and streamer Rachael Wright-Munn, aka ChaelCodes.

Sep 29, 2026

In this week’s episode of The Bike Shed, Aji and Joël dive into the distrust around the phrase ‘programmer discipline’, why you cannot just rely on willpower, and how Static Analysis tools can help with not crossing boundaries.

Sep 15, 2026

The Bike Shed is BACK! Aji and Joel kick off this week’s episode with a fantastic combination of component bugs and how much headspace they take up, historic heraldry vs ChatGPT’S anchoring bias, before diving into the latest big development of the Dev world, Github’s release of stacked PR’s.

Jul 14, 2026

It’s time to play the music, it’s time to… get Aji and Sally together again. This week’s episode is a radical one, and a listener suggestion no less; let’s Muppet-cast a software development team!

See all episodes →