- Currently Listening to:
- Creedence Clearwater Revival — Lookin’ Out My Back Door
Like I imagine the majority of those users who migrated from a Windows PC to a Mac, Firefox has been my primary browser for the last five years (since Firefox 0.8 came out in February 2004). It’s so long ago now in web years that it’s hard to remember, but on Windows, back in those dark days, there really weren’t any options beyond the standard Internet Explorer 6 install.
Microsoft had lost interest in maintaining their browser, having secured 90% of the browser market. For web designers, this was a disaster. When Firefox emerged it was almost instantly better than IE in every regard, so it was an obvious choice. Nowadays, the three most advanced browsers — Firefox, Chrome and Safari — each have many strengths on which to recommend them.
When Safari 4 was released as a public beta in February, I decided to give it a try for a week. You all thought I was mad, many of you requested to be transferred to another peanut factory, but I’m still using it here two months later.
Safari’s main strengths are speed and stability. If you’re a tinkerer, a Firefox install has a Windows XP-style half-life, after which its performance continuously degrades and it becomes significantly more prone to crashing. I tried opening the Safari feature page in my new copy of Safari and my many years-old Firefox, and the difference in performance ellicited an honest-to-God laugh-out-loud. That almost never happens! (I should say that I’m open to the idea that I am wholly responsible for Firefox’s poor performance by loading my profile with too many extensions and customisations. One badly-written extension or Greasemonkey script and the browser can begin to drag.)
Safari is ahead of the game in other ways too though. Full-text search of your history with rendered thumbnails of each page is a killer feature. These are indexed by Spotlight as well and can be searched from apps like Launchbar. The Chrome-style new tab screen is excellent for keeping track of pages that change over the course of the day. The lack of a progress bar when loading a page is a very interesting departure which I find myself liking more as time goes on. The new tab bar does take some getting used to, and has been discussed at quite marvelous length elsewhere. I would favour one of the proposed mockups which give more space to the window controls.
There were two things about my Firefox setup that I did really miss when switching: keyword search from the location bar, and delicious integration. In Firefox you can just type directly into the location bar and it will do a Google search. Even better than that is using keywords to search specific sites — “wp Bell pepper” to open a Wikipedia page for example.
Safari can’t do any of that out of the box, but there is a SIMBL plugin that manages this very nicely, called Keywurl. Delicious support is provided by the Delicious Safari extension, which does the job admirably. Boom.
- YouTube - What is a Browser?
- Browser history hijack + social networks = lost anonymity
Simply joining a few groups at social networking sites may reveal enough information for hackers to personally identify you, according to some recent computer science research. In a paper that will be presented at a security conference later this year, an international team of academics describes how they were able to build membership sets using information that social networking sites make available to the public, and then leverage an existing attack on browsing history to check for personal identity. That information, they argue, can then be combined with other data to create further security risks, such as a personalized phishing attack.
- Someone at Microsoft is either really devious, or really dumb.
They need to shuffle a list of 5 items. Instead of writing a standard Knuth shuffle in a few lines of code, they do this:
var aBrowserOrderTop5 = new Array(0,1,2,3,4); aBrowserOrderTop5.sort(RandomSort);
function RandomSort (a,b) { return (0.5 - Math.random()); }
Answers on a postcard for why this is a really bad idea.
- The Life, Times (and Death?) of Internet Explorer 6 (Comic Strip) - Smashing Magazine - StumbleUpon
- Google to send Internet Explorer 6 users packing come March
Google is continuing to kill off support for Internet Explorer 6 in its services
- A Primer on Information Theory and Privacy | Electronic Frontier Foundation
It turns out that that "stuff" is quite useful for telling different people apart on the net. In another post, we report that on average, User Agent strings contain about 10.5 bits of identifying information, meaning that if you pick a random person's browser, only one in 1,500 other Internet users will share their User Agent string.
- ginger's thoughts » HTML5 video: 25% H.264 reach vs. 95% Ogg Theora reach
According to Statcounter’s browser market share statistics, the percentage of browsers that support HTML5 video is roughly: 31.1%, as summed up from Firefox 3.5 (22.57%), Chrome 3.0 (5.21%), and Safari 4.0 (3.32%) (Opera’s recent release is not represented yet).
- http://www.michaelvandaniker.com/labs/browserVisualization/
- a week with Chrome at found_drama
- Chrome grabs market share from IE and Firefox, passes Safari
We predicted it would happen, and it finally has: Internet Explorer 8 has surpassed IE6, easily the most hated version of Microsoft's browser among the tech-savvy, after passing IE7 the month before that. At the time, we also predicted that Firefox's steady gain would result in the browser passing the 25 percent mark in 2009, but alas, that will have to wait until sometime in 2010. Instead, Chrome was the big winner this past month, stealing third place away from Safari, while Opera remains in fifth place. In December 2009, only Safari and Chrome showed positive growth.
- 24 ways: Make Your Mockup in Markup
Crashing and text rendering issues suck, but we’ve learned to live with them. The real issue with using Photoshop for mockups is the expectations you’re setting for a client. When you send the client a static image of the design, you’re not giving them the whole picture — they can’t see how a fluid grid would function, how the design will look in a variety of browsers, basic interactions like :hover effects, or JavaScript behaviors. For more on the disadvantages to showing clients designs as images rather than websites, check out Andy Clarke’s Time to stop showing clients static design visuals.
- Aza’s Thoughts » Identity in the Browser (Firefox)
The browser is your personal and trusted agent to the web. It’s the only actor on the Internet stage which both knows everything you do on the web, and never has to let that data leave the privacy of your desktop. Your browser knows you (or, at least, should).
At Mozilla Labs, we’ve been working on some potential integrations of identity directly into the browser. Note, this is an extremely rough draft.
- Browser Size
- Please Scroll
- Chrome Extensions for Mac Coming Soon - PC World
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