- 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.
- Neowin.net - Internet Explorer 9 beta due on September 15
Microsoft is also planning broader support for HTML5 in Internet Explorer 9 through its new script engine. Microsoft recently performed W3C Web Standards tests on IE9, including HTML5, SVG 1.1 2nd edition, CSS3 media queries, CSS3 borders & backgrounds, CSS3 selectors, DOM level 3 core, DOM level 3 events and DOM level 2 style. Microsoft, with the help of W3C, performed a total of 192 tests on a variety of browsers. Internet Explorer 9 scored 100% in all eight tests, while every other browser, except Firefox in DOM level 2 style tests, didn't score perfect in any of the test categories.
- delicious support forum - Firefox and Internet Explorer extensions
- Manipulating the browser history - MDC
HTML5 introduced the history.pushState() and history.replaceState() methods, which allow you to add and modify history entries, respectively. These methods work in conjunction with the window.onpopstate event.
- intellectual honesty and html5 : Christopher Blizzard
That’s right. If you’re not on Safari, then Fuck You.
- Microsoft CSS Vendor Extensions - IEBlog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs
As you may know, all browsers have a set of CSS features that are either considered a vendor extension (e.g. -ms-interpolation-mode), are partial implementations of properties that are fully defined in the CSS specifications, or are implementation of properties that exist in the CSS specifications, but aren’t completely defined. According to the CSS 2.1 Specification, any of the properties that fall under the categories listed previously must have a vendor specific prefix, such as '-ms-' for Microsoft, '-moz-' for Mozilla, '-o-' for Opera, and so on.
As part of our plan to reach full CSS 2.1 compliance with Internet Explorer 8, we have decided to place all properties that fulfill one of the following conditions behind the '-ms-' prefix:
If the property is a Microsoft extension (not defined in a CSS specification/module)
If the property is part of a CSS specification or module that hasn’t received Candidate Recommendation status from the W3C
If the property is a partial implementation
- How Microsoft Is Busting Its Own 'The Browser Is Part of the OS' Myth -- Redmondmag.com
Microsoft officials wish the company didn't have to support IE6 any more. It's time-consuming, costly and fraught with incompatibilities. But Microsoft can't simply pull the plug on IE6 for the simple reason that many of the company's most powerful business customers are still using it. These customers know IE6 doesn't comply with standards. They know that it's nowhere near as secure as later iterations of IE or some other more recently introduced browsers from Microsoft competitors. But there are some harsh realities surrounding IE6.
Some enterprise users built internal line-of-business applications around IE6 -- and are now stuck with it. Others are planning to run Windows XP into the ground -- or at least until 2014, when Microsoft officially ends support for it. And because IE6 is what's built into XP, that's what these companies are going to allow their users to run. Still, other firms have opted to use IE6 as a kind of blocking tool. They're counting on the Microsoft legacy brow
- A List Apart: Articles: Prefix or Posthack
Perhaps inevitably, there’s been some grumbling about these prefixes. There have been calls to drop them, or to collapse all the vendor-specific prefixes into a single prefix like -beta-. The primary pushback is that nobody really wants to write the same thing four or five times in a row just to get, say, rounded corners on an element.
While such grousing is understandable, it is exactly the inverse of what should be happening. We ought to praise vendors for using prefixes, and indeed encourage them to continue. Beyond that, I hold that prefixes should become a central part of the CSS standardization process. I do this not for the love of repetition, but out of a desire to see CSS evolve consistently. I believe that prefixes can actually accelerate the advancement and refinement of CSS.
- Mobile Browser Cache Limits: Android, iOS, and webOS » Yahoo! User Interface Blog (YUIBlog)
- Cross-browser kerning-pairs & ligatures
Improved handling of kerning pairs and ligatures in modern browsers using the text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; declaration.
- APNG - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Animated Portable Network Graphics (APNG) file format is an unofficial extension to the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) specification. It allows for animated PNG files that work similarly to animated GIF files, while supporting 24-bit images and 8-bit transparency not available for GIFs. It also retains backward compatibility with non-animated PNG files.
- Google Is Getting Better At Turning IE Into Chrome As Chrome Frame Goes Beta
Back in September of last year, Google unveiled an early look at an interesting (and rather hilarious) new project: Chrome Frame. What it does is take Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser and basically turn it into Google Chrome via a plug-in. Today, that plug-in has progressed enough that Google is graduating it to full beta status. “We think it’s really stable,” engineer Alex Russell tells us in noting the move to beta.
- Schneier on Security: Detecting Browser History
We analyzed the results from over a quarter of a million people who ran our tests in the last few months, and found that we can detect browsing histories for over 76% of them. All major browsers allow their users' history to be detected, but it seems that users of the more modern browsers such as Safari and Chrome are more affected; we detected visited sites for 82% of Safari users and 94% of Chrome users.
- Is Firefox Headed Towards A Massive Decline? Its Co-Founder Thinks So
Someone posted the following question to Quora recently: Will Firefox have double-digit market share in 3 to 5 years? Straightforward enough. Yes, says (outgoing) Mozilla CEO John Lilly. No, says Firefox co-founder Blake Ross. So far, Ross is winning the argument, according to the votes from Quora users.
- Paul O’Shannessy - blah. blah. blah. - How to Install Flash on Windows OR A Cleveland Steamer is a Better Experience
Pretend for a moment that a helpful Adobe customer service agent is helping your mother install Flash:
You need Flash! Go download it.
Oh and by the way, we’re going to trick you into installing some McAffee product that you don’t want! I mean, we’re not tricking you, we’re helping you…
Oh you’re using Firefox? We have an awesome way of installing Adobe products: an extension! You know that way you normally install things on a Windows computer, fuck it! Trust us, this is wayyyy better!
- WebKit2 – WebKit
WebKit2 has a different goal - we want process management to be part of what is provided by WebKit itself, so that it is easy for any application to use. We would like chat clients, mail clients, twitter clients, and all the creative applications that people build with WebKit to be able to take advantage of this technology. We believe this is fundamentally part of what a web content engine should provide.
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