Category: Web Browsers

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Lisa the Barbarian: A woman poses with a viking helmet and a sword…and an Opera Browser T-shirt. (via Espenao’s Opera the Barbarian)

CNET UK presents The 30 dumbest videogame titles ever, including “Spanky’s Quest,” “Ninjabread Man,” “How to Be a Complete Bastard,” “Touch Dic” and “Attack of the Mutant Camels.” (via Slashdot).

Cowboy Bebop at His Computer — examples of media articles (especially about pop culture) in which the reporters (and editors) clearly didn’t do their research. The title comes from a caption on a still from Cowboy Bebop. That’s not the character’s name, and the character in question is female. It probably is her computer, though.

Archeophone Records: Actionable Offenses: Indecent Phonograph Recordings from the 1890s. Comedians telling bawdy stories, recorded on wax cylinders. The write-up is PG, though the track list looks to be at least PG-13. Looked up after reading NY Times’ article on voice recordings from 1860 (recorded with ink on paper), which is also worth a read. (via Slashdot)

Edit: Forgot to list the (temporary?) resurrection of 1994-era home.mcom.com, the website of what was then Mosaic Communications Corporation and would soon be renamed Netscape. Subsequently picked up by Boing Boing and Slashdot. For more old web browsers, check out the Browser Archive at evolt.org. (via Justin Mason)

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Safari LogoGrabbed the new Safari 3.1 this morning, both at work (WinXP) and on the laptop at home (Leopard). Noticed that the website no longer says “Beta” for the Windows version.

Oddly enough, there doesn’t seem to be much chatter from the browser community about it, at least not on sites I follow from work. There may be 25 posts on my RSS reader at home, for all I know.

I wish Apple would make the release notes easier to find. I clicked on the “more info” link in Software Update at home, but didn’t have time to really read it. I wanted to check the list at work, but there’s no menu item, it’s not visible on Apple’s website, and their search engine hasn’t indexed it yet. I had to search Google, and found it from some random person’s Twitter post. (Oh, and Apple? As long as I’m giving you advice, you’re running your site on Apache. Apache has a feature called mod_speling [sic] that will automatically correct a single-error typo when someone hits your site. I highly recommend that you look into it instead of handing out a 404 error whenever someone’s finger slips.)

User interface seems mostly the same as 3.0.

Not sure if it’s new or I just never noticed it, but the history menu has an option to reopen all windows from the previous session. It isn’t the automatic recovery offered by Firefox or Opera, but it’s the next best thing—and quite handy for cases when, for instance, Norton Antivirus has just updated itself and popped up a “will reboot in X seconds” warning, which you didn’t see because you had too many windows open. *ahem*

I believe this is the first browser released that supports embedding TrueType fonts. (IE has been able to embed fonts for years, but you had to convert them first, which may be why you don’t see too many these days.) When WebKit first added the feature last fall, I tested it out on my Les Mis page.

I really like the new developer tools (Prefs→Advanced→Show Develop menu), especially the network timeline. This, combined with YSlow on Firefox (itself an extension to Firebug), will be extremely useful for optimizing site performance.

It gets 77/100 on the Acid3 test, much better than Safari 3.0, which only scored 39/100. WebKit looks like it’s on track to be the first engine to pass again, having hit 93/100 yesterday. Oddly enough, the Acid2 regression is still present on XP (need to compare to the Mac version it displays correctly on the Mac), with an orange band covering the eyes and the border to the right of that band red instead of black.

Another odd thing: when it’s really busy, it seems to revert to a standard window frame instead of its own skin.

Who wants to bet that .Mac will be one of the first webapps to really make use of offline storage?

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FirefoxOne of the biggest complaints about Firefox since 1.5 was released has been its high memory usage. Go to a forum anywhere and you’ll get people griping about “have they fixed the leak yet?”

It is, of course, much more complicated than that. There are caches, fragmentation, places where memory is used inefficiently, bunches of small leaks, leaks that only happen under specific circumstances, leaks in extensions, leaks triggered by combination of extensions, etc.—not one single leak that can be fixed. And then there was the unfortunate post in which one Mozilla developer (I’m too lazy to look up who) pointed out that 1.5 stored more information in memory, and that probably had a bigger impact on total memory size than actual leaks, which many people on the Internet jumped on as “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.” (Why should they bother to read what was actually stated, when they can just read a misleading but sensational summary?)

A lot of the small leaks were patched in bugfix releases for 1.5 and 2.0, but really big changes are coming in Firefox 3. Mozilla’s Pavlov has written a detailed post on Firefox 3 Memory Usage, describing the different categories of memory improvements that have been made in the Firefox 3 development cycle.

I wouldn’t be surprised to find that this is one of the big reasons Firefox 3 has taken so much longer than previous releases. I suspect it’s time well spent, though, and users will be happier with a later, lighter Firefox than with one that shipped earlier, but used just as much memory.

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Internet ExplorerInstalled the first Internet Explorer 8 beta. Some thoughts:

I’m impressed that it can import settings from Firefox & Safari.

It detected Firefox extensions and even offered to look up similar add-ons. Unfortunately it was a big long search string with all the titles, and therefore a useless list of results for things like cameras (yeah, how am I supposed to install a $1000 Nikon D80 on my web browser?) and the hint book for Splinter Cell.

Activities: My first thought was, “hey, they’re doing stuff with microformats!” Which is key to the underlying support (recognizing types of data and only offering relevant services, like maps for locations but not for book titles). But on the face of it, it’s a lot more like the way Flock integrates with various web services: Set up your blogging provider, and you can easily send stuff to your blog. Though right now they mostly have Microsoft-hosted services.

“Emulate IE7” appears to involve restarting in an alternate mode right now. I assume automatic switching is something planned for later betas.

Other than that, the UI seems about the same as IE7 so far.

It does indeed pass Acid2 (assuming the page isn’t swamped when you try to load it).

So, how else does its rendering differ?

Minor visual glitch: I have CSS-based banners on some pages (W3C validation, for instance), using spans with borders. If it’s on the last line of a page, IE will cut off the bottom border, because it extends past the end of the page. Other browsers show it. I’ve gotten around this in the past by adding a blank paragraph afterward, but now IE8 collapses the empty paragraph. That’s probably the correct thing to do, but it does mean adjusting things a bit. Not a big problem, though, because I’ve just noticed that it handles other pages fine, without the <p></p> workaround, which means that I’m probably already using a better solution elsewhere.

Several cases of re-styling UL lists seem to confuse it. The tabs running across the top of my Flash page, for instance, or the sidebar on the Alternative Browser Alliance. Others appear just as they do in other browsers (including IE7). This will bear investigation. (Edit: 2 different problems; see below.)

Still no sign of generated content. Beta 2? Please? Edit: according to CSS3.info, it does support generated content, but images don’t work (yet?). I’d been using this, progressive-enhancement–style, to add icons for outgoing links on my Flash site. It works in, well, everything else current.

Additionally: I’m surprised to see it so early, and to see it as a public beta and not something that required an MSDN login. And they had the sense to release a version for Windows XP! I was half-expecting it to be a Vista-only release, which would’ve been seriously annoying.

Further updates will be added below as I think of them.

It turns out the problem on the Alternative Browser Alliance menu wasn’t related to lists as I’d thought, but to a change in the CSS parser. For whatever reason, IE8b1 is susceptible to the Caio Hack (/*/*/ place code here /* comment */) normally used to hide CSS rules from Netscape 4. At this stage I should probably be able to remove it and not worry about NS4 anymore. (And it turns out that since I added media types to the link a while back, NS4 doesn’t even read the stylesheet in the first place!)

On the issue with the tabs on the Flash site, it looks like IE8b1 isn’t extending backgrounds beyond the text line on inline elements (oddly, also like NS4). This is probably what’s really going on with the CSS buttons I mentioned above. I’ll have to check which behavior is correct, but my money would be on the Gecko, Opera and WebKit interpretation. If so, this will probably be changed before the final release. If not, I’ll use inline-block instead. Which perhaps I should be doing anyway, except for the annoying fact that Firefox 2 doesn’t support inline-block and Firefox 3, which does, is still in beta.

I’ve reported the Caio Hack issue to Microsoft using their “Report a Webpage Problem” tool. The form emphasizes that you shouldn’t send anything that could identify you, so instead of reporting the problem on one of my own sites, I sent the page describing the hack. This probably means I reported it in the wrong way. 😕

It looks like Activities isn’t actually context-sensitive yet, since it’s offering to show me a map even when I’ve selected random prose instead of an address.

Having messed with it more than I probably should over the last 24 hours, I’ve come to a decision: During beta 1, any rendering problem I encounter in IE8b1 that works the way I want it to in Gecko, Opera, Safari and IE7, I’m going to assume is a bug in beta 1. I’ll try to narrow them down & report them when I have a chance, but I won’t actually change my sites’ code (except for retargeting IE-specific workarounds) until at least beta 2.

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The WaSP Buzz recently posted several links to CSS resources, including a rather thorough CSS Reference at SitePoint.

The ISC reminds us that IE7 will be pushed out to WSUS next week, which should help get rid of IE6. Yeah, I’d rather more people switched to Firefox or Opera, but I’m at the point where I’d love to be able to stop worrying about IE6’s shortcomings when trying to build sites. IE7’s shortcomings are much easier to work around. (Sorry to keep harping on this!)

The inventor of Norton Antivirus talks about computer security and has some rather interesting ideas on what policies are worth pursuing…and what policies aren’t. Long passwords? Great for protecting a stand-alone machine, but on a 10,000 machine network, they only need to crack one. Patch everything? Not every vulnerability gets exploited. I’ll have to read the Slashdot thread when I have time; that should be really *ahem* interesting.