Category: Web

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The WaSP is reporting that Microsoft will end support and cease distributing Internet Explorer for the Macintosh at the end of January. It’s been about eight months since the latest version of Mac OS X shipped without IE, and almost three years since Apple launched Safari.

While there is an “end of an era” feeling to this, it’s kind of like losing the last veteran of World War I. It’s of more historical significance than anything else. When Microsoft released IE5/Mac, it was hailed as the most standards-compliant web browser available. But Microsoft abandoned it years ago.

Fortunately, not only is Safari a worthy successor, but there are other options as well. What’s great about the web browser field these days is that the major players are constantly improving their offerings and working toward greater compatibility. And soon any website that wants to cater to Mac users will no longer be able to fall back on “Just use IE!” They’ll have to test in Safari, and of course the easiest way to build a website that works in IE/Win, Safari, and Firefox (the two defaults and the major alternative) is to start with standards-based code in the first place—which improves compatibility with even more browsers. Users get more choices, and websites get more users. Everyone wins.

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I’ve been struggling to promote my new site, the Alternative Browser Alliance, since I launched it in August. It’s a tough sell. I get the most traffic when I post something visible on Slashdot and people follow the link in my signature. You can barely even find it in Google—search for “Alternative Browser Alliance” and blog posts about it show up ahead of the site itself! (On the other hand, it seems to be #1 for “alternative browser” on MSN. Not that it seems to be helping much.)

By contrast, Flash: Those Who Ride the Lightning pulls in tons of visitors. Last week I put up an article on the Three Dimwits, the Flash’s comedic sidekicks from the 1940s. Within 24 hours it had received more than 150 hits. Within 3 days it was the top result for “three dimwits” on Google.

Why the difference? Well, my Flash site is long-established and authoritative. More importantly, it fills a specific niche. You can find a zillion pages about web browsers. But there are only a handful of large sites dedicated to the Flash, and mine is the longest-lived of them, aside from DC Comics’ own site. And until I wrote one, I could not find a page anywhere that actually focused on the Three Dimwits, just a set of stubs and the occasional comment in articles about the Flash.

Last Thursday I posted a suggestion box on the front page of the site. The results have been interesting. The freakiest part was probably that the first suggestion came in just five minutes after I uploaded the form! There’ve been 22 suggestions in the first week, which I’ve divided into three categories. Continue reading →

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Worms of the future: someone on MySpace *ptui!* came up with an actual JavaScript worm using cross-site scripting exploits and XMLHTTPRequest. In 24 hours, the worm had forced 1 million users to add him to their friends lists.

Personally, MySpace bugs the heck out of me because it seems to have a culture that encourages embedding images from other sites. 18% of hits to hyperborea.org from other websites are from myspace. Admittedly that’s inflated by the fact that attempts to embed images from my Flash site redirect to the actual articles, so it’s probably more like 10%, but it’s still insane. Earlier this week I started blocking hits from MySpace to images posted on this blog, and I plan to do the same with the Flash images over the weekend. You like my photos? Great, link to my actual site! You like the scan I have of some movie logo? Great, copy it and upload it to your own site!

(via Slashdot)

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I’m launching a new browser switch site, with a bit of a twist. It’s promoting all alternative browsers, kind of like Browse Happy, but a bit more inclusive and aimed at a slightly different audience.

The idea is that a diverse browser “market”—one with three or four major browser suppliers all competing with each other—is the best way to maintain innovation and security. Anyone following the classic browser wars, the lull in IE development, and the sudden appearance of IE7 can see the difference competition makes for innovation. As for security… If someone can hit 90% of the world’s computers by hitting IE on Windows, we’re in trouble. But if they have to hit 30% each on IE, Firefox, and Opera, and even those are split among Windows, Mac and Linux, it’s a lot more effort for the bad guys.

I got the idea back in May, during some rather heated Firefox/Opera flame wars. It seemed to me that fans of the two browsers had more in common than they thought, if they’d just stop fighting each other. I worked on it during June, and launched a test version last month, asking for feedback from friends and from the Spread Firefox and My Opera communities*. It’s still not where I’d like it to be (Comic-Con, then procrastination), but after the net went crazy over Paul Thurott’s “Boycott IE” article I realized I’d better launch what I had and refine it later.

So, without further ado, I’m officially launching the Alternative Browser Alliance.

Alternative Browser Alliance

*I’ve since imported my comments from the post on Confessions of a Web Developer, my old blog at My Opera, because it was largely the same content. That’s why some of the comments here are dated earlier than this post.

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I recently picked up a new domain name for a stand-alone website I’ve been working on. Since I got a good deal from Yahoo last March when I registered googolplextheaters.com for $5/year, I went with Yahoo again. I was slightly annoyed to see the price was now $9.95, but I remembered $4.98 had been a promo price, and $10/year is still not bad. Heck, I remember when then-monopoly Network Solutions dropped the price of a domain name from $100 to $70.

Anyway, it seems that Yahoo still offers $4.98 domains—depending on how you get there. Some of their ads offer the lower price, and if you come into the service through the ad, you get the discount.

It’s kind of like an automatic coupon.

It’s also a bit annoying that I could have spent half as much if I’d clicked on a different link.

Still, it’s only a $5 difference. I spend that much on lunch.