K-Squared Ramblings

Browser Bits

Avenicus compares Firefox 3 beta 5 to Opera 9.50 beta 2 on performance and memory usage. The surprise: Firefox 3 uses less memory than Opera 9.50. Clearly all the work Mozilla has done on cleaning up memory usage has paid off.

Codedread comments on Apple’s Web Inventions.

Asa Dotzler counteracts FUD about the safety of Firefox, Safari, and other alternative browsers. His main point: the key measure of security is not the number of vulnerabilities, but the window of vulnerability: the time between a hole being discovered and the patch getting onto users’ systems. (In addition to a responsive security team, automatic updates really help here.)

In just over a week, Opera’s new developer toolset, code-named Opera Dragonfly, will be ready for an alpha release. This will be a welcome addition, not just for developers, but ultimately for Opera users as well. Obviously, it’ll make it easier for web developers to debug compatibility issues, leading to fewer sites breaking in Opera. But it could also bring more people in. Firefox’s growth got started with recommendations by techies. If Dragonfly proves to be as good or better than Firebug, developers will spend more time with Opera, which could lead to recommendations.

Flash Sighting? Opera: The Fastest Browser Alive!

Opera Software has just released a new beta version of the desktop web browser, Opera 9.50 beta 2. The splash page makes me think of something a bit different, though:

Opera 9.5 beta
Speed, security, and performance matter.

Now, we’ve made the fastest browser in the world even faster. Opera’s new beta is quicker to start, faster at loading Web pages and better at running your favorite Web applications.

Hmm, a red and yellow blur, zooming across the view? And an emphasis on speed? That reminds me a bit of this guy:

Opera has long promoted itself on its speed, and it has used a super-hero theme in its advertising before. The vaguely Superman-like* “Opera Man” was used heavily in advertising Opera 8, despite being ridiculed by most of the browser’s user community.

So why not a subtle reference to the Flash?

*Blue costume + red cape. Hey, if a blue shirt and red jacket work for Clark on Smallville, you know the color scheme has become iconic.

Blocking IE6: You, Me and…PayPal?

On Thursday I stumbled across a campaign to Trash All IE Hacks. The idea is that people only stay on the ancient, buggy, feature-lacking, PITA web browser, Internet Explorer 6, because we web developers coddle them. We make the extra effort to work around those bugs, so they can actually use the sites without upgrading.

Well, yeah. That’s our job.

And a bunch of random websites blocking IE6 aren’t going to convince people to change. If I were to block IE6, or only allow Firefox, or only allow Opera, I’d have to have seriously compelling content to get people to switch. Mostly, people would get annoyed and move on. Who’s going to install a new browser just so they can read the history of the Flash? Or choose an ISP? Or buy a product that they can get from another site?

Slapping the User in the Face

It’s so easy for someone to walk away from your site. One of the tenets of good web design is to make the user jump through as few hoops as possible to accomplish whatever you want him/her to do. Every hoop you add is an obstacle. Too many obstacles, and they’ll just go somewhere else more convenient.

Back when I was following Spread Firefox, every once in a while someone would suggest blocking IE. Every time, people like me would shoot it down. Read the rest of this entry »

Joining Opera Watch

Daniel Goldman, who has been posting news about the Opera web browser at Opera Watch since 2004, has embarked on a new project that has kept him too busy for blogging full-time. So he’s launching the next phase of the blog as a group effort. And, I’m happy to say, he invited me to join as a contributor.

Thanks, Daniel, for the opportunity to be part of Opera Watch!

Now I need to think of something to write!

Beta Than Expected

I haven’t been following the progress of Fedora 9 very closely (possibly because it took me until last month to finally upgrade my home PC to Fedora 8), but as the release date of April 29 May 13 approaches, I thought I’d take a look at the release notes for an overview of what’s new. Of course there’s the usual upgrades to the various desktop environments, including, finally, KDE4, but something that surprised me was the inclusion of Firefox 3 beta 5.

Admittedly, Linux distributions often include non-final software by necessity. Many open-source projects spend years in the 0.x state not because they don’t work well, but because the authors don’t feel that it’s complete yet. (Often, a project will take their checklist and build feature 1, stabilize it, add feature 2, stabilize that, etc. so that you get a program that’s a stable subset of the target. Off the top of my head, FreeRADIUS was quite stable long before it hit 1.0, and Clam AntiVirus has been quite usable despite the fact that its latest version is 0.93.)

Lately, though, there’s been a tendency toward sticking with the latest stable release, at least for projects that have reached that magical 1.0 number. Sometimes they go even further. Only a year and a half ago, Fedora planned to skip Firefox 2 and wait for version 3. (Clearly, they expected Firefox 3 would be out sooner!) So it was a surprise to see that this time, Fedora has decided to jump on the new version before it’s finished.

Flocking from Netscape

When AOL first announced they were discontinuing Netscape, they recommended Firefox (a logical choice for many reasons). Since then, they’ve also started heavily promoting Flock—to the point of offering seamless upgrades from NS8 to Flock. (In theory, anyway; I fired up the copy I had for testing and couldn’t get it to do anything but update to the most recent 8.x version. Confirmed. I let it sit open in the background for a while, and it eventually popped up the offer for 1-click Flock migration.) Netscape 9 has an update notice that offers to download Flock or Firefox.

The key issue, of course, is moving as many users as possible from a discontinued browser—there’s no doubt that security holes will be found in it over time—to one that is actively maintained.

Why Flock, specifically? Well, sticking with the same toolkit and user profile makes migration easier, so that narrows the field to Firefox and Flock. (Not sure about SeaMonkey’s profile.) Since Netscape 8 and 9 were big on integrating with websites, Flock’s “social browser” seems a slightly better fit. And it turns out most of the Netscape 8 team went on to build Flock. Talk about social networking!

(via Flock: The Netscape Spirit Lives On)

Foolish Links

IE9 to include alternative CSS.2012 standard instead of following anything remotely like the rest of the world.

Social tagging initiative from WaSP to physically tag bad web designers.

Opera hits 106/100 on Acid3 after discovering an Easter egg in the test.

The openSUSE mailing list announced OpenSUSE 4.1, with KDE 4.1, GNOME 4.1, MP41 support, OpenOffice 4.1, XEN 4.1, VirtualBox 4.1, and a 4-in-1 CD install.

Added: The Electronic Frontier Foundation has sent out a newsletter detailing its findings on a Congressional Listening program (apparently they monitor citizens for their opinions—who knew?), plans to move the EFF offices to an armored zeppelin, an NSA-sponsored social networking site (to “allow ordinary Americans to instantly share their private data with the government”), and Homeland Security’s conclusion that Wikipedia is a “Larger Threat Than Terrorism, Dixie Chicks Combined.” Sadly, the newsletter does not appear to be archived on the website.

Added: Virgle, a Virgin/Google joint venture to establish a permanent colony on Mars. Now seeking applicants for Martian pioneers. Takes the Google moon base from 2004 to the next level.

Added: A co-worker pointed out that all of YouTube’s featured videos are Rickrolls today. And it looks like Google is going all-out with some 15 hoaxes today. *whew!*

The Internet Storm Center is keeping a list as well.

Techno-weird Links

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)

Opera on Acid3: 100% (and now WebKit too!)

We may soon have a winner! It looked like WebKit was going to be the first to pass the Acid3 test, passing 98 of 100 sub-tests earlier today, but internal builds of Opera pulled ahead, and have just reached 100/100!

This doesn’t constitute passing the full test, as the resulting page needs to look exactly like the reference image, but it means they’re very close.

These fixes won’t appear in the upcoming Opera 9.5, since it’s in the stabilization phase as it approaches release (just like any new Acid3-related changes in Firefox won’t make it into Firefox 3), but will probably find their way into the next major version.

We’re in the home stretch. Opera’s nearly there, but WebKit is close behind. WebKit could still catch up while Opera polishes off the rendering issues, in which case Safari would be the first browser to pass both Acid2 and Acid3.

Congratulations to the Opera team, and best of luck in the final lap of the race!

Update: Just a few hours later, and WebKit has caught up, also passing 100/100. And as they point out, it’s a public build, one you can download and try out yourself! The race to pass is going to be very close. Though at this point, it’s almost certain that WebKit will be the first to be publicly accessible.

(via CSS3.info. More at OperaWatch and The Good Life.)

Acid(2) Stare

After looking at how Safari 3.1 handles the Acid2 test, and finding that under some circumstances/platforms it fails the test, I realized: that one line, with the eyes, has been the cause of most regressions in browsers that previously passed the test.

Rows 4-5 test fallback behavior for objects. The idea is that if a page tries to load an external resource, but can’t—the file is missing, the server’s down, the network’s slow, the browser doesn’t have the right plugin, etc.—the page can provide alternate content. And it can be nested, so you can try, say, a video clip that falls back to an SVG image that falls back to a PNG that falls back to text. Read the rest of this entry »

Safari 3.1 - Quick Thoughts

Grabbed 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?

What’s Dynamic About It?

In my post on Webslices, I mentioned that the home page of my Flash site uses server-side includes instead of a static HTML file. But it doesn’t really update that often: maybe 3 or 4 times a month. Is it really worth building that file dynamically? Should I switch from SSI to something more powerful, like PHP, that will let me add headers so that repeat visitors won’t have to re-download the whole page except when it’s actually different? Or should I switch to a static file, with the same benefits but simpler? What am I actually building, anyway?

Looking through the code, I find:

Browser upgrade banners. People using old versions of Firefox (currently 1.5 or older) or Internet Explorer (currently 5.5 or older) get an “Upgrade to Firefox 2″ banner instead of the thumbnail of the current issue of the comic. This is just as easily done with JavaScript—and is done with JS elsewhere on the site. (I used to make some minor adjustments for other versions of IE, but I converted them all to conditional comments a while back.)

Last-modified date in the footer, pulled from the actual file. I’ve already got a script to update this in the static files, so it’s just a matter of adding it to my general update script. A two-minute, one-time change and I’ll never notice the difference.

Latest posts from this blog. Probably better done with an iframe, or maybe using AJAX. Drawback: either method would mean an extra request from the client. On the plus side, repeat visitors would be able to re-use the rest of the page, and only download the 5-item list.

Unique-per-day spamtrap addresses, hidden where harvesters might pick them up. But only a few of them still accept mail and feed it to filters. Mostly, they just waste spammers’ resources. I could easily either get rid of them or change the script to generate a new address with each update instead of each day.

So really, there isn’t much stopping me from using a static file for the most-viewed page on the site, with all the attendant savings in system resources, bandwidth, etc.

On the other hand, I keep contemplating switching to a database-driven system for the whole thing, which would make any changes now meaningless. But since I’ve been thinking about that since around 2000 or so, and haven’t changed it yet, that’s not exactly a blocker!

Update (March 30): I’ve made the conversion to a static file. The blog posts and browser upgrade banners are now done client-side (and run after the rest of the page is loaded), the last-modified date is part of the pre-processing script, and I just removed the daily spamtrap addresses. Now to see whether it actually improves performance.

Webslices and Revisiting Microsummaries

When the first Firefox 2 beta was released, I looked into Microsummaries, a feature that enables bookmarks to automatically update their titles with information. I concluded they were useful, but not for anything I was doing. The main application would be my Flash site, but it already had an RSS feed for updates, and a microsummary could only really include the most recent item.

Now the first IE8 beta supports Webslices. They’re similar in concept, but can include formatted data (not just plain text) and use microformat-like markup on the web page instead of a <link> element in the head.

I figured with two browsers supporting the concept, I’d give it a shot. I adapted the script I use to generate the RSS feed so that it will also take everything on the most recent day and generate a text file, which is used for the Microsummary title. For the Webslice, to start with I just marked up the “Latest Updates” section of the home page. Since I haven’t installed IE8b1 at home, I’m using Daniel Glazman’s experimental Webchunks extension for Firefox to try it out. Unfortunately the extension doesn’t seem to resolve relative links in its current state.

The real question, of course, is whether either technology offers anything better than what feeds can do now.

I think I’ll end up going the external-feed route for the Webslice as well, since it’ll use a lot less bandwidth than having a bunch of IE installations pulling the entire home page once a day. Plus since I’m using SSI on that page, it doesn’t take advantage of conditional requests and caching, and a static file will. But that’ll have to wait. Lost is on in 2 minutes, and after getting up earlier than usual this morning, I’ll probably be going to bed right after the show.

Update: I checked in IE8, and the webslice does work as expected. A few minor differences: Webchunks pulls in external styles, like the background and colors, while IE8b1 only uses styles in the chunk itself. Interesting bit: I’m marking up list items as entries, and IE8 is actually displaying them as a bulleted list, while Webchunks is simply showing the content.

So it at least works. Maybe tonight or Sunday I’ll see if I can refine it a bit.

Cleaning up Firefox’s Memory Usage

One 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.

(via Asa Dotzler)

First thoughts on IE8 Beta 1

Installed 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.