Also – PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE refrain from building sites all in Flash! Treat Flash like you treat images – enhancement. #sbbuzz #
With the release of Firefox 3.5, I decided it was finally time to get serious about setting up a custom headline font on Speed Force. Cross-platform @font-face embedding in CSS is now possible on Firefox, Safari, the beta version of Opera, and (I think) Chrome. So I pulled out some bookmarks, looked for some fonts with licenses that allowed embedding, messed around with a test page and finally settled on two custom fonts: one for the post headlines, and one for the title and the sidebar section headers.
I tested it in a couple of browsers, both on my Linux desktop and on the Mac laptop, and planned to test it on the Windows desktop when Katie was done with it. But then something weird started happening.
Firefox started crashing. Repeatedly. Not quite predictably, but only when that test page was open.
I figured maybe it was a corrupted font, so I removed one, then the other, then both. If the page tried to download an embedded font, Firefox would eventually crash. If not, it was rock solid.
This seemed kind of bizarre for such a high-profile new feature to cause consistent crashing.
I did some searches online but didn’t come up with anything until I tried running Firefox from the command-line, so that I could read the error message. It complained, "firefox: cairo-ft-font.c:554: _cairo_ft_unscaled_font_lock_face: Assertion `!unscaled->from_face' failed." Searching for that led me to Fedora bug 509501 and bug 502274, and this blog entry.
To make a long story short:
So until Fedora ships a newer (or at least patched) version of cairo, my primary browser on my primary desktop will crash on any web page with an embedded font.
Nice.
I guess I could patch my own system for now and put the fonts up for the benefit of the rest of the Firefox+Safari+Opera-using audience on Windows and Macs (and probably other Linux distributions). But that means causing a crash for anyone else running Fedora 11 when they visit my site. I’m not too thrilled about that idea. I have no problem with adding enhancements that only appear under certain browser+os combinations, but actively crashing a browser? Not something I want to do.
Update (July 21): Aha! Fedora submitted an updated cairo for inclusion in the stable release last night!
Why is it that Firefox consistently truncates the title “Google Analytics” at the worst possible spot? #
Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 yesterday, for Windows XP and Vista. So if you’re still running IE6 it’s once again time to think about upgrading. (Assuming, of course, that you’re not locked in by corporate policy or another piece of software.)
IE6 is now two versions behind the current release.
IE6 is almost 8 years old (it was released in 2001).
IE6 is lacking in many capabilities that all other modern web browsers have, in web technology, in security, and in features you can use.
You can read a review at Wired, a write-up from the IE team, or a summary of technical changes from WaSP.
Of course, Internet Explorer isn’t the only option out there. There’s Firefox, Opera, Chrome and a host of other alternative browsers that are worth checking out.
If you’re still running Windows 2000 or some other old version of Windows that can’t run IE7 or IE8, I’d absolutely recommend Firefox or Opera. Either will be much better than IE6, both will run on Windows 2000, and Opera will even run on Windows Me and Windows 98 (but you really ought to move to something more current than Windows Me.)
![[Opera Logo]](http://www.alternativebrowseralliance.com/images/icons/opera.gif){kind=icon}
![[Chrome Logo]](http://www.alternativebrowseralliance.com/images/icons/chrome.jpg){kind=icon}
![[Firefox Logo]](http://www.alternativebrowseralliance.com/images/icons/firefox.png){kind=icon}
Just a reminder: Tuesday is Firefox Download Day, and Firefox is trying to set a world record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours.
It starts at 10:00 AM Pacific Daylight Saving Time (the Mozilla offices are in Mountain View, California), i.e. 17:00 UTC. You can use a time zone converter to figure out your what time that is in your own time zone.
Only full downloads count, so if you’ve been using one of the release candidates and want your download to be counted for the record, you’ll have to go to the website instead of just using auto-update. Edit: The Download Day page is swamped — just head to Mozilla.com for now.
And yes, Firefox 3 is good. I’ve been using the betas and release candidates for several months, and it’s a huge improvement over version 2!
Firefox: The new release candidate Firefox 3 RC2 is out. No date yet on the official launch, but they’re still saying June. Also, developers are starting to talk work that’s gone into what will become Firefox 3.1, such as completing CSS3 selectors support.
Opera: A new Opera 9.5 preview came out today, showcasing the browser’s new look. Also, the Opera Core team takes a look at what you can do if you put hardware acceleration on the whole browser.
Internet Explorer: IE8 beta 2 is scheduled for August. I’m looking forward to seeing what they’ve done, and figure I’ll start updating sites to accommodate changes. I held off changing too much when IE8b1 came out, because some of the differences were obviously bugs (triggering the Caio Hack, for instance; and yes, I reported it).
Flock has been moving ahead with small, rapid releases, adding integration for new services each time. They just added Digg and Pownce in Flock 1.2 a few days ago. Now they’re getting ready to start on Flock 2.0, which will merge in all the new capabilities of Firefox 3. That means it’ll get new rendering capabilities, better memory management, probably EV certs and such.
Last October I wrote about some milestones in web browser marketshare. Specifically, I was looking forward to IE7 overtaking IE6, and to Firefox overtaking IE6. Well, both of those have finally happened, at least on this site, and a little more besides. Take a look at these stats from May 2008:
| Usage | Browser | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 61.2% | IE (all) | |
| 35.7% | IE 7 | |
| 28.6% | Firefox (all) | |
| 26.4% | Firefox 2 | |
| 25.1% | IE 6 | |
| 4.7% | Safari | |
| 1.9% | Mozilla | (still not sure if this is SeaMonkey or a catch-all) |
| 1.4% | Opera | |
| 1.0% | Firefox 3 |
Back when I wrote the original post, I had a series of 5 or 6 milestones in mind, but decided to keep it simple and only post the first two. The next one after Firefox passing IE6 was for Firefox 2+ to pass IE6. I should have been checking in more frequently, since it already has.
So what’s next? Well, I expect to see the following in the next year or two:
Things I’d like to see, but am less confident about in the near-term:
Of course, these will probably all happen faster locally than globally, since the audience seems to skew slightly toward the alternatives, but then local stats are the ones that actually matter for a specific site.
For the upcoming release of Firefox 3, the Spread Firefox campaign is launching Download Day 2008: a campaign to set a world record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. Participants are asked to pledge to download Firefox 3 on the day that it’s launched. The exact date hasn’t been scheduled yet, but everything seems on track for June. (via The Mozilla Blog)
Update: The release date is June 17.
![[Opera Logo]](http://www.hyperborea.org/journal/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/opera-ooo1.gif)
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.
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.
