K-Squared Ramblings

Browser Sniffing Strikes Again!

As the first major web browser to reach a double-digit version, Opera has been testing out alpha releases of version 10 for months now. One of the early problems they encountered was bad browser detection scripts that only looked at the first digit of a version number and decided that Opera 10 was actually Opera 1, and therefore too old to handle modern web pages.

After extensive testing, they’ve concluded that the best way to work around this is to pretend to be Version 9.80. From now on, all versions of Opera will identify themselves as “Opera/9.80″ with the real version appearing later in the user-agent string.

For example:

Opera/9.80 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X; U; en) Presto/2.2.15 Version/10.00

This is similar to the way all Gecko-based browsers identify themselves as Mozilla/5.0, then list the real browser name and version number later on, which makes me wonder why they didn’t just stick with that increasingly irrelevant prefix — though I suppose any scripts looking specifically for Opera versions might have still picked up Opera/10 later on in the ID.

It’ll be some time before Firefox or Safari runs into this issue, but with Internet Explorer 8 in wide release, you have to wonder…what will Microsoft do when they get to IE 10?

Retroactive Robots Exclusion

In going through to-do items in my mailbox, I stumbled on this post which I thought I had posted here, but realized I hadn’t. It may be out of date, but it may prove interesting, at least to someone.

I recently [edit: August 2006] discovered exactly how the Wayback Machine deals with changes to robots.txt.

First, some background. I have a weblog I’ve been running since 2002, switching from B2 to WordPress and changing the permalink structure twice (with appropriate HTTP redirects each time) as nicer structures became available. Unfortunately, some spiders kept hitting the old URLs over and over again, despite the fact that they forwarded with a 301 permanent redirect to the new locations. So, foolishly, I added the old links to robots.txt to get the spiders to stop.

Flash forward to earlier this week. I’ve made a post on Slashdot, which reminds me of a review I did of Might and Magic IX nearly four years ago. I head to my blog, pull up the post… and to my horror, discover that it’s missing half a sentence at the beginning of a paragraph and I don’t remember the sense of what I originally wrote!

My backups are too recent (ironic, that), so I hit the Wayback Machine. They only have the post going back to 2004, which is still missing the chunk of text. Then I remember that the link structure was different, so I try hitting the oldest archived copies of the main page, and I’m able to pull up the summary with a link to the original location. I click on it… and I see:

Excluded by robots.txt (or words to that effect).

Now this is a page that was not blocked at the time that ia_archiver spidered it, but that was later blocked. The Wayback machine retroactively blocked access to the page based on the robots.txt content. I searched through the documentation and couldn’t determine whether the data had actually been removed or just blocked, so I decided to alter my site’s robots.txt file, fire off a request for clarification, and see what happened.

As it turns out, several days later, they unblocked the file, and I was able to restore the missing text.

In summary, the Wayback Machine will block end-users from accessing anything that is in your current robots.txt file. If you remove the restriction from your robots.txt, it will re-enable access, but only if it had archived the page in the first place.

(Originally posted as a Slashdot comment.)

15 years of the Opera Web Browser

Hard to believe Opera has been around for 15 years. It’s only 14 since its first release, but 15 years ago two programmers started the project that became the Opera web browser.

I’ve been using Opera off and on for about 10 years. I think it was 1999 when a classmate showed me Opera 3.6, and how fast and small it was. (This was back when the installer fit on a floppy disk — and back when that actually made a difference.) I’ve followed it as they expanded from Windows onto Mac and Linux, onto high-end cell phones with Opera Mobile, and finally onto every Java-capable phone with Opera Mini. I’ve watched as they went from trialware to ad-supported to freeware business models. And while the desktop browser is no longer the speed demon it used to be, it’s been a consistent innovator in terms of both browser features and web capabilities.

So I’d just like to say: Happy 15th birthday, Opera! Just think, in a year, you’ll be old enough to drive!*

*In California, anyway. I think in Norway the driving age is 18.

Upgrading the Web: IE8 Released

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.)

Alternative Browser Alliance Update

Just a quick note: I finally got around to updating the Alternative Browser Alliance website. Not the full rewrite that I was planning to do two months ago, but at least it’s now current on things like Google Chrome, Firebug, Dragonfly, etc.

I’ve also released that site under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license, which should simplify matters for translations.

Finally, as a compromise between a full blog and little notes on the home page, I added another Twitter account, AltBrowser, where I’ll post not just site updates but random bits of news, comments, tips, etc. related to the topic.  I don’t have time to maintain yet another blog.  And I’m not convinced the net needs one.

I still hope to do that major rewrite, but this should bring it mostly up-to-date.

Dillo Web Browser Updated at Last: 2.0 Release

After several years of inactivity and a quiet relaunch earlier this year, the Dillo web browser has finally released Dillo 2.0.

The open-source project started in 1999 with the goal of creating a small, fast, highly efficient graphical web browser that could run well even on low-end hardware and software. It’s a UNIX application, and runs on Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc. Things stagnated when it became clear that GTK1 was going to vanish, and GTK2 would not fit the project goals, and eventually the browser was ported to the Fast Light Toolkit (FLTK).

If you’ve used Dillo before, some of the improvements in this release are multiple character set support (the old versions were Latin-1–only), tabbed browsing, HTTP compression, anti-aliasing, improved rendering and UI, and smaller(!) memory usage.

It does have its limitations, and a few major items stand out as missing when compared to other modern browsers:

• No CSS stylesheet support.
• No scripting.
• No plug-ins.
• Limited SSL support.

That said, it’s useful to keep around on an older system, or for situations where speed is more important than rendering, or to test how a website works without styles, scripts, and plugins.

I started building RPMs of Dillo for my own use back in 2002, and became the official RPM packager for the project the following year. I’ve posted Dillo RPM packages for Fedora 9, RHEL 3, RHEL 4, and RHEL 5. Other distros will have to wait until I get my build system out of storage or figure out how to convince mock to let me build two packages together.

Suggestions Wanted: Alternative Browser Alliance Relaunch

You may have seen my website, the Alternative Browser Alliance. I put it together in 2005, when flame wars between Opera users and Firefox users were at their height, to show that we shared a common goal: opening the web. The most popular page on the site is a list of web browsers, which is linked as a resource from a number of sites and also gets a steady stream of traffic from people searching for alternative browsers.

Of course, things have changed a lot since 2005, so I’m planning an overhaul of the whole site. Read the rest of this entry »

First Impressions of Google Chrome

Now that it’s live, I’ve downloaded the Google Chrome beta on my Windows box at work.  Thoughts so far:

Good:

• Site compatibility seems to be fine so far, with a couple of minor issues (see the “Bad” section).  Mostly I’ve tested it with a couple of forum sites, LiveJournal, Slashdot, and WordPress.
• I like the simple settings box, with “Basics,” “Minor Tweaks,” and “Under the Hood.”
• It does feel fast.
• Showing the URL of links in the lower left-hand corner is a perfect compromise between the spatial advantages of a permanent status bar and the extra room provided by leaving it out.
• I like the task manager for the browser itself.  It’ll be good for developers, but it’ll also be good for users: as the comic points out, if your browser starts chewing up all available resources, you’ll be able to tell what page/plugin/program is at fault instead of just blaming the browser.

Bad:

• Gears support doesn’t seem to work quite right.  WordPress.com doesn’t detect that it’s available.  Local WP installs with Bad Behavior can’t sync completely.  (It doesn’t send an Accept header on the request for one of the TinyMCE files, which causes Bad Bahavior to think it’s a spambot and triggers a 403.)
• Cookie management is too simplistic.  I like to accept all cookies temporarily, but clear everything when I end my browsing session, with exceptions for sites where I want to stay logged in.  This is easy in Firefox, a little trickier in Opera, and doesn’t seem to be an option in Chrome.
• I have seen it pause a couple of times, with as few as 5 tabs. [edit: these seem to be related to Flash content]
• No Incomplete spell-check.
• I keep hitting the forward-slash key to search within a page, since that’s the shortcut I’m used to in Firefox and Opera.

Summer of the Browser

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.

Web Browser Milestones Passed

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:

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:

• Firefox 3 replacing Firefox 2. It’s already got a strong pre-release following. (Fx2 will stick around while there are still Win98 and WinMe users, but they’re already at less than 1% here and falling.)
• Firefox 1 fading into the sunset in favor of newer, more capable releases.
• Netscape disappearing into history. (It’s already below 1% here.)
• IE6 dropping below 25%, 20%, 10% (watching it go to single digits will be satisfying), and finally 1%.
• Safari approaching 10%. It’s holding steady here, but keeps climbing globally.

Things I’d like to see, but am less confident about in the near-term:

• IE6 disappearing from the radar. There are hold-outs, both at the user and the sysadmin level, plus a sizeable minority on Windows 2000. Plus I think Microsoft is committed to supporting IE6 through the lifetime of Windows XP, which means they’ll keep shipping security fixes until 2014. On the other hand, IE 5.0 is technically still supported as part of Windows 2000, but I see very few IE5 visitors these days.
• IE8 replacing IE7, for most of the same reasons it’s taking so long for IE7 to replace IE6.
• Opera breaking out of its steady marketshare and hitting a solid 5%. That would make them much harder to ignore. (10% would be better, since Safari’s still struggling for recognition at 6%.) Of course, to get there they’ll have to pull off a major publicity coup.
• IE dropping below 50%. Could be done, but it’ll be tough. If there’s no majority browser, it’ll be very difficult to justify building a site for one browser only.

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.

Double-Digit Danger

Andrew Gregory points out that some browser detection scripts might have trouble when Opera 10 eventually rolls around. Why? Because one of the easiest, ways of testing for a version number is to do look for the the “Browser n” or “Browser/n” patterns. The problem is that this strategy only grabs the first digit of the version number. That works fine for 1–9, but once you hit 10, suddenly it looks like 1 again.

Firefox and Safari, currently at just before and just after 3, are likely safe for now, but IE is creeping up on 8, and with their new, faster release schedule, IE10 may only be a couple of years away.

I’ll admit, I’ve written code like that myself (not the specific example, but I’ve done regexp matches that only look at the first digit), but always on sites that I expect to be able to maintain. Of course, one of the lessons to learn from Y2K is that shortcuts get entrenched, and code you thought you’d have time to clean up long before it became a problem has a tendency to stay in use far longer than you expected. And we’ve seen the same thing with web script archives, where someone’s example code that mostly worked in IE4 gets enshrined as “the” way to accomplish something, even though there have been better ways that work more consistently for years.

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 »

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)