The author of this blog, James Robertson, passed away in April 2014. This blog is being maintained by David Buck (david@simberon.com).
Interesting - Google is baking Flash into Chrome:
The search-and-advertising giant announced Tuesday that it will bundle Adobe’s Flash player with downloads of the Chrome browser, putting Google in sharper opposition to Apple
Of course, with the popularity of the iPhone (and the seeming popularity of the new iPad), site developers are going to have to deal with the "no flash" problem anyway...
Look, another stern warning about browser problems - the only shock being that it's Germany complaining about Firefox, not IE:
The German government has issued a stern warning to web surfers telling them not to use Firefox because the browser contains a critical security vulnerability.
I simply can't see most people caring anymore. I switch between Firefox and Chrome (as both annoy me slightly differently). If I stick with one "too long", all my saved logins time out, and it's a royal pain in the neck to switch back. Yes, there are plugins (for Firefox) to manage that, but again, I can't be bothered. I think I understand why so many people have stuck with IE 6. While it certainly stinks, sticking to one tool likely makes their lives simpler.
Ever wanted to experience 1993 (at least the web part) again? Well, if you have a modern Linux distro, you can:
Github user Alan Dipert has posted the source code for NCSA Mosaic 2.7 on the code-hosting website. You can download it and run it on any modern Linux installation. It seems to run on Ubuntu just fine, though PNG support is a little wonky. The good news is that the folks on Github are actively submitting patches.
You'll have to ignore Google (or any modern search engine) to get the real feel, but there it is. It's hard to explain why those of us who were in that first wave of online users were so excited, given images like this:
Just seeing that "S" image brings back memories :)
Technorati Tags: history
There's been a new post to the Google "Gears Blog", explaining why they haven't said much about Gears of late. The main reason? HTML5 seems to be on track to provide the same features natively:
If you've wondered why there haven't been many Gears releases or posts on the Gears blog lately, it's because we've shifted our effort towards bringing all of the Gears capabilities into web standards like HTML5. We're not there yet, but we are getting closer.
It would be pretty nice to get rid of the hacks that exist for video, if nothing else.
Looks like it's Opera's turn to get a big Javascript performance boost:
Opera unleashed a beta version of its browser this morning, and 10.5 claims the lead over Google Chrome and Apple's Safari in the Javascript stakes. The speed improvement is down to a new Carakan ECMAScript engine.
With faster performance across the browser spectrum, browser apps are only going to get more ambitious.
Technorati Tags: javascript, opera
Google is making a good move to cut off legacy browsers (IE 6 being the main legacy browsre, but also the 2.x series of Firefox):
Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites. As a result you may find that from March 1 key functionality within these products -- as well as new Docs and Sites features -- won’t work properly in older browsers.
They have links to the latest generation of all the main browsers, so there's really no excuse to keep using something like IE6. Even if your corporate intranet was built for IE6 (like *cough* the one I have to use *cough*), IE7 and IE8 both do a fine job of dealing with that. There's really no reason to stay with a browser rev that came out with the launch of Windows XP :)
Technorati Tags: legacy browsers, google, web
The dev (unstable) build of Chrome for Mac now has extension support - I'm guessing that I'll be able to shelve Safari and Firefox on a more permanent basis soon. Not quite yet though:
The dev channel edition of Chrome lives up to its label; according to Laforge, the Mac preview crashes when the user adds a new bookmark folder if sync is enabled.
Chrome usage is going up, too - it's apparently up to 4.6% of all browser usage.
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