Google shakes up the playing field with “Chrome”

Google introduced its newest offering, “Google Chrome” on September 2nd. This is a new browser designed from scratch for the web 2 and Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). As with all its other products, the great Google search capability is available throughout the browser with in integrated web search, history search and support for the various google services in built. Being the Google fan I am, I quickly downloaded it (About 40MBs) and tried it out. Actually i am writing this post on Chrome! 

The first thing you notice is the minimalist design of Crome. The menubars and other toolbars have given way to a more spacious environment to work in. The status bar at the bottom is gone too. One thing I like about this design is the lack of the Title bar, which I always thought was unnecessary!

The application itself is an evolution of the open source project, “Chromium”. And it builds on the Mozilla/Gecko engines and Apple webkit rendering mechanism. 

A great new development by Google is the new “Task Manager”, which can be used to check which web applications are using the highest bandwidth and system resources. I think it ll give RIA developers some encouragement to try and cut back on using resources heavily as the users will be able to see how good/bad their designs are. Additionally the tabs work as different browsers themselves with different address spaces and different threads, therefore a crash in one Web App would not crash the whole browser, only that particular tab. 

Google also advertises that Chrome has builtin support for google gears, But I tried it on WordPress, it did not work. However this may be because of a fault in WordPress’s ability to identify the browser. 

The browser is still in beta, however Google is using its infrastructure already available to test is on the whole web, using its “Chrome Spiders” which check for browser issues in web pages. Also the browser has inbuilt Phishing detection and detection of malware sites too!

Overall, I think Chrome’s stability, design, and usability is very good and the complete redisign of the Ajax framework makes it a definite browser to look at in the course of next few months.

The whole new look and feel of Google Chrome

IE7, not good enough

So now IE7 Beta 2 is finally out. And it really seems a whole lot like the IE7 beta “preview” that was out back in January. The differences are pretty minor. It looks like a pretty decent web browser, but it’s definitely not going to get me to stop using Firefox . No siree…!

I know it takes a long time to re-jigger your whole web browser, but by “late 2006″ it’ll be five years since IE6 was released. That’s kind of ridiculous, when you look at it that way. I know the company had to spend a bunch of man-hours fixing stuff for Service Pack 2, but five years?

Firefox is gaining marketshare steadily, converting more users with every passing month. Some switch because they fear the security problems in IE. I don’t really buy into that as an excuse. Internet Explorer does indeed support ActiveX , which is a means of running native code through your web browser. And like any native code, it presents a security risk. You shouldn’t run an ActiveX control any more than you would run an .exe you download from that website, because essentially that’s what it is. That’s also why you can do some really great stuff with ActiveX. But Firefox isn’t my browser of choice because it’s more secure. New versions of Firefox drop all the time with bunches of security fixes both big and small.

To be honest, the browser itself isn’t the weak point in online security. The weak point is viruses, Trojans, and other locally-run programs. ActiveX apps can install these things, but as long as you don’t click on that little bar on the top of IE that says “hey do you wanna run the ActiveX control on this page?” when you’re not sure it’s safe, you’re okay there. The real security risks come from downloaded warez, P2P apps, email attachments, and tons of other things your web browser can’t really protect you from. That’s not to say that browser security isn’t important. Crucial, even. It’s just that I don’t believe running Firefox is making my computer more secure than running IE.

But Firefox does so many other things right. Its interface is simple and attractive, but customizable if need be. Performance is good enough. The real kicker for me is the extensions. I don’t run many. But the number of options are many, and make it easy to customize the fox, whatever way you want to.

So I’m staying with Firefox. Who knows, maybe in the six months between now and release, IE 7 will do the things I want, or at least I will be able to easily make it do so. But where will Firefox be by then?

Rage against the IE 6

I recently started on this project to develop a site for the Electrical Engineering Society of the university. And all was going well, I tested the site out on Firefox, and it looked cool. But when I tried it out on Internet Explorer, it looked pretty half baked. The reason? I used purely standards compliant design with no tables and only the box model of CSS. It seems that IE has a lot of issues with the box model and many other standards compliant techniques. Now this was driving me up the wall because many users at the campus use IE because it is the default browser on Windows operating system. So I had to rethink the design to suit IE. This is not the only bug that IE6 has. Here is a list of them,

• The Box Model bug
• The Double Margin Bug
• No Min Widths / Min Height
• Stepdown bug (Normally when floating objects you can count on them lining up vertically until they break. That is, you could if you weren’t using IE 6. IE 6 appends a line break effect after each floated block element which will cause “stepdown”.)
• No Hover States (Most modern browsers support hover states on just about any element, but not IE 6. IE 6 only support the hover pseudo-class on anchor <a> elements,)
• No Alpha Transparent PNG Support
• And the list goes on and on and on…

This takes me to the point I am trying to make. We as web designers spend loads of time thinking and rethinking the look of a site, only to find that the site looks like crap on this horrible excuse for a browser known as IE 6 (Sorry about the language, it is just my anger talking!). I know all the web designers agree with me on this one.The time spent on hacks and workarounds for IE6 is time that should be spent on more useful things like improving the design and functionality of the site.

So if you are with me on this, All I am asking is to protest this monopoly of the IE 6 by switching over to a better browser such as Firefox, Opera or even IE7.

And for you webmasters out there who just want to voice your protest, just add the following code to your site with jquery to make your site look washed out on IE6. A neat little kick in the face of IE6 

/*
 *
 * Black'n'White plugin 1.0
 * $Date: 2008-06-17 15:38:15 +0200 (mar, 17 giu 2008) $
 * $Rev: 177 $
 * @requires jQuery v1.2.6
 *
 * Copyright (c) 2008 Massimiliano Balestrieri
 * Examples and docs at: http://maxb.net/blog/
 * Licensed GPL licenses:
 * http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
 *
 */ 

if(!window.BlacknWhite)
    var BlacknWhite = {}; 

BlacknWhite = {
    init     : function(options)
    {
        options = jQuery.extend({minor : 7}, options); 

           if(jQuery.browser.msie && jQuery.browser.version < options.minor)
            jQuery("html").css("filter","gray");
    }
}; 

jQuery(document).ready(function(){
    BlacknWhite.init();
    //BlacknWhite.init({minor : 8}); 
}); 

Wayback machine

There are search engines and then there are search engines. This search engine I am talking about is gonna knock your socks off! So keep reading. This is definitely one you’d wanna bookmark!

Imagine Google could time travel!  Pretty neat huh. That’s exactly what this search engine does. It gives you your search hits in chronological order. Just for fun, say you typed “www.google.com” in their search box. It will give you a list of results for the Google homepage in 1998,1999,2000… up to the present. Pretty cool huh? This is great for historians and web developers to see the evolution of the web in a whole new way. Also if you forgot to backup your site and the web host went down with your site. This is a great way for you to get your lost site back.It is all in the “Wayback machine”!

Looking at the look and feel of some of the old sites. You can’t keep from smiling at the primitiveness. But in those days, these sites were top notch. The best sites on the net.

Here are some well known sites with their past selves,

• Google.com [1998]>>

• Yahoo.com [1998]>>

• Sourceforge.org [2000]  >>

Additionally, the site is an online museum dedicated to all things wayback. You can get rare images, videos, audio etc.. All from this great site. So here is the site,

http://www.archive.org/

Fox the third is here

Well it is finally here. Firefox 3 with all its glory. Who needs Microsoft when you have kickass products like these. Thankz to Mozilla and the open source community! Firefox 3 is well worth the hype.

For me, Firefox is not only a browser, it is a success story that has proven for once and for all that Open source is the way of the future. Coming to the scene at a time when Microsoft had battered down the competition it had in Netscape, Firefox was the saviour of the internet for most of the commoners like us. Ever wonder what the internet would be like if only IE 6 was there? Ugh… I can’t even bear to think! Anyways, that is history… and Firefox my friends, is the future!

The browser has smashed its target of five million Firefox 3 downloads in 24 hours, acheiving a final tally of 8,290,545 downloads of the new browser, and reaching a market share that peaked at over six percent.

Mozilla was aiming to set a Guinness world record for the total number of downloads of a piece of software in a 24-hour period. As part of its marketing effort, it encouraged users to pledge to download Firefox 3 on its release, and to hold download parties.

Online metrics company Net Applications said market share of Firefox 3 peaked at 6.2 percent of all browser usage at 5am EDT on 19 June — less than 48 hours after release.

Just under 300,000 of the downloads in the first 24 hours came from the UK, with the vast majority — 6.5 million — from the US.

Did you miss out on the download day? See what happened here