The browser war continues to rage unabated, with the end result being better products for us, the users. This past week has seen significant beta updates to my two favorite browsers: Chrome and Firefox. I’ve been playing with beta 1 of Mozilla’s Firefox 3.6. This new version of Firefox boasts improved performance, personas (the ability to easily switch between different skins for your browser), and updated support for web standards, including support for the Web Open Font Format (WOFF). Read the rest of this entry »
In this age of instant gratification, we are always busy and increasingly impatient. Even with the latest computer technology and ever-faster broadband speeds, most of us would still like do be able to get things done faster. Here are some buttons and bookmarklets for your browser that will help.
Save Things for Later
Sometimes we don’t have time to read entire articles or blog posts, but we don’t want to miss out on the information we’ve discovered. We all have some way of saving things to read later. Usually it entails simply bookmarking the link, either locally in the browser or, even better, online with a social bookmarking service such as Delicious. Read the rest of this entry »
We’ve written widely about the rejuvenated browser wars, with lots of innovation coming from the new Firefox 3.5 and Google Chrome. There is another browser that has recently been released in a new version 5.1: Lunascape. The new version is this browser’s first release optimized for English-speaking users (it’s from a Japanese company; I covered the alpha here).
The interesting thing about this browser is that it includes the three rendering engines that are found in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari/Chrome. There are a few reasons why this browser may be worth adding to your arsenal, even if you don’t use it as your default.
Read the rest of this entry »
Many of us have been using the Release Candidate of Mozilla’s Firefox 3.5 browser, which is a major upgrade to previous versions. Now, Mozilla has released a third Release Candidate, available for download for Windows, the Mac and Linux. Mozilla also has a post up about the release, although there aren’t a lot of clear details as to what, exactly, is new.
Mozilla’s post says only that the updates in Release Candidate 3 are in response to “user feedback.” The organization intends to move quickly toward a final release of Firefox Version 3.5. In all likelihood, the differences between this version and RC2 consist of bug and/or security fixes.
I’ve been steadily using both the betas and the Release Candidates of Firefox 3.5, and it’s both speedy and substantially more feature-rich. It’s stable, too. If you’re already running a Firefox 3.5 beta or Release Candidate version, you can obtain an update to RC3 by selecting “Check for Updates” from the “Help” menu. Here are the official Release Notes for more information.
We’ve written about Firefox, covered avant-garde niche browsers, and looked at the impending Google Chrome launch. But there’s a sizable community whose browser opinions we haven’t looked at: you, the web working public. When was the last time someone asked you what you wanted in a browser, as opposed to just handing you a new piece of whizbang software and telling you you’d love it?
Well, here’s your chance. Forget about Firefox extensions and IE rendering modes and Safari speed and Opera standards-compliance for the moment, and imagine you’ve got a line into the development teams. What features are you missing in the current crop of browsers that would actually make your life easier and more productive? What promises do you wish they’d deliver on? What would make you switch to a new browser for your own web work?
There are a lot of browsers out there beyond the few that most people code for. The most recent one I’ve run into is Navigaya, which might better be described as a Flash-based browser experience for those addicted to sensory assault. When you visit the Navigaya site (use full-screen for hte best experience), it starts playing music videos from a customizable playlist as wallpaper. In front of that, you can run a search (and see results from multiple engines at one) or browse the web.
While all that’s going on, you can explore the various menus and shortcuts that Navigaya has to chunks of web. These are customizable with your own links too, but the starting set is a good portal to many common sites, categorized into areas like “maps” or “fashion”. Their Category menu gives you browsable news from many sources at once, with headlines and videos as well. All in all, it’s a surprisingly engaging way to explore the web, though I don’t know that I’d try to use it when I wanted to get serious work done.
Now that Internet Explorer 8 is in serious beta, web workers who develop or design web pages are faced, once again, with a knotty question: which browsers (and which versions) do you design for? The basic problem is understanding your market: browser usage statistics are unreliable, but they all seem to agree that the market belongs to Internet Explorer and Firefox, with a smidge of Safari thrown in (Opera advocates, I know you’re out there, but with a usage number rarely cracking 1% in any survey, it’s tough to justify spending time on Opera-specific testing).
Even within those broad categories, though, the market is more fragmented than ever before: Firefox 2 and 3 are both in substantial use, as are IE6 and IE7. It’s worse in some markets; I have one customer who requires IE5.5 compatibility due to restrictions on browser version at a government agency. Some people want to address this by campaigning against IE6, but that still seems quixotic to me. With no end in sight to new versions, and intense competition in the browser market, it seems like this problem will only keep getting worse.
If you create web pages, what’s your testing strategy? What browsers do you consider important enough to check?
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
