Archive for category Web

Browser Speed is not all about Load Speed

Jun 21

Posted by Pacoup in Web | No Comments

Have you ever had this weird feeling that although Google Chrome itself was quick, the page was dreadfully slow? If yes, it’s perfectly normal, because Google Chrome may be the worst in dynamic page render speed.

Hmm, what’s dynamic page render speed? Let’s explain:

Cold Start > When your browser is booted for the very first time
Warm Start > When your browser is booted after having been closed once or more
Tab Speed > How long does it take to open one or more tabs
Load Speed >  How long does it take to load a page
Dynamic Load Speed > How does the browser handle loading content on the page as you scroll through the page

Surprisingly, having a slow dynamic load speed can  make your browsing experience quite bad, especially on complex sites like IGN.com. I haven’t thoroughly tested this theory yet, but here are some preview results:

- Chrome > Frankly the slowest of all, like, really slow
- IE > Small amelioration over Chrome
- Firefox > Small amelioration over IE
- Opera > Significantly faster than Firefox

I haven’t tested Safari yet, or any of this scientifically, but Opera’s claim of “making you faster” might not be far-fetched after-all.

Left in the dust: IE’s demise

Jun 19

Posted by Pacoup in Web | No Comments

When Acid2 was released, it took a few months for Safari to pass it (webkit), a year for Opera (presto) and 3 for Firefox. Internet Explorer took 4 years, with the release of Internet Explorer 8.

Now that Acid3 is released, both Safari and Opera managed to pass it under a year, quickly followed by Google Chrome which also runs a build of webkit (Safari’s engine). Although not complete, beta versions of Firefox 3.5 are already ready near passing the test.

On top of that, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome’s latest versions all support the CSS 3 @font-face property, allowing custom fonts to be embedded in web pages. Some other CSS 3 niceties are being supported as well, such as multiple backgrounds, etc.

Internet Explorer is nowhere near.

Developer Frustration

The result is developer frustration. Since IE is still used by the majority of the world, supporting it is not an option if you want your web business to work. So because of one browser, you’re stuck on not using features which have been included in all major browsers since the dawn of time (CSS Tables, although finally supported on IE8) and you’re also stuck waiting another round for those newer features, like embedded fonts, that could make your website better.

Google, Chrome, Wave and HTML 5

Google knew what they were doing in picking Safari’s engine (it’s open source!) for Google Chrome. Afterall, webkit is the fastest moving engine out there, not only in terms of shear web page render speed, but also in terms of standard. Beating everyone else in the standards race isn’t new to Apple. Strategically, it would have been ideal if Google couldn’t have put their hands on that engine, speaking in Apple’s favor of course. But webkit wouldn’t be so advanced if it wasn’t for its open-source nature. Everybody wins in that case, especially developers. It’s one less browser to care for, because virtually anything that works in Safari works exactly the same in Chrome, and vice-versa.

Google is a fairly innovative company, but more specifically, they’re freaks of doing everything strictly withing the browser’s capabilities. Forget about RIA frameworks like Flex or Silverlight at Google, everything happens in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The prospect is interesting though: What happens when Google wants to do something that’s not yet possible in browsers? Wave.

As mentioned in their Google I|O presentation, Google Wave, literally e-mail re-invented, is a web application + protocol that needs HTML features that aren’t even in the HTML 5 spec. Of course, they managed to make it happen with JavaScript, but Google is still applying to put those specs in HTML 5, and considering their position and especially their participation in webkit, it’s almost guaranteed they’ll get anything they want in there, including very early support in Safari and Chrome.

If you watched the keynote about Wave, you’ll notice that it ran in Chrome and Safari, on Windows and Mac OS X respectively. It looks obvious at first, they both use the same engine, but wait, ask yourself that: Why didn’t Google show it for Firefox? Why did Google bother to show it on Safari at all? It’s almost a given what Google meant; webkit is the most advanced engine and not even Firefox could follow.

Is it possible Google, in both an effort at further eating away from Microsoft, and as a gift to the developer community, intends to leave the non-standard browsers, in other words IE, without support for Wave? They’d even have a very good reason to do it, and Wave is a protocol so Microsoft could just make its own IE-compatible Live Wave.

History Tells

It actually doesn’t tell much as of the current situation. In the 1990s, Netscape got eradicated by IE simply because Microsoft’s resources far outpaced anything Netscape was capable of. Internet Explorer was both more stable, free (Netscape wasn’t free until 1998), and especially more widely distributed; bundled with Microsoft’s OS, a first in that industry. Since IE won because of Windows, both on a finance and availability measure, attributing IE’s success to its engine isn’t very exact. That makes history totally irrelevant as far as the web industry goes right now.

It’s even more unclear how a browser manages to gather popularity since both reasons feed each other. The first is that the features are better and users like it more and the second is that developers prefer developing for that platform. The third might be accessibility (ie. bundling with an OS) but it doesn’t count in something that really makes the user switch.

As far as it’s going, Firefox has largely gained its popularity because of its clear superiority to IE 6. Tabs and better security, seen in the form of more efficient pop-up blocking, a stop to malware, and arguably speed, prompted people to switch to Firefox. However, brewing behind was the developer community, who suddenly realized there was much more out there than what IE 6 was capable of. Very quickly IE 6 became hated for its quirks and lack of proper functioning and the whole IE suite still retains that perception amongst developers today.

As the Mac increases in popularity, Safari becomes more popular, much in the same way IE originally won the first browser war. But Firefox keeps eating away from Internet Explorer’s market share while the others keep growing. Really, the only browser losing market share is IE. Some websites even lack support for IE completely and Firefox has recently seen its European market share get the majority. Developers even test their websites in IE after having developed them in Firefox.

Game-changing Mechanics

There’s a very inevitable game-changing mechanism coming up, if users see that their websites don’t work properly in IE anymore, they’ll switch. Take Opera for example, most users who’ve heard about it say they’ve decided to stick with IE/Firefox because Opera is broken; it doesn’t render pages correctly. The reality is Opera is a much less broken browser than even Firefox, it’s always been faster as adopting new standards and passing Acid tests, trailing behind Safari. But that doesn’t change the perception for a regular user that it’s not the website that’s broken but the browser.

Some less knowledgeable developers even talk about “fixing an Opera quirk” while it works very well in Firefox. In reality though, if they have to do that, they’re code is wrong, not the browser. Fixing an Opera quirk essentially means making your code right because Firefox interprets it wrong.

So theoretically, looking at IE’s state of support for standards and the speed at which it supports them makes it an ideal candidate for abandonment. Microsoft can keep doing all of their advertising, it doesn’t matter, the other browsers have better engines that very tightly keep up with one another more than ever. If Microsoft doesn’t invest serious energy into making IE a top browser engine, they’re going to lose the 2nd browser war, and probably much faster, because of Google, than the current rate of decrease.

Object Oriented CSS – A Primer

Jun 17

Posted by Pacoup in Web, Web Developement | No Comments

Preface

Object Oriented CSS (OOCSS) has recently made some buzz in the web industry and for very good reasons. It’s the kind of thing I go: why didn’t I think about this? As a CSS architect, I’m very enchanted to learn something new in the subject, all thanks to Nicole Sullivan at Yahoo.

It’s a great idea, well, just maybe

A lot of Nicole’s arguments were hammering around the fact that OOCSS would be faster. While it may be efficient to code OOCSS from a programmer’s perspective, it’s far from making your page load any faster. OOP concepts require you to separate classes into individual files so that the code becomes more manageable. However brilliant that is from a manageability perspective, it’s a nightmare plan for CSS speed. You don’t want to make your browser load every single little piece of CSS like that.

If your OOCSS class files are served from a single domain, the average browser will only handle 2 concurrent connections to that given domain, making your loading of CSS classes literally 2 at a time. This isn’t beneficial at all. Having multiple pieces would require your browser to wait for the other ones to finish before even sending a request for the rest, and that also makes a lot more HTTP requests, in other words, a lot of overhead.

PHP and other applications of course don’t have that problem since they request files that are stored on the server from the server, which just results in an insignificant increase in disk I/O. But the whole OOP concept remains slower however you see it. In software engineering, everything ends up being either a 1 or 0. The computer by itself cannot understand OOP, which means you have to add additional application logic to make it work, making things slower. The only reason OOP exists is to make it easier for programmers to develop complex applications, it has nothing to do with speed.

Easier to learn?

Apparently OOCSS is easier to learn. Yes, ok, it’s true that making it possible for a junior CSS developer to only handle smaller properties from different classes at first is a way to make CSS easier to work with. But it doesn’t make it easier to comprehend.

OOP concepts won’t help in any way at understanding the CSS box model, neither will they fix the differences between the various browsers. In fact, OOCSS just makes it more difficult to comprehend CSS because on top of that, you have to learn the Object Oriented concepts.

The only real easy part is what OO brings to anything; maintainability. You don’t have to dive into a super long page of CSS rules to modify something.

Cascading, not Object Oriented

Unfortunately for Sullivan, as she mentioned in her presentation, OOCSS is but a practice. CSS has never been Object Oriented, it’s a Cascading language. Using OO practices with CSS is a good idea, but it doesn’t really work. Let’s take a look at some examples:

<style type="text/css">

.block {
   width:200px;
   height:200px;
   background-color:blue;
}

.redBlock {
   width:400px;
   background-color:red;
}

</style>

[...]

<div class="block redBlock"></div>

Ok, what do we have here. First off, you’ll notice there’s a lot of stuff missing, but just imagine there’s all the HTML headers and tags around it. So we have two classes and a div with both of those classes in its name. Yes, this is perfectly fine CSS practice.

With that, we would obtain a 400 by 200 pixels red square. The ability for the square to take one of the classes’ property and override it while still keeping its other properties intact is called Inheritance in OOP. Based on our HTML code, you would guess that redBlock inherits the properties of block. So how about we switch it like this:

<div class="redBlock block"></div>

The block would then take a blue color and a width of 200 px right? Well, this is where the problems start, it doesn’t. In fact, the order in which you specify the classes of the div has no importance whatsoever. In this scenario, we would still get the same red block with 400 px of width because the redBlock class is written after the block class in our CSS rules. This is called Cascading, which is where CSS takes its name: Cascading Style Sheets.

Most people who do CSS know the other aspect of Cascading which states that internal CSS overrides external, and in-line overrides internal. But very few know that it even extends directly into the declarations themselves, possibly because they’ve never used two classes in a single element at once, a very rare CSS practice as of now.

In real OOP however, there’s so such thing as cascading. By inventing some nice pieces of fictional CSS to define the inheritance, much in the way it’s done in real OOP languages, we can do the following:

<style type="text/css">

.block {
   width:200px;
   height:200px;
   background-color:blue;
}

.redBlock {
   extends:block;
   width:400px;
   background-color:red;
}

</style>

[...]

<div class="redBlock"></div>

In OOP, making a class “extend” another is literally telling it to inherit the properties of that class. In this scenario, we don’t even have to write the two classes inside the div because the CSS rules already define redBlock as inheriting (extending) the properties of the block class. We would obtain our famous red block. However, we didn’t say that block extended redBlock, so writing a div element with the class block would only use the block class’s properties, not the redBlock’s.

Unfortunately that CSS code is pure fiction. There’s no such construct in CSS and since it hasn’t been planned for CSS3, the whole idea remains largely a dream years away.

But do you really want this dream?

However brilliant this OO thing would be, its current implementation is nothing but a way of coding. Because of its functionality issues and overhead though, that way of coding CSS is nothing more than a gimmick.

In my opinion, it doesn’t bring in enough maintainability and functional benefits in its current state versus the overhead induced. Yes, Object Oriented practices do make it easier not to make scalability mistakes but a lot of Sullivan’s speech is just good practice, not OO. Every newbie in every field will make scalability mistakes no matter what the language.

I’m not sure if the current state of OOCSS solves anything.

Opera 10 Unite

Jun 16

Posted by Pacoup in Web | No Comments

I was very critical in my last review of Opera Software’s Ian Hickson for his design choices in the latest beta of Opera 10. Either they listened or a lot of people raved about that because they made a few ajustements here and there on the design that make it more friendly and way sexier. The bookmark icons really look like bookmarks now.

But the truly amazing thing about the new version of Opera 10 Beta is its alpha preview of Unite, a new somewhat revolutionary service on the Opera browser that could potentially revolutionize the web, and especially give a kickstart to the ever unpopular but often superior Opera browser.

What’s Opera Unite

The concept may actually be difficult to grasp on for new users, but it’s fairly simple actually. What’s not simple is understanding how it works and what it involves for the future of the web. First things first, what is it.

The basic concept of Opera Unite is to give the power of a web server in the hands of the desktop owner. Essentially, this allows you to serve any of the content on your computer, much like you would do with a regular web server, but in a much simpler manner. Unite is no regular web server, it’s a set of services that use a proxy operated by Opera to do NAT traversal from your computer to the clients (say, your friends’ computers). You can go read on Wikipedia to know what a proxy and NAT are, but basically al you have to know is that this thing is config-free.

You don’t have to setup anything, it just works, assuming of course you aren’t on a network where proxies aren’t possible, which is a common scenario on enterprise networks, so no, you won’t be able to chat with friends at your job because of Opera Unite, but you might be if it’s hosted at home. But Unite certainly isn’t aimed at the enterprise network users, but to home users, so the proxy thing is irrelevant.

At least more exciting than Mozzila’s Firefox 3.5 speed campain claim of the fastest Firefox ever, which while true, doesn’t make it any faster than Safari and Chrome, Opera Unite currently includes 6 services: File Sharing, Fridge (shared Post-it like notes), Media Player (stream music), Photo Sharing, The Lounge (chat) and finally Web Server, a barebones web server capable of serving static content only (very similar to File Sharing except it works with a real DNS allowing you to actually link pages together with a common root, something you can’t do with the File Sharing service).

Many complain the Web Server doesn’t support PHP, but this is where Unite services get really interesting. They are actually built on an API, and so anyone could program their own Unite service for the world to use, hence, possibly a PHP-enabled web server. The Media Player service only supports music, but this is arguably understandable because video not encoded for the web can be quite heavyweight and not streamable from our regular Internet connections. Not including video capability is actually a better move than having ignorant people go angry because the streaming is slow.

All things considered, Opera Unite uses your own machine as your server, which means you effectively have about only 90 to 100 kb/s of bandwidth, the regular amount on most ISPs. iTunes + AAC files are 256 kb/s, outpacing your home’s connection speed by 2.5 times, meaning you’ll have to buffer your music of course. Imagine video… just not yet.

If you’re the owner of a web site, keep in mind this won’t replace your Hosting plan, it never will IMO. If you want to start your own website (static only of course) and you have so very few visitors, this might be a very easy free solution for that, although you don’t get your own domain and you have to leave your computer open all the time. If you are one of those persons, consider 1and1.com for a start. They’re super cheap and provide great services for starters.

How is this better than…?

IM Sharing

Sure, you can share files on Windows Live Messenger, but the service is often slow because of incompatible protocols between platforms and you files can’t “live” there. As soon as the window is closed, the sharing is gone forever. Conversly, Unite acts as your own server and is accessible from any computer with a browser. Yup, you don’t even have to have Opera installed on your system to access services on another computer because Unite serves content the same way as a standard HTTP server like Apache. This is especially important whe sharing files with your friends because it means they don’t have to download any additional software, ever.

Hosting, FTP

It’s private. There you go, it ends there. Unlike hosting your files elsewhere on computers you don’t own, the files are directly transfered via an encrypted proxy. This means that no one except you and the recipient has the ability to see your files; useful for transfering stuff you don’t want others to find out about, or legal entities perhaps…
The other advantage is that unlike FTP, you don’t have to connect to something and upload something. Your own computer acts as a server, so as soon as the file is on your hard-drive, it’s available on the server should you wish to share it.

Music Hosting

Recently, web sites like imeem started providing hosting services for your music, for a moderately priced monthly payment of course. Services like these are great in that the music streams from high end servers, so you never really wait for it to play. It’s like an anywhere MP3 player. However, uploading all your music may take ages and the small overhead of Opera Unite (because of your limited ISP’s connection) may be more worth it than waiting for all of your files to upload to Imeem.
You also have to consider the fact that all your files are being hosted on that company’s server. What if imeem goes out of business? What about privacy issues. Yeah, they are all very real, although you shouldn’t have to worry about the privacy of your music files IMO, but you know, some people do for reasons we won’t mention.

Fundamental Flaws

Opera Unite is not without flaws though. Although a very potent service, with compatiblity on all three major platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux), something Google didn’t even bring yet with a barebones browser, Unite remains a service, which is where Opera’s claim of freeing you from 3rd parties is quite biased.

The fact is, unlike P2P  like Skype, Unite uses proxies instead of pure NAT traversal. The advantage is that the server computer or client computer doesn’t have to have a UPnP router, but the proxies are still hosted on Opera, same goes for your domain. Keep in mind such a service wouldn’t be possible if it wasn’t made like that. You need to have an address for it to work, and thus a domain provider, in this case, Opera. Otherwise we would be stuck with IPs insteads of usernames and couldn’t benifit from the dynamic IP resolving done by Unite, which prevents your service from being innaccessible because your IP changed, something that happens very often on home connections.

So unlike Opera says, Unite is yet another product that relies on a company’s servers to work.

Additionally, where Opera missed the point in my opinion, is that Unite isn’t open. Sure you can develop for Unite on the Opera Browser, but you’re still stuck with Opera. Unite can’t get out of Opera. This is pretty in line with the company, which still keeps Opera closed source. So despite the move potentially freeing you from any kind of hosting service, you have to get an Opera account, and you have to have Opera’s browser to operate it.

All of this isn’t a flaw perhaps, depends on your perception of things, but it does make Unite an Opera-dependant feature. Fortunately it also makes the browser far more attractive.

What the Future Holds

Arguably one of the most interesting feature of Unite is that it works, now. A lot of new stuff has been thrown at us recently, most notably Google Wave, but they remain previews not even open to the public, and further-more, far from working with every browser out there.

There’s a lot of potential in such a tool. Since you can develop other services for it, it’d be easy to imagine someone integrating the Wave protocol in there so that you can host your own private Wave conversations, something a bit beyond the chat client currently integrated in Opera Unite. However Opera seems to have forgotten that to send a link to your chat room on Unite you have to start by an instant message through some other service, or an e-mail, or yet again a phone call. People also close their computer, so I don’t see chat going anywhere with Unite.

There’s potential with File Sharing though. I intend to use it for all my future file sharing on Windows Live Messenger. I just give a link, and there you go, they download effortlessly. Photo sharing is also interesting and Music is one of the biggies in there of course.

The rest unfortunately fits way too well in a persistent environment to be relevant in Opera Unite. Sharing notes and having a web server for example, remains something much more useful on a hosted service like Google Notebook.

Conclusion

I really don’t know if it’s a game changer or not. I think it’s going to have a lot of difficulty competing against persistent services, despite its advantages. The real problem with it is that it’s Opera. Nobody knows Opera and the service isn’t quite revolutionary enough to spawn something similar to Firefox. Will I use Opera as my default browser because of Opera Unite? No. My browsing experience remains better elsewhere. File sharing abilities and other potential applications with Unite aren’t enough to make me switch. I prefer sharing my photos on Google Picasa than having to leave my computer open. Nobody will use a web server on a home computer to make a business and my MP3 player already has my whole library on it; why would I want to spend more bandwidth to listen to music.

So, Opera Unite is a great idea. It’s just an ever more niche experience burried in the Opera menues for the Facebook-paranoyed who still want to share. The story would be quite different if Opera didn’t make Unite into an Opera browser feature.

The fastest browser on Mac OS X Leopard – 06/2009

Jun 14

Posted by Pacoup in Web | No Comments

Browsers

- Mozilla Firefox 3.5b4
- Apple Safari 4.0 (5530.17)
- Opera 10.00 Beta

V8 Benchmark

Fastest: Safari

Firefox: 272
Safari: 2676
Opera: 188

Sunspider Benchmark

Fastest: Safari

Firefox: 1044.6
Safari: 895.4
Opera: 4006.8

Tables

Fastest: Safari

Firefox: 297
Safari: 49
Opera: 102

Flash

Firefox: 71
Safari: 71
Opera: 71

Silverlight

Firefox: 23
Safari: 23
Opera: 23

What does this mean?

Well it’s just a small test I made without any really strict stuff, but it does prove some stuff.

First off, Cold and Warm start are totally irrelevant on Mac OS X since you basically leave the browser open even if you close all windows (that’s how OS X works). You could close it, but if you’re on Mac OS X Leopard you probably have a computer with enough RAM so that it doesn’t matter.

Secondly, as you probably noticed, Flash and Silverlight are surprisingly consistent accross the different browsers, which means they aren’t really something you can test on the Mac. Conversly, on Windows, Flash plugins considerably differ between Internet Explorer and other browsers. If you’re the one who intalled your system, you probably noticed it was neccessary to install two different Flash plugins, one for IE and one for Firefox and the others. Tests, although none I’ve done recently, have proven the ActiveX Flash plugin for IE to be much faster than the one available on other browsers. I don’t know about Silverlight, but I guess everything about IE has to be unique because of ActiveX.

Third, Apple keeps its promise on the Mac. Safari is consistenly faster in both JavaScript and Tables, which doesn’t represent the whole Internet, but it’s pretty indicative. Opera is faster at DOM operations (Tables) than Firefox, but remains slower for JavaScript.

Without a need for further testing though, until Chrome comes to Mac OS X, Safari remains the king of speed on Mac. Guessing from Apple’s tight OS/Hardware integration and the optimizations further brought in by Snow Leopard (10.6), I’m guessing even Chrome will have a hard time keeping up with Safari on Mac when it comes out.

Yes IE is slow, Yes Firefox is slow, Yes Safari on Windows is slow…but!

Jun 12

Posted by Pacoup in Web | No Comments

I love these tests. Thank you Lifehacker. Wasn’t it freaken obvious that Chrome was faster. Doesn’t take a genius to figure out Apple’s and Microsoft’s in-lab tests are just a load of bull. Browser speed isn’t solely dependent on how fast the page loads the HTML, it’s also dependent on how fast the actual browser works, ie. opening a tab (not pointing to anyone for their F*** slow tabs). I’m really surprised for Opera though, really lost its edge huh.

Anyway, don’t forget Google Chrome is still a crap browser for everything else that you actually use on a browser, *cough* like Bookmarks and Print Previews *cough*, and so you may not want to switch from Firefox to that. Did I mention Google’s developer tools are still stuck on Firefox exclusively? I don’t know… it just looks like Google simply doesn’t care about the developer niche for Chrome. I thought it was clear that pleasing developers was the way to go since they are the one really pushing the browsers by making their sites compatible, I mean, why not, do both, it’s a Google product, native Page Speed would be a nice addition, along with all those features it’s missing.

Well, with Firefox looking towards more extensive standards support in as soon as 3.5, things are getting interesting. Maybe we could get to use cool web technologies if it wasn’t for Microsoft’s 10-years-behind Trident (IE’s engine) developement team. Guess what, we now get to develop stuff for the web that has been available since, wait, 2004, because IE 8 is now out! Oh no, wait wait, there’s still a majority of the world stuck on IE 7, and some 19% on IE 6 (OMG, you can get Firefox on your pirated Windows XP copy ok, you don’t have to crap your WGA that way, so hurry).

At the very least developers can find joy in dedicated server solutions that don’t depend on what your users use. Thank you open source community (Mac OS X Snow Leopard open beta please?) for letting me use PHP 6 without anyone knowing while it’s not even released yet.

Bing! Not so much

Jun 8

Posted by Pacoup in Web | No Comments

Well, turns out market share for Bing dropped after that special day, go read on TechCrunch.

But anyway, with all niceties aside and the fact that Bing simply doesn’t help you more if you don’t live in some of the big cities in the United States, how does Bing actually help you search better? You want the truth, it doesn’t.

It’s name sucks, and so does its search. I’ve had multiple cases where searches would return anything from no results to highly irrelevant searches, or searches heavily biased towards Microsoft sites. For example, searching for cookieless domains returns a mix-match of Linux and Microsoft results with a bias towards open source technologies, and doing so on Bing returns tons of Microsoft article on the matter, with Microsoft products of course. I wouldn’t call Linux a bias though, it is the most used server and thus represents my search better.

The same goes with their Maps. Did Microsoft bother to fix their search service only? Searching “Aylmer Prentiss” on Bing returns nothing, and it thinks I was searching for a business (wait what?), on Google Maps, it cleverly finds exactly what I was looking for, Prentiss street in Aylmer (yup, even though that city’s been merged and is now called Gatineau), Quebec, Canada.

So Bing has some great features that work for a better search experience than Google, but it misses one very important thing.
The search doesn’t work!

Why should I force myself to try Bing when I can’t find what I want, which just seems something so easy to do on Google. It just works, end of the game.

Google Wave, HTML 5 and Webkit

Jun 8

Posted by Pacoup in Web, Web Developement | No Comments

At this year’s Google I/O, we’ve had a taste of this very sweet thing called Google Wave. I’m totally sold, this thing really is email invented and I think once people realize how powerful it is, and when people try it of course, which is easy, Google is the most visited site on the Internet, it will explode in popularity.

And since it’s a protocol, open source above that, so not just a Google thing, I’m positive Wave is going to replace e-mail in a complete fashion very quickly.

But how far can a product go at making things more popular. If you noticed, the demo runned on Chrome 2 and Safari 4, the two biggest Webkit-based browsers on market today. Why? Because Google Wave requires HTML 5 features not yet implemented in other browsers (except Opera 10 maybe). Yup yup, even Firefox doesn’t support it and of course IE is far from that.

Google Wave is so entrenched in HTML 5 that some things weren’t even implemented in HTML 5 yet and Google is proposing those new capabilities to the WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group).

So although we’ll have answers to that much later, I was wondering: Can Google push Webkit browsers to glory and forcibly integrate new features in HTML 5 because of Wave?

Post your theories in the comments.

Bing! It works!

Jun 5

Posted by Pacoup in Web | No Comments

Well if you saw my article titled Bing!, you know that in my head Bing was a stupid rename of Live search. But, it works! Yes, Bing effectively jumped pass Yahoo’s share of the market in the last few days.

Amazing is the word. But, graphs show it passed ahead by taking shares from Google, not from Yahoo, which makes TechCrunch’s hypothesis that everyone’s just trying it pretty possible.

Apart from that, some people were critical of Bing because it replaced their default search engine in Internet Explorer 6. Wait, what? Since when does Internet Explorer 6 has a default search engine, it doesn’t even have a search bar. Anyway, beats me and has been apparently fixed by Microsoft.

Hopefully Bing doesn’t fail as bad as Cuil did, see the last link bellow.

Thanks TechCrunch for the scoop.

More here:

TechCrunch: Did Bing just leapfrog Yahoo search

TechCrunch: Oops, Bing is now your default search engine on IE6 whether you like it or not

TechCrunch: Cuil fail traffic nearly hits bottom

Opera 10 Beta – First Thoughts

Jun 3

Posted by Pacoup in Web | No Comments

Speed Improvements

Although I didn’t benchmark anything, as always there’s nothing to be said about Opera’s speed. It’s still a zippy browser with a really high tech JavaScript, HTML and CSS render engine.

New Interface Skin

The new interface skin is nice, but it’s just a skin. Nothing else than esthetic changes here, although it’s also good cause you can expect Opera to operate the same way it used to before. Besides that, the new design isn’t better, neither is it worse, although I’m not really up to par with Jon Hicks’ decision of changing the bookmark icon from a Star to a Heart. I don’t know… the bookmark star just seems like an easily recognizeable international bookmark icon everybody knows about, no?

Customizeable Speed Dial

Apart from ever more burrying Google Chrome under the dirt by kind of prooving Speed Dial, or the like, was Opera’s inovation, at least in the browser space, it would have been nice to see Opera come up with a feature that allowed switching the Speed Dial behavior to something like Chrome.

Personally I don’t even like having all my top visited sites in there, but doing it manually isn’t always something people know how to do, or make the effort to do.

So, apart from that, the new customizeable capabilities of Speed Dial are nice, backgrounds and arrangeable row counts, but they’re only in presets as far as I know, which is not nice. I mean, why can’t I have a 1×3 Speed Dial, or a 16×16? I’d doubt it to be a technical limitation thing.

Oh and by the way, if you really need speedy access to  256 web sites (16 x 16), maybe you should think about using the dynamic bookmark search.

New Features

One of the nicest and probably yet another of these things you only discover by mistake after having used Opera after 5 years, unless some Opera guru shows you, is the visual tabs. At first I kind of dismissed this, because visual tab previews already existed in Opera 9.

But the new visual tabs aren’t the “usual” tab previews. You can now pull the tab bar down with a little 3-dotted handle (pretty obvious if somebody tells you actually) and open it up so that the tabs change from text-only rectangles to full-page square previews.

Although you’ll really suffer from using that feature on a small screen, aka every laptop, it’s pretty nice and visually attractive on a desktop computer. It’s really the kind of thing where people go: – Oh wow, what is that? It’s unfortunate Opera still doesn’t get that for new features like this, unless you publish an actual video and/or ad, mainstream isn’t going to know about it. Well, it’s still Beta, they have time to make a video to show it off.

Oh and it’s intuitive too, no more guessing what’s in that tab, just look at it. I actually don’t like reading off the bottom of my screen though, so I switched the tab bar to bottom, so it’s more like a giant Browser Dock.

Opera 10 Beta also includes nice improvements to mail over the alpha, and especially over Opera 9. You can finally send Rich HTML e-mails with Opera Mail. Thank you!

Should you try it?

If you’ve never tried Opera, try it it, it’s definitely worth the ride. But I have to warn you, Opera is a very technical browser and it may not be the mainstream user’s ideal. It’s incredibly satisfying for freaks like me who work on 24 inch displays, and especially for web developers, again, like me, but the browser has so much to offer you may just not find anything over Firefox or Internet Explorer (you really have to be geeky to know how to use Opera properly). Adding on that is the fact Opera has very poor support from web developer because of its frankly super minor position on the market, even behind brand new Google Chrome. This doesn’t mean Opera renders pages in a broken way, it actually renders them better than any other browser, with only Safari 4 capable of measuring against it. It just means the people who make web sites, web developers, don’t test their web site with Opera. Plugins also face poor support and apart from Flash, most web apps will tell you Opera is supported and stuff like Silverlight won’t work. But in all of that, again, you have to blame others, not Opera. Opera makes good stuff, it’s just not popular enough.

If you’re ready to dive in the fabulous world of the Opera web browser, get ready to have either Mozilla Firefox or Microsoft Internet Explorer in backup, or maybe Safari, and on a lesser extent Chrome (as of this writing).