23 Musings

Good news in the browser standards war. Thins are really hotting up now as Opera has announced that their latest beta (or maybe even alpha) has passed the Acid3 test.

Let's see the responses from Mozilla and Microsoft as they try to get IE and Firefox up to speed...

Could it be true? Please say it is!

Ars Technica is reporting that intensive browsing in Firefox 3 beta generally consumes less than half the memory that Firefox 2 does. They've also looked against the competitors and found that it uses less memory than IE7 and Opera as well.

Now I'm really excited about the coming release of Firefox 3! The memory leak issues have always been my only issue with the browser, if they fix it Firefox will be as near to perfect as I require for my browsing needs.

I'm still adamant it's Flash that causes the leak though as I never get it unless there is Flash on a page and I leave it in a tab for a while...

Daily Tech has a good article detailing how the current most popular browsers fare with the newly released Acid3 test.

As expected it's way out of their reach. How close the final releases of Firefox 3 and IE8 will come is anyones guess. I reckon they won't pass either as IE8 only passed Acid2 when in private beta.

Yes it's here. The final release of the Acid3 test happened today. Browser manufacturers should be quaking in their boots as it attempts to test their ability to render web standards compliant code. And it's not just CSS being tested, the new Acid3 test puts emphasis on a browsers' DOM scripting abilities as well as continuing to assess it's ability to render CSS, SVG and webfonts.

More in the press release. Can't wait to see how Firefox 3 and IE 8 fare...

The idea is to go here and hope that you see something like the image below (if you're truly standards compliant).

The latest release of Firefox in beta is being targeted with being quicker than Safari in the javascript stakes. It's about time we had a proper bit of competition in the browser wars in areas that really do matter to the users (rather than fancy features and add-ons). Getting performance just right is what will increase the move to one browser from another.

I'm using version 3 and like it but unfortunately they don't seem to be addressing the memory leakage issues which tend to occur with Flash. I'm hoping that's their next step in performance improvement.

Hat tip to Josh at Read Write Web for his write up regarding this link that I'd never come across before. It's a demo of an analytics tool aimed at web 2.0 and AJAX websites.

With the death of the page view as the all important metric of the analyst there has appeared a need to be able to measure users engagement with a website rather than just how many pages they viewed.

The rise of AJAX has been a major player in this with whole websites sometimes being a single screen which makes many calls to databases and servers in order to refresh itself multiple times in a users visit. Thus devaluing the page view completely.

The demo shows a novel way to gauge a users engagement by measuring in time how long segments of the page stay in the browser viewing pane. This isn't perfect by a long way but it's a sign of how analytics tools will have to work in the future as websites get more difficult to measure and marketeers and management get more demanding in their hunt for data to help understand their users.

Also really interesting is the demo of a tool to measure users engagement with a banner advert. I can't wait till metrics like this exist as they may help marketers see that throwing money into display advertising is not the way forward anymore.

What I'd really like to see is mouse interaction data on pages as well. It surely is possible to collect the data on the X and Y coordinates and it's a good hint as to what area of the screen a user is actually focused on (users tend to hover the mouse over what interests them). It's great to know that the item you're interested in is within view but how do you know that users are actually looking at it? Short of installing eyetracking as defacto in PC's we may never answer questions like that!

The Web Standards Project never stands still it seems. Hot on the heels of Microsoft announcing that IE8 could comply with Acid2 the standards gurus are preparing the next generation browser standard compliance test.

You can read some more about Acid3 here and even try it here (it won't work on any browser yet). They're also asking for suggestions of tests to add to Acid3 so if you have any ideas go here.

I love Firefox, it's my browser of choice and apart from the obvious memory leakages (especially when viewing pages with Flash) it does everything I need.

For those of you who use it but didn't know, there are many ways to tweak and customise it to make it even better. Here's a nice list of some useful tweaks from Computer World.

Rumours abound once again of Google's ambitions in the browser market. Apparently they've registered Gbrowser.com as a domain name and various blog posts online and discussing the benefits they could derive from entering this competitive market.

Google already have a small investment in Maxthon, a browser popular in the Chinese market. Whether this could be the base of a push into producing a browser remains to be seen.

Of course, Gbrowser.com could be something entirely different. It could be an attempt to secure the domain name for other possible uses, one of which I'd suggest could be an offline browser (more like an Explorer than a traditional browser) to access Google Apps, Docs, Gmail etc when full on/offline functionality is launched which must be coming sometime soon (you'd imagine). It would add a lot of value if you could download all those Google services to your hard disk for browsing and ammending before reconnecting to upload changes. That would really make Google a desktop app and fully portable!

This is brilliant! If, like me, you worked in the online world in the old days then you'll probably recall the days when websites looked like this and there were no decent search engines.

The rate of progress is astounding when you think it was like this 13 years ago!!

Wow, it seems we're all wilfers these days... Apparently millions of us (those residing in the UK) are surfing the web aimlessly, losing an average of two full working days per month.

Some research, carried out by YouGov over 2,412 adults found that more than two thirds of the UK's 33.7 million internet users are guilty of "wilfing" (What Was I Looking For?).

The survey revealed that almost a quarter of the country's internet users spend 30 per cent or more of their internet time wilfing, both at work and at home.

Although men are much more likely to be tempted to wilf than women, shopping websites were found to be the biggest cause of wilfing, the survey found.

Worryingly, a third of male respondents admitted that wilfing had negatively affected their relationship with their partner, with almost one in five men being distracted by porn websites. Wilfing for porn... whatever next? ;-)

Loving this article detailing the 50 best tech products ever! Really pleasing to see Netscape Navigator recognised as the top product, it made such a huge impact on me when I first discovered the web!

Read the article at PCWorld online.

I'm in shock! I've just become aware of the debacle surrounding the Italian governments new tourism website which promotes their country to potential visitors.

This is the story of the Italian National Tourism Portal which has recently appeared online after three years (the project began 16th March 2004). Created by IBM the site launched to derision worldwide from the blogosphere and from Italians themselves. It's amazing that such a huge sum of money can be spent on a website which doesn't appear particularly complex. Far more sophisticated websites are created all the time with budgets a fraction of this spend. Rumour has it that the logo alone cost €100,000!

Design wise it looks pretty good, but it doesn't work on all browsers, has a lot of copy errors and very poor translation, accessibility is shocking and it's incredibly slow to browse around.


Apparently it's not the worst offending government sponsored money-pit website, rumour has it that the German employment office site cost an astounding €160 million! Both of these sites are scandalous wastes of public money, something far better could have been produced for far less money!

Progress is being made at the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group on the Web Applications 1.0 draft specification. It's starting to look very good and I'm extremely pleased that they have addressed a lot of the issues with HTML/XHTML which needed sorting out.

This draft has been published yesterday, I'd suggest all interested developers take a look and familiarise themselves with it as you can expect to see aspects of it being supported by browsers very soon.

Microsoft have released a redesigned homepage on their main corporate website. It is literally just their homepage that's changed, the rest of the site is as it has ever been.

The redesigned homepage looks much better, the layout is much more up to date and they've obviously taken notice of current design, colour and layout trends.

However, this keeping up with the latest trends looks to have been taken a little too far! They've really tried to emulate the Web2.0 crew by stuffing a clunky AJAX navigation module into the page. It's a nice bit of navigation but is incredibly slow to load, in Firefox 2.0 it is so slow and caused the browser to hang while loading meaning you couldn't switch to another tab or use any other browser features. It's slightly better in IE7 but only marginally, the speed is still slower than I'd expect for any piece of website navigation.

The speed of the nav is verging on being so slow it's unusable, it made me want to find another site to find the info I was looking for straight away. Of course, being Microsoft, chances are the info you want may only be on their website so you may have no choice but to persevere...

My opinion? Top marks for trying to bring their homepage up to date, zero for execution.

One of the things that has bothered Firefox's creators has been it's inability to pass the Acid2 browser test. The Acid2 test is a test for the rendering abilities of browsers which was developed by the Web Standards Project. A recent alpha release of Firefox 3.0 has been able to pass thanks to changes in it's rendering engine. Now Firefox can pass it will join the likes of Safari and Opera in being able to say it is truely (or at least as near as possible) standards compliant. And, of course this puts them another step ahead of Microsoft with Internet Explorer.

This alpha release of Firefox 3.0 seems aimed at getting the rendering engine right, which is definately the correct thing to do, they can add all the new features and bells and whistles before a final release.

Microsoft has now released IE7 as a high priority update, so expect penetration to increase dramatically over the next week or so. Now is the time we will see how ready all you webmasters are!

I posted some weeks ago about being prepared for IE7 and ensuring your website was compatible with no adverse effects on layout and style. I suggested that there was no need to panic as long as your site was built well and adhered to basic standards.

It seems that a lot of large companies weren't quite up to speed! Etre (a fantastic usability company I've had the pleasure of working alongside) have done a bit of digging to see just how ready people are. The article on their blog shows that a lot of large audience sites were caught out. Of particular note (and a particular surprise to me) were the likes of bank Alliance & Leicester, Lloyds TSB and Northern Rock. With large audiences and facilities such as online banking you'd have thought they'd have ensured preparedness. But no...

Etre's article is well worth a look as it contains screenshots showing the differences between IE6 and IE7. None of it looks too major but I'm sure some wrists will have been slapped for failing to be ready.

So one of the big 'improvements' in IE7 that has been shouted about by Microsoft and others as a great leap forwards is proving to not be quite so great. The phishing filter was designed to recognise websites that are masquerading as something they're not or trying to access your personal details.

First reports I had back from an acquaintance in the travel industry were that with the phishing filter on confirming a booking on their website was taking ages as the phishing filter tried to verify what was going on. This is actually down to the coding on their website, a small tweak has fixed the problem, but still annoying that a new browser should cause this sort of issues in a very normal, perfectly valid way of implementing a checkout process.

And this morning there are reports tha a spoofing bug has been found which could help crooks mask phishing scams, the exact type of attack that Microsoft designed IE7 to thwart. The bug allows a web site to display a pop-up that can contains a spoofed URL. An attacker could exploit this weakness to fool people into believing they are on a site they trust when in reality they are viewing a page created by hackers for phishing. The alert to this bug came from Secunia. They said, "This makes it possible to only display a part of the address bar, which may trick users into performing certain unintended actions". They've created a demonstration showing a Microsoft URL in a pop up window, but displaying content from Secunia.

I suppose this will always happen with new software releases, they can't expect to find every bug and new attack vectors are opened all the time. However it's not good PR for a new browser, especially when it's being touted as so secure and going to get pushed by Automatic Updates as a security fix!

...and they haven't even released it through Automatic Updates yet!

Microsoft have announced that there have been over 3 million downloads of IE7 in the first four days of it's official release. That's a pretty staggering figure by all accounts and shows the incredible loyalty Microsoft have from your average web users.

Of course that penetration will grow exponentially quicker once it is released as an Automatic Update towards the end of the month.

Interestingly, this blog had 1.5% IE7 usage up to the launch and today has 6%.

I've found a few sites that still have alignment issues although nothing too major. The main issue I've seen has been with HTML email newsletters a lot of which I receive to my web mail account. I'm seeing a lot of problems with alignment and images straying over text showing just how poor some companies preparedness has been.

The latest release of Firefox should be available tomorrow at the www.getfirefox.com website.

However it is already available at the Mozilla FTP site so if you want a sneak preview go here.

The latest version of Firefox comes hot on the heels of the release of Microsofts latest browser IE7. Firefox 2.0 boasts new features such as an in-line spell checker, anti-phishing tool, better integrated search, support for Javascript 1.7 and further improvements to the way tabbed browsing works.