23 Musings

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...

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.

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.

Seems the PR bods at Google missed out on getting to proof their web page offering a Google optimised version of IE7 for download. Had they seen it, they would have noticed the blatent copying of Yahoo's version of the same page. Techcrunch have posted screenshots of the two pages here. It appears the Google page even had an image of IE7 with the Yahoo toolbar installed, exactly the same as the one on the Yahoo download page! Even some of the HTML looks copied...

So I wonder if any heads have rolled at Google over this? Seems a very basic error to make, and over a totally static page like this it really is unforgiveable. The effort involved in designing a basic page like that is minimal, surely Google could have gone to the effort to get it right first time?

Google have now rectified the problem, again posted on Techcrunch here.

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.

A couple of weeks ago I posted on the improvements made in IE7 when it was compared to IE6 by the guys at Zimbra when using a Web2.0 app.

Well, they've now revisited the tests and added Firefox 2 into the mix and directly compared it to IE7. The tests were completed using the same interface as before (an app making a lot of use of Javscript and DOM manipulation).

The results seem to confirm what I would have suspected; whilst IE7 has made significant improvements over IE6 it has still not caught up with Firefox in it's performance with handling complex javascript interfaces.

Full details of Zimbra's testing are available here.

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.

Excellent piece of insight on the Zimbra blog into how IE7, IE6 and Firefox 1.5 perform when using a Web2.0 app (an app making a lot of use of Javscript and DOM manipulation).

The guys at Zimbra have tested the performance of the three browsers when using the Zimbra Web Client. This is extremely useful for those of us who don't have access to the testing tools needed to perform this kind of task and validates what a lot of web developers will be thinking.

The results show that IE7 is very much improved over it's older counterpart, in their tests Zimbra quote IE7 as about twice as fast as IE6 over a range of tests. Firefox 1.5 of course is about twice as fast as IE7 over the same tests. So while Microsoft has made good progress and plugged a number of memory leaks it seems they still have some way to go!

It will be interesting to see how Firefox 2 compares once that is released!

So, not even a full day in the wild for the full release of IE7 and there's already a vulnerability found!

Secunia say the vulnerability can allow the disclosure of potentially sensitive information, such as bank details or login information. According to Secunia 'The vulnerability is caused due to an error in the handling of redirections for URLs with the "mhtml:" URI handler. This can be exploited to access documents served from another web site'.

The vulnerability exists in IE6 too, so you would have thought it would have been fixed before the new browser launched!

It's only rated as 'Less Critical', level 2 of 5 on Secunias scale, but it's really not good PR on launch day for Microsoft!

So Yahoo seems to have taken the lead in something (see my earlier post on their woes). They've released a final version of IE7 optimised for Yahoo users before Microsoft has released IE7 Final itself (they are still only offering RC1 on their website).

Microsoft are touting this as an example of how great their new browser is and how easily partners can customise it. Well they would say that as they haven't got it available for download so quickly!

Quite surprised Google haven't either got into bed with Mozilla or tried the browser market themselves yet, seeing as they've tried almost everything else.

Microsoft are releasing the browser before the end of this week and it will be in a critical update at the end of the month, so penetration of the browser should grow very quickly.

Hope you've all been testing, what was the old Scouts motto.... Be Prepared!

Travolution has run a story about travel websites and their lack of preparation for the launch of IE7. Apparently some of the major online travel sites will need some tweaking if they are to become usable with the latest Microsoft browser. It's understandable that there may be alignment, font and other presentation issues but the article alludes to rather larger issues at a couple of websites.

It seems very poor to me that these companies aren't prepared and haven't built their websites in such a way that a new browser is an easy thing to deal with. If a site is built with web standards in mind with valid, semantic well formed markup then it shoudln't prove to tasking to check it and tweak stylesheets etc to make it render identically in IE7. Of course, all those websites which have tried to jump on the Ajax bandwagon may find the task of getting ready for a new browser that little more difficult!

I'm sure all these people will be ready by the time IE7 makes it's presence felt! It is however quite pleasing to read the Travolution article as we are ready for IE7 and most of our competitors are mentioned!