Browsersphere

According to Dave Hyatt, the Safari team has made significant gains of late in achieving compliance with the new Acid3 test.  Apparently they’ve made the leap from scoring 39/100 on the test to 90/100 after addressing issues with CSS3 Selectors, general parsing bugs, SVG and DOM Level 2 features.  According to Hyatt, the remainder of the issues tend to fall into the SVG category, and since they are getting so close to Acid3 compliance, they will be updating Surfin’ Safari regularly with updates on their progress.

As promised, I sent some questions to Sebastiaan de With, the icon and interface designer who came up with the idea for a new web browser, Latitude, which was covered here at Browsersphere recently.

Sebastiaan was kind enough to come back with very thorough and informative answers, so I’ve posted them here in full, with a few minor edits and links added.

Has the idea for Latitude been lingering in your mind for a long time, or is it something that sprang to life only recently?

I’ve been thinking about browser interfaces since the last few months, mostly inspired by the expressions of Mac users about the lack of a Mac-experience in browsers like Firefox and Flock. Although most people consider an .app bundle adequately ‘Mac-like’, I think it goes down to the very mental model the user has of the software he’s using. Take, for example, Safari’s bookmark management. There’s this great bookmark bar, that lets you toggle between the bookmark view and your website. It’s a tiny button that usually confuses some novice users I know, but I can understand that’s no priority. However, the same kind of view pops up if you access ‘History’ from the menu. It’s something a lot of users find confusing, because these completely different content views are all accessed from different places and are dismissed differently (discounting tabs and undo). Firefox also does this wrong, using a separate sidebar for anything you might be able to imagine. No user wants to think “in what sidebar is this thing I need?”

There [are] two options to improve on Firefox’s models; you either take away all the crud, without reinventing the basic principle (Safari’s path), or you re-think browser interfaces from scratch, keeping in mind the paradigms of Mac OS X, and for example iTunes. Why can my mother buy a song in iTunes, while she can’t find a fun movie on the internet, or keep track of what’s happening in the world?  It then struck me that original ideas should be implemented to reduce the screen estate the interface would consume, and the pieces of the puzzle soon clicked together. What do you want in a browser? I’m sure I could ask any intermediate computer user and get a list of his most wanted features. Now try condensing that into a new browser, with the basic premise that the UI should be minimal.

In your “My dream browser” post you wrote “I am aware of several ‘new generation’ browser projects, but none really line up with my ideas.”  Can you share a few of these “new generation” projects and/or why you think they fall short?

The two projects that really [caught] my attention were Flock and Shiira; these two browsers are ideologically opposed to each other. Flock tried to make an integrated browsing experience and failed, in my opinion. The Mac version of Flock once counted no more than 10 buttons; these days, its toolbar is chock full of nondescript buttons and widgets. To me, it wasn’t just visually busy, but it was mostly a browser that seemed like a big hassle to get my head around. I just want something I don’t have to learn, while still being feature-packed. Shiira really did much better in this regard, but simply went a different direction, reinventing parts of the interface, making things more intuitive and visual, but in no way expanding on the feature set of browsers. I really want both; an intuitive browser that’s as functional for viewing web content as the Finder is for viewing files on your disk. Finder doesn’t just handle one format of files either; it can handle your content. And in my opinion, that’s what a browser should do today. Focus on content.

The feedback to both of your posts on the subject has been very positive based on the comments.  Have you gotten a lot of other feedback through email or by other means, and has it been just as positive?  Are there any instances where you received constructive criticism or even negative feedback?

I’ve gotten a lot of email from developers and people who really want to see this developed. I chatted with a few developers, but as I’m very occupied as a full-time icon and interface designer, I can’t oversee or manage such a project right now.

I’ve gotten more than enough constructive criticism and even negative feedback; from people saying my interface mockups are just ‘someone with Photoshop‘ to dismissing certain ideas or even calling me names for proposing to take away the tab bar when the sidebar is active. I think a lot of people misinterpret my designs; most think it’s intended to completely throw every interface paradigm in browsers today overboard, but that’s the opposite of my intention.

I want to make a browser with a more accessible and less cluttered interface. For loose ideas, like the ‘Time Machine’ view for history I mocked up, criticism is fierce, while I’ve always mentioned that it is just a mock-up of a more visual way to view your history for one website, suggesting a different view for all website history. But most people who express the most intense critique fail to offer any real better solutions to the problem.

In your “Latitude” post, you wrote “Several developers have contacted me with the desire to develop it, and some have already actively begun programming whole aspects of it.”  Can you share what aspects have already gone under development?

Thanks to Apple’s WebKit, developers are able to implement a multitude of my interface ideas and gauge the feasibility other features I suggested . Currently, basic work is being done on making more intelligent sidebar behavior, fullscreen browsing, and changing things like Downloads and Bookmarks from their conventional format to something ready for the sidebar.

Will you be making the design document and centralized website you mentioned in that same post available for public consumption, or are you trying to limit it to only those actively working on the project?

I intend to make this as open as possible, and I hope all developers working on the project are eager to allow other people to chip in and collaborate to make a better browser reality.

I noticed some criticism of Firefox in your other blog entries.  Is this your primary web browser today?  If so, what do you think are its biggest shortcomings?

Although Firefox is not my primary web browser (Safari is), it is one of the most used browsers today, and the last beta version for OS X showed an interface that is absolutely nonstandard and horribly designed. I think Firefox, while aiming for a ‘good’ look and feel on all platforms, really fails to deliver on any, with perhaps the notable exception of Linux. As I said in the response to your first question, the lack of invention in the interface causes the user to go on a quest to find the features he needs, and disappoints most of the time in providing them.

Have you put any thought into working your visual design ideas into an already existing platform (e.g. Firefox) via extensions or themes in order to bypass all of the work that goes into creating a new rendering engine, etc.?

As I said in my response to question 4, WebKit already allows this, and thanks to that, I can deliver the interface in full Cocoa glory. Firefox (with the exception of Camino) still uses XUL to render its interface, which is something I wouldn’t want to touch with a ten foot cattle prod. Also, I think drastically changing the structure and interface of a browser like Firefox would require so much more than an extension, that working ‘from scratch’ is automatically the preferred option.

If readers of Browsersphere are interested in contributing, what kinds of help are you looking for?

Anything! If you can code a website, feel free to drop an email, but especially (talented) developers are encouraged to contact me to get details on the project before the official website goes live.

Believe it or not it’s been over three months since the last edition of Around the Browsersphere, so we’re long overdue.  Let’s get to it…

• Mozilla turned ten last month.
• Camino 1.5.5, a maintenance release, was made available a couple weeks ago, and Camino 1.6 Beta 2 was released a couple weeks before that.
• Add-on developers need to get their butts in gear and start updating their extensions to work with Firefox 3, primarily because the browser will be out in a couple months and secondarily because I don’t like using the Minefield builds without my favorite extensions
• The Firefox Extension Guru’s Blog points out that over 600 million Firefox add-ons have been downloaded, and that in anticipation of the release of Firefox 3, addons.mozilla.org is being redesigned.
• The Opera Desktop Team has been experimenting with document.all cloaking and is giving users more control over tab-related behavior (more on that here) in the latest builds.
• SeaMonkey 1.1.8 was released earlier this month.
• The Safari team has added support for the new W3C Selectors API and appears to be busy chipping away at bugs related to the Acid3 test.
• The WebKit team has been spending some time focused on SVG performance improvements and a native, Cairo-based Windows port of the rendering engine.
• The forthcoming Opera Mobile 9.5 (not 9.0) is twice as fast as Opera Mobile 8.65 and four times faster than Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile.  Screenshots and videos of the new release have been appearing quite a bit.
• Alex Faaborg has provided a second glimpse at the icons to be used in Firefox 3 (you can see the full sheet of icons here).  Apparently the throbber is still up in the air.
• Firefox has about:config, now Opera Mini has opera:config.
• Glubble is a parental controls suite for the Firefox browser (via Asa Dotzler).
• Will IE8 really pass the Acid2 test?
• Cross-window messaging is coming to Firefox 3 (via Simon Willison).
• VnTutor has a list of 10 hidden features of Konqueror.
• The creator of KHTML, Lars Knoll, has been promoted to VP of engineering at Trolltech.
• Everyone has a pet feature.
• Take a look at Maxthon’s split-view feature in action.

The following comes from CSS3.info:

Dave Hyatt has recently checked in to the WebKit repository some basic support for using the ClearType text rendering system, which uses a different algorithm for subpixel anti-aliasing than the current CoreGraphics libraries do. Windows users will find that this makes text in Safari look similar to text in other web browsers and elsewhere on the system.

For more information on some of the caveats of the new feature and how you can try it out yourself, be sure to read ClearType rendering forthcoming for Safari on Windows? in its entirety.

While I’ll still consider it one of the minor players in the browsersphere, given its popularity in other areas, it seems worthwhile to mention that according to Net Applications (via TechCrunch), the iPhone apparently now has a 0.09% web browser market share.

If we compare that number to the numbers I covered last month, that puts the iPhone at around nine-tenths of a percentage point behind Opera.

Reza.com reports that according to recently released web browser statistics from Net Applications, all of the major web browsers seem to be at a standstill in terms of market share.  According to the stats, which cover the last couple of months, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari have all seen very slight losses in their share of the market.  The lone standout seems to be Opera, which apparently saw an increase from 0.87% to 0.99% from September to October of this year.

I stumbled upon CSS Contents and Browser Compatibility today via etc..  It has a side-by-side comparison of web browser support of CSS features broken down by selectors, pseudo-classes, declarations and experimental declarations.  The web browsers compared are IE 5.5, IE 6, IE 7, Firefox 2.0, Safari 3.0 (Windows), Opera 9.5 Beta, iCab 3.0 and Konqueror 3.5.7.

It’s not surprising to see that as you scroll down the page semi-quickly, a majority of the red shows up in the Internet Explorer and iCab columns.  Beyond that, it looks like Firefox and Opera deserve some props for having only one red box each for the features in the first three categories.  Konqueror’s not far behind with about two-and-a-half, depending on how you count the “Incorrect” implementation for background-attachment.

What stands out, though, is the support for experimental features.  Konqueror leads in that category with support for three features, Safari’s next with support for two-and-a-half, and then Firefox and Opera with two each.  The other browsers fail to even register in this area (again, not surprisingly).

See anything else interesting in the stats?  Post a comment.

It’s been a while, and there’s a lot to catch up on in the browsersphere.  This time around, let’s focus on all things Konqueror:

• Rozengain.com points us to KHTML on Windows part III, which shows how you can test your web designs in the KHTML rendering engine (used by Konqueror) on Windows using VMWare and a SUSE 10 image.
• According to this post on Digg and its first comment, a patch has been created for Konqueror that would allow for “plasmoids,” which apparently are somewhat equivalent to widgets in Opera.
• Blue GNU discusses the possibility of a KHTML/WebKit merge.
• Roderick Greening beckons the KHTML and WebKit folks to make a decision that will benefit the web and web users.
• Zack Rusin responds to Harri Porten as part of a debate that I won’t pretend to understand.
• A post at The Gay Bar (?) titled “Browsers Suck” says that Konqueror “is just ridiculously hideous, lacks the features Opera has.”  Not that the post has anything nice to say about Opera either.
• SensoryMetrics released the browser stats from its visitors and revealed that Konqueror was dead last in terms of usage.  A post the next day then lamented the omission of the browser in a speed test (via Web 3.0).

If you don’t let a single front page item on Digg pass you by unnoticed (like me), you’re likely to run into quite a few browser-related diggs over time.  Let’s take a look at some that have shown up over the course of the past month.

• Ubuntu Forums Firefox Plugin – “finding answers to stupid questions was never so easy.”
• Get your Firefox Wonder Edition, most efficient Firefox build! – “Firefox Wonder Edition is a special version of Firefox that combines one of the most efficient Firefox build[s] with special extras that make it the fastest Firefox around for Windows.”
• Firefox memory usage and memory leak news – “Many Mozilla community members, including both volunteers and Mozilla Corporation employees, have been helping to reduce Firefox’s memory usage and fix memory leak bugs lately. Hopefully, the result of this effort will be that Firefox 3 uses less memory than Firefox 2 did, especially after it has been used for several hours.”
• New Firefox 3.0 alpha blocks malware, secures plug-in updates – “Security features debut in latest preview, as Firefox 3.0 heads down the stretch.”
• Firefox/Camino vs. Safari Image Quality — Big difference (IMAGE) – “There seems to be a pretty big significance between these two browser[s] in terms of displaying this image. Not sure why this is happening…but it’s making me consider leaving my favorite browser.”
• New Konqueror web browser icon by Oxygen Team – “Konqueror, KDE web browser get[s] a new icon in Oxygen style. Check it out.”
• Justice in India is done with the help of Linux, OpenOffice and Firefox – “In Uttar Pradesh (most populated state of India), Judges have been distributed laptops powered by Linux, OpenOffice, Evolution, Gnome, Firefox.”
• Proposed Firefox 3 Theme For Mac OS X Looks Exactly Like Safari – “Firefox 3 is having an identity crisis on the Mac. Recent screenshots reveal that the new theme is striking similar to Apple’s Safari. If you can’t innovate, imitate.”
• Can IE’s architect explain why it’s so bloated? – “More good news for Internet Explorer users: Microsoft’s IE chief explains why IE is fatter than Firefox and will never have a similarly comprehensive plugin system.”
• Firefox Coming To Your Phone – “The iPhone, with its fully-functioning Safari browser, showed us that mobile browsing need not be a compromise. Now, the folks at Mozilla are working on a mobile version of Firefox.”
• Mozilla: We’re Ready to Rock the Mobile Web Now – “Here’s some information about what we’re planning to do with hiring, technology, partnerships, and products, and how you can get involved.”

As you can see, Digg is pretty heavy on Firefox, but you got a little Safari and Konqueror in there, too (the IE stuff probably doesn’t count ).

Carnival (via microformatique) is “a free microformat parser for Safari. Download it, fire it up, and whenever a microformatted site is viewed in Safari, Carnival will glow green. Click on the icon to view the available data.”

According to the extension’s author, “This is an alpha, proof-of-concept release. Only hCards are supported, and you can’t actually do much with the data yet.”

Think of this as Operator Lite for Safari.