Browsersphere

With at least a couple more Firefox 3 betas on the way, the release of IE8 Beta 1 and the official release of the Acid3 test, there’s a lot going on in the browsersphere these days.  Let’s jump right into it…

• First off, it’s now March, so Netscape Navigator is officially dead (but do you really believe that?).
• The Opera Desktop Team has released what they are calling a Plugin Milestone Build.
• I think this guy may be more into web browsers than I am.
• Mozilla’s been getting some fan mail.
• Opera has made the switch back to Google for search in Opera Mini and Opera Mobile (see a screenshot of the new Opera Mini start page).  There’s more on this over at TechCrunch as well.
• Sebastiaan de With (remember him?) thinks that the Firefox 3 interface is going nowhere.
• A forum post pointed me toward another minor player called Acoo Browser, which is another browser built on Trident.
• CyberNet claims that Avant Browser 11 will be the best version of the browser yet.
• Ben Moore seems to have mixed feelings about some of the changes made between Maxthon v1 and v2.
• sKatterBrainZ claims that “there’s nothing in Safari that is truly innovative or unique to the world of web browsing.”
• Somewhat contradictory to that, Ian Hixie, the author of the Acid3 test, seems pretty impressed with how quickly the Safari/WebKit team has responded to the issues uncovered by Acid3 (I’ve covered this here as well).
• Ian Clifton had some interesting points to make about the Internet Explorer team’s original stance on standards support in the forthcoming IE8.
• microformatique points out that the IE team has used the hAtom microformat to implement their WebSlices feature.
• CyberNet says the SpaceTime 3D Browser is “mostly for fun” and shows off a video demo of the interesting browser.
• Firefox 3 Beta 3 has replaced Firefox 2 as the default browser in Alpha 6 of Ubuntu Hardy Heron.
• Opera Mini users browsed over 1.8 million web pages back in January.
• Kevin Yank says that table-based layouts will be “the next big thing” (via Simon Willison).
• Daniel Glazman wrote a CSS3 Selector test suite and posted the results for Firefox 3.0b4pre (Minefield), Safari 3.0.4 for Windows, Opera 9.23 and Internet Explorer 7.  He was impressed to see that the latest builds of Opera pass all of his tests.
• Opera Twitters (via Opera Watch).
• Myk Melez talks about what it’s like to sheriff for Mozilla.
• Opera Mini users can now zoom images.
• Mitchell Baker has posted about the Mozilla Steering Committee.
• Jesse Ruderman created a Greasemonkey script for those who spend a lot of time looking at the Firefox tinderbox.
• Opera’s Charles McCathieNevile, Mozilla’s Brendan Eich and Microsoft’s Chris Wilson will square off at SXSW tomorrow in a panel called “Browser Wars: Deja Vu All Over Again?”
• It doesn’t look like many CSS3 features have made their way into IE8 yet.
• Konqueror 4 for Windows has been reviewed.
• Someone decided to show off how they made a web browser with Visual Basic 2008 in under three minutes on YouTube.
• Okiwi is a free web browser for the Nintendo DS.
• An online poll asking what the greatest web browser ever is has some interesting options from which to choose.
• A C|Net podcast covers, among other things, BMWs that feature full-blown in-dash web browsers.
• Dan Gayle digs Lynx.
• Auto Web Browser “will consult the search engines from a user defined list, download the pages to your computer, filter and analyze them and then it will automatically surf further, downloading other potentially interesting pages using the links from the meaningful part of the relevant documents.”
• The Off By One Web Browser “may be the world’s smallest and fastest web browser with full HTML 3.2 support.”
• The WorldWideWeb browser (which was later renamed Nexus) turned 17 years old last month.
• You can view your Firefox web browser history visually with ThumbStrip.
• Firefox, Flock, Internet Explorer, Maxthon, Opera and Safari are nominated in the Browsing category of the Webware 100.
• Anne van Kesteren covers some of the “evil” things about IE8.

Amazingly enough, there’s a lot more to post about, but that should hold you over for a little bit.  I’m interested in hearing if Browsersphere visitors are more interested in somewhat random links like this or if it would be preferable to have the links broken down by the web browser to which they correspond.  If you have any thoughts on that, please leave a comment.

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.

This just in from the IEBlog:

We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously.

If you’ll recall, there was a bit of an uproar about a month ago when it was announced that web developers would need to opt-in in order to take advantage of IE8’s improved web standards support (I got to the news late and a combination of that and pure laziness kept me from posting anything specific here, especially since you literally had to be living under a rock to have missed the debate as it burned across the web).  As a result of the uproar, the IE team seems to have changed its stance on the matter.

Here are some more details from today’s IEBlog post:

Our initial thinking for IE8 involved showing pages requesting “Standards” mode in an IE7’s “Standards” mode, and requiring developers to ask for IE8’s actual “Standards” mode separately. We made this decision, informed by discussions with some leading web experts, with compatibility at the top of mind.

In light of the Interoperability Principles, as well as feedback from the community, we’re choosing differently. Now, IE8 will show pages requesting “Standards” mode in IE8’s Standards mode. Developers who want their pages shown using IE8’s “IE7 Standards mode” will need to request that explicitly (using the http header/meta tag approach described here).

In the end, I think the IE team has made the right decision.  As a web developer myself, I really feel that it is in the best interests of the web to encourage the migration to the latest and greatest web standards, and hey, if a bunch of legacy code suddenly needs a retooling to catch up with the times, that can only mean more work for web developers, right?

What do you think of the decision?

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.

If you’re as into following web browsers as I think you are, you probably already heard that an internal Microsoft build of the next version of Internet Explorer, which will be dubbed IE8 (and not something else), recently passed the Acid2 test.  The news spread quickly, as it was featured on sites like Slashdot and Digg, and was relished, praised and congratulated by many, and met with some criticism by others.  Robert Scoble gave kudos to Microsoft and the IE team; Opera Watch called it an “exciting and positive step in the right direction for Microsoft and the Web;” Simon Willison gave some technical examples of what the news means, Slightly Ajar called the news “a great win for standards;” Dave Shea called it a “huge leap forward.”

On the more skeptical front, both Asa Dotzler and Slightly Ajar questioned just what exactly the IE team meant when they referred to “IE8 standards mode.”  Furthermore, Dave Massy responded to some criticism and other questions about the forthcoming browser.  When Bill Gates was asked about some of the secrecy that has surrounded the release in a recent interview, he expressed surprise and allowed that there aren’t any deep secrets about what is going on with the development of the browser.

To say that all the recent ramblings have gotten people talking about the browser would be an understatement.  Beyond sparking interest in IE8’s handling of the Acid2 test, the buzz has spurred ideas and suggestions about what other features should be included in the release.

If you’ve gotten through this post and you’re still itching for more information about IE8, which is reportedly due out in the first half of this year, the original announcement at the IEBlog is packed with details, including the checkin log from when the feature landed in the central IE build, a Channel 9 interview features IE GM Dean Hachamovitch and Architect Chris Wilson, and a post titled IE8 Expectations, written by Jonathan Snook, is one of the better written posts on the subject, including everything from details about the underlying Trident rendering engine to predictions about what will and won’t be supported.  So be sure to give those links a read as well.

This time around we’re going to focus on Internet Explorer, since it hasn’t gotten much love around these parts lately.  However, before I get to the links, I just want to say that keeping a finger on the pulse of Internet Explorer is a task I wouldn’t wish upon anybody.  You literally have to crawl your way through piles and piles of end user complaints about script errors and outright functionality failures (e.g. bookmarks not working at all or home pages never loading) and questions about how the browser can be removed for good from users’ systems, permanently.

Once you get past all that, though, you do tend to find some interesting links, not necessarily all positive, but at least substantive.  So without further ado, here goes…

• Rowen Atkinson hates Internet Explorer “with the heat of 1000 suns,” but refrains from telling us how he really feels.
• Colin Cochrane explains why he feels Internet Explorer did not kill XHTML.
• TechWhack covers why Microsoft’s recent settlement with Eolas will make Internet Explorer less annoying.
• FlvGetter makes downloading .flv files from Internet Explorer as simple as a right-click.
• This ZDNet Australia article covers in detail how to install IEs4Linux (which was covered here before) on Ubuntu.
• Learn how to fake max-width in Internet Explorer via phydeaux3.
• Microsoft may be considering throwing standards to the wind explicitly, and not just implicitly.
• For those who think Firefox is a memory hog (you’re not alone), A Day in Paradise has a screenshot of Internet Explorer using up over a GB of RAM.
• 101 ways to make that annoying click sound go away in Internet Explorer (or one definitive one).
• Neek Blog wonders why Google would promote Internet Explorer.
• IE7Pro 1.2 was released on October 30, 2007.
• Internet Explorer saved one mac user.
• Do you recognize this morphed logo?
• Companion.JS is apparently to Internet Explorer what Firebug is to Firefox.

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 was a big week for web browsers. Let’s get caught up on the little stuff…

• Vince Liu recommends using IEs4Linux if you’re looking to install Internet Explorer on Linux.
• HTTPOnly cookie support has been added to Firefox.
• The Opera Desktop Team explains My Opera synchronization.
• Firefox 3 will resume downloads across sessions.
• The Register interviewed Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner (via Opera Watch) and CSS3 . Info interviewed Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie — see part 1 and part 2.
• Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World claims that Opera’s only real competitors at this point are Konqueror and Safari.
• A Fedora Forum user refers to Konqueror as ‘the soup nazi in terms of [code] compliance'.
• Opera Watch explains how to enable single key shortcuts in Opera.
• Hisham explains how to install an Internet Explorer warning infobar.
• az Sports Hub found an Arizona Cardinals theme for Firefox.
• Kathy Hughes explains how to avoid being prompted to login when browsing SharePoint sites in Firefox.
• NetSkinner can 'theme' almost any Palm OS web browser.
• NetSurf is an open-source web browser for RISC OS.
• Bryan Clark follows-up on his web browser home page findings.
• Web Browser CSS Support has a complete rundown on the CSS support of some of the major web browsers.

Feedback on the recently released Opera 9.5 alpha has started to roll in now that more people have had a chance to play with it. I have to admit, I haven’t played around with it yet, so I’ll tell you what some other people are saying…

Download Junkie says:

• We tested this early preview and it’s already looking superb. The performance is the best of any browser we’ve used, it was very stable and the Mac OS X version ships with a much-improved user interface that looks like a proper OS X interface.

Vorlath says:

• I really have to plug Opera 9.5 right now. It looks the same. Or at least, I made it look the same again (skins, rss feeds, plugins and such). But it feels like I have a new computer.
• Personally, everything about how Opera 9.5 renders pages rocks.
• The renderer in Opera 9.5 isn’t just fast. It’s lightning fast. Moving things on screen, scrolling, refresh, everything just flows extremely fast.

Ars Technica says:

• The new alpha does feel slightly “snappier” than its predecessor.
• While still not as full-featured as a standalone BitTorrent client, being able to download torrents with a single click on a web page is an extremely useful feature and is one that I use all the time.
• When you start typing in a URL or search term, Opera will not only auto-fill a dropdown list of previously visited pages starting with the letters you have typed, but it also searches the contents of web pages in your history and displays those matching results as well. So you can just type, say, “apple” in the URL and it will pick up not only www.apple.com but any recently visited web pages mentioning that particular fruit.

Asa Dotzler says:

• My initial use suggests some mild performance improvements on a few of the heavier pages I visit. There are quite a few rendering glitches but that’s to be expected this early in the development cycle.
• There are just too many sites that still block Opera completely. Not being able to use Google office apps and other top 1000 sites is just a deal-breaker for so many people.
• Opera today looks and feels a lot more like Firefox and IE than it did just a couple of years ago and their dev team deserves praise for those moves.

Digg users say:

• Been using for least than 5 minutes, and I already love it. most of the site specific anoyances that broke my opera 9.23 are now fixed.
• Opera once again demonstrates its prowess in innovation with the new feature list – such as the full history search.
• OMG it is fantastic! I think it is really faster on Mac now and works better with many websites, such as Plaxo and Google Calendar! Sweet.

You know there’d be at least one “OMG” in that last set

And just in case you’re looking for some testing grounds where you can put some of the alpha build’s new features to the test, you can either head on over to David Storey’s list of demos or to CSS3 . Info, which has a section dedicated to CSS3.

Oh, and Browsersphere is still kind of a comment virgin, so if you’ve had a chance to look at the Opera 9.5 alpha and have your own thoughts on it, please leave a comment

Opera’s Chief Web Opener, David Storey, has posted an update on CSS support in Kestrel, the forthcoming 9.5 release of the Opera web browser.

Apparently, after having added support for whitespace: pre-line;, Kestrel is getting very close to full support for CSS2.1. In addition, several CSS3 advancements continue to be made. Read David’s post for all the details.