Looks like the superb Firefox for Android is (finally) getting some competition. I guess it really is time to upgrade my Galaxy SII to the recently leaked ICS rom!

Possibly related twitterless twaddle:

• Google loves html5 (in Android 2.0)
• Follow-up Friday: Ubuntu Unity, Android security & WordPress Stats
• WebTech news (august 2009)

I remember reading about this a couple of years ago or so, but forgot as  support for this html5 spec was limited to Chrome (Apple added support in Safari as well). But while investigating a problem a WP DoNotTrack-user was facing, I re-discovered iframe sandboxing (it effectively stopped the javascript-based tracking inside the iframe) and noticed that support for it is to be included in Internet Explorer 10 and that Mozilla is finally working on an implementation as well.

So yeah, the option to sandbox iframe’s pointing to blacklisted (or non-whitelisted) hostnames will probably be in a future version of WP DoNotTrack. Stay tuned!

Possibly related twitterless twaddle:

• Fix iframe-positioning problem with frameMagic.js
• Avoid iframe-scrollbars with squeezeFrame.js
• It’s official: you can not track your visitors

Now, I haven’t met too many people that use Firefox Mobile and indeed when reading about mobile browsers, Firefox is rarely if ever mentioned. But what if I told you that Firefox Mobile is by far the best browser on mobile when taking performance, features and security into consideration?

I won’t beat around the bush, here’s the pretty objective data.

Some remarks:

• the hardware is pretty comparable; all dual-core CPU’s and plenty of RAM.
• higher is better, except for Sunspider which measures time (in microseconds).
• I’ve got no screenshot or URL of the google v8 test results on my phone, but I’ll be glad to reproduce.
• sunspider and v8 are javascript performance benchmarks.
• html5test is an indication for support of “modern” browser features (html5, css3 and much more).
• the features of the browser GUI arent’t measured byhtml5test, but I’m pretty pleased with Firefox Mobile in that respect as well; great tabbed browsing, plugins (including noscript!), sync-ing of all relevant data between desktops & mobile, …
• I added Opera Mobile and Dolphin HD to the list. Opera’s not too shabby but not a winner either?

And last but not least; as Firefox Mobile isn’t native and since it’s on the same (crazy) rapid release cycle as the desktop-version, I consider it to be a lot more secure when compared to the slow evolving, rarely updated native browsers in Android and iOS.

My advice; if you’re an Android-user and you’ve got a recent handset or tablet, you really should consider switching to Firefox Mobile. It’s the best mobile browser no-one is using! Except for you?

# also stop google+ widget
Site plus.google.com
Accept from plus.google.com
Deny INCLUSION(SCRIPT, OBJ, SUBDOC)


# and twitter
Site platform.twitter.com
Accept from twitter.com
Deny INCLUSION(SCRIPT, OBJ, SUBDOC)

The summary for TLS-dummies like me:

• According to the TLS spec the server should not only provide it’s own certificate, but also any intermediate certificate between it’s own & the CA’s root
• Browsers (or the OS’es key stores that some browsers depend upon) don’t ship with any intermediate certificate, but can and in some cases will store (cache) them when they come across them. In Firefox, cached intermediate certificates are listed as being part of the “software security device”, whereas root certificates are in the “builtin object token”.

All in all, this means that whenever you’re implementing TLS (or SSL, if you’re old-fashioned) you have  to configure your webserver to provide all intermediate certificates in a “chainfile” as (for example) per Apache’s SSLCertificateChainFile directive.

Well, chances are that your disgruntled visitor was using a browser you didn’t test on, like Chrome on Mac for example? Because there is a small issue you have to take into account when “doing https”; both Chrome and Safari (but not Firefox) on Mac use OS X’s keychain, which does not have some of the intermediate certificates needed to establish the trust relationship between your signed certificate and the certificate authority’s root certificate.

As you can’t expect Apple to add intermediate certificates to their keychain by default (which Firefox does a pretty good job though) and you can’t ask all your OS X users to add the intermediate certificate by hand either,  you’ll have to solve this yourself. A good thing Apache can help you in that department with it’s SSLCertificateChainFile directive, which

sets the optional all-in-one file where you can assemble the certificates of Certification Authorities (CA) which form the certificate chain of the server certificate. This starts with the issuing CA certificate of the server certificate and can range up to the root CA certificate.

If there’s only one intermediate certificate missing between your’s and the CA’s, you can export it in good old Firefox (as a pem-file), place it in the same directory as the actual certificate and use SSLCertificateChainFile to tell Apache where to find it and that should solve the nasty errors those Twittering Mac-heads get.

After some cursing and a lot of Scroogling, I finally stumbled across this blogpost which described the exact same problem and advised to set  “layers.acceleration.force-enabled” (which tries to force hardware acceleration, which isn’t supported on Linux by default) back to “false” in about:config. And indeed this small rollback solved my memory-woes. Guess I shouldn’t have dismissed that silly about:config warning message after all.

And while we’re on the subject; Firefox 7 should see substantial improvements in memory usage, yay!

Now don’t get me wrong; me and my Magic, we got along real fine. But my employer likes the smell of a fresh smartphone in the morning and subsidizes to make that happen and when I saw a colleague with a Samsung Galaxy S II, I knew me and my Magic HTC had to part ways.

The Galaxy S II sports a huge, bright screen with vivid colors (Samsung’s super AMOLED screens are simply stunning), a 1.2 GHz dual-core processor and 16Gb of internal storage (with an microSD-slot to be able to add up to 32Gb). There’s no hardware keyboard like on the HTC Desire Z I once was planning on buying, but the Galaxy does come with Swype, the virtual keyboard that takes most of the pain out of … not having a keyboard. I’ve installed all of the favorite apps from my HTC-days and as a bonus I can now finally also use Firefox Mobile (which is great, by the way).

So what’s not to like about it? Well, it’s huge, for starters. Big hands come in handy when using the S II, so I wouldn’t want to market it in China, except as a mini-tablet maybe. I’m not too thrilled about Samsung’s TouchWiz as seen on the homescreen. And battery-life isn’t that great, but that’s to be expected, with that humongous screen real estate I guess.

All in all my S II is a great smartphone. One probably doesn’t really need a dual-core handset with 16Gb of memory and a 800X480 screen, but it sure is nice little gadget to play around with for the next 2 years or so …

On one hand there’s Internet Explorer, with no less then 4 versions in the wild (cfr. chart on the left, data source: statcounter.com). According to MS’s own IE6countdown, IE6 is down to 1.9% market sharee in Belgium (but 10.7% worldwide), so we might as well forget about that dinosaur, except maybe if you’re in a b2b-context? But that still leaves you with IE7, IE8 and IE9. Check your visitor stats, because your mileage may vary, but you’ll probably want to focus on IE8 (the “stable” version) and IE9 (the “new stable”).

Google Chrome is the example of a radically different approach. There’s a new version approximately every 6 weeks, with users upgrading to the latest stable version automatically. The impact of such a rapid release schedule can seen in the chart on the left (data source: statcounter.com).

The advantage of this approach for web-developers is clear: you don’t have to worry about older versions any more. But on the other hand; you do have to worry about newer versions (at least a bit), because by the time you finished development of your application, Google Chrome (and Firefox, which recently joined the rapid release frenzy) will be one or even two version further along and customers will have upgraded automatically.  In general this won’t be a problem, but maybe you should test your app in the stable and beta versions of your supported browsers during development and consider investing some time in regular testing on the stable versions after your move to production, to avoid that a HTML rendering or JavaScript engine regression or a slightly altered CSS interpretation messes up your online presence?

Anyway, there’s no silver bullet, so what is your approach?

Possibly related twitterless twaddle:

• Google to launch Chrome, a Webkit-based browser
• Lovin’ the WordPress plugin ecosystem
• Embedding HTML5 YouTube video with WP YouTube Lyte

Firefox 5 will probably not include one of the much discussed hidden features in Chrome 13; the possibility to hide the navigation bar, but Mozilla indeed is experimenting with that as well. I’ve got Mozillalabs Prospector’s Simplify Firefox add-on installed on my netbook and in that 1024X600 context the extra screen real estate is a huge advantage. On the other hand, on my 1440X900 work laptop screen I don’t need (or want) those measly extra pixels. Maybe hiding the navigation bar should be an option which is by default off on normal-sized screens and is automatically turned on for screens with a netbook-like resolution?