“What browser should this be tested in?” Remember 2003, when that question was rarely asked because there was virtually only Internet Explorer? Or 2006, when you could get away with just IE6 and Firefox 1.5? 5 years later the browser landscape has become a lot more complex. You’ve don’t only have to consider Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and maybe even Opera and mobile, there’s browser versions to worry about as well!
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?
browsers
Blogposts on blog.futtta.be about browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and good ole Internet Explorer).
Firefox 5 and hiding the navigation bar
I got prompted to update my Firefox 4 to Firefox 5 beta last week. New features include better standards support, speed improvements, better integration with Linux desktops, in-browser software channel selection and support for CSS animations. The final version of FF5 is expected to ship on June 21th.
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?
Code Rush: watching Mozilla’s history in the making
A couple of days ago I saw “Code Rush“, a non-fiction movie about life at Netscape while they were in the process of open sourcing their browser in 1998. It’s a great documentary about a defining moment in the history of the web, touching on subjects like code & quality (zarro boogs), the fight with Microsoft, the awkward marriage with AOL, the stock market, technology start-up culture and work versus life.
Open sourcing Communicator didn’t save Netscape as a company, but it did allow the Mozilla Organization to create a whole new browser suite based on XUL and NGlayout (later Gecko), which were 2 important building blocks for Phoenix, a standalone browser (instead of a suite) which we now know as Firefox.
Code Rush aired in 2000 on PBS in the States, but was released under a Creative Commons license in 2009. You can check out all footage (and search the transcripts) on clickmovement.org.
Did Flash really become irrelevant in 2010?
Little over a year ago I must have been smoking some weird shit when writing that Flash would become irrelevant in 2010. Because after all, this is 2011 and there’s still plenty of Flash for Adobe aficionados to make a living and the famous html5 video codec issue hasn’t been fully sorted out yet either. So I was wrong, was I? Well, … not really!
Apple still stubbornly refuses Flash on the iPhone and more importantly the iPad, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 joined the HTML5-crowd in full force and even Adobe is going HTML5 with support in Dreamweaver and in Illustrator and with a preview of Edge, “a tool for creating animation and transitions using the capabilities of HTML5”.
But is was only in December 2010 that I knew I was dead on with my prediction, when I overheard this conversation at work between a business colleague and a web development partner:
Business Colleague: I would like a personalized dashboard with some nice-looking charts in my web application.
Web Development Partner: No problem, we’ll do it in Flash!
Business Colleague: No, we want this to work on the iPad too!
The year technology-agnostic decision-making business people started telling suppliers not to use Flash, that was the year Flash became irrelevant and “the open web technology stack” (somewhat incorrectly marketed as HTML5) took over.
Firefox 4 beta007: the thunderball we’ve been waiting for
Although the final release of Firefox 4 has been postponed until the beginning of next year, the latest beta-iteration of our little browser-friend is a huge step forwards!
Up until beta6 a number of very nice features had already been added; tabs on top and grouped tabs, a new add-on manager, Firefox sync, lots of HTML5- and CSS3-features, support for the webm video codec, support for WebGL (3D on the canvas), hardware accelerated graphics, …
But despite all of these exiting changes, there was one elephant in the room; javascript speed. Chrome and Safari were miles ahead and even Opera and Microsoft IE9 were boosting important advances in that area. And that is where beta7 makes a huge step forward; Firefox 4 sports a new Javascript-engine and is now in the same league as Chrome and Safari even beating them in some tests and that speed difference is immediately obvious after upgrading from beta6 tot beta7.
So Firefox 4 is getting ready for prime-time; lots of great new features, fast and -in my experience- very stable. Guess it’s time to upgrade my lovely wife’s Firefox 3.6.x to the brand new 4 beta 7! I do hope she’ll find the location of the reload button though …
Fire and Fox don’t make no Firefox
Apparently the Firefox-brand is that strong that some want to be associated with it. But I’m not sure Mozilla (the not-for-profit or the corp) is fine with the blatant … “re-use” of their artwork.
The irony; Fox security offers fire- & theft-detection. But never mind, we’ve got Firefox 4 (beta7) to look forward to, haven’t we?
Over vanalles en nog wat
Een paar kleine ditjes en datjes, het moet hier niet altijd proper uitgewerkt zijn:
- Dropbox is tof, maar niet perfect: op Android een file aan je Dropbox toevoegen doet pijn aan het gat en de Windows-versie wilt ook thuis de proxy van het werk gebruiken (auto-detect proxy werkt niet).
- WP-YouTube-Lyte zit aan versie 0.4.1, de afmetingen van de player zijn nu configureerbaar. Het ding is al bijna 2300 keer gedownload (cumulatief voor alle versies) en op basis van de downloadcijfers na een release gok ik dat het op een site of 300 geïnstalleerd staat.
- Van cijfers gesproken, afgelopen maandag met deze blog de 100.000 pageviews gepasseerd, dank daarvoor anonieme passant.
- Ik draai al een week ofzo op Firefox 4 beta1 (zowel op Windows als op Ubuntu), lekker stabiel voor een eerste beta. Tabs on top is inderdaad logisch en html5 video (met WebM) op YouTube lukt nu ook, maar aan de nieuwe theme en add-on manager is nog “wat” werk. Beta2 zou eerstdaags uitkomen, maar het is nog wachten op de grote javascript snelheidswinst (waarmee FF terug dichter bij de concurrentie zou moeten komen).
En nog wat: als het gesprek even stilvalt, vragen mensen niet meer naar het weer, maar naar je mening over de slaagkansen van droomkoppel De Wever & Di Rupo. Ik zeg dan dat ze moeten slagen en dat ze dat zelf ook weten want dat het er anders niet goed uitziet voor onze portemonnee en dan verwijs ik naar een interessant artikel dat ik daarover op Apache las en het gesprek valt weer stil.
But how unstable is Flash really?
You probably read that Steve Jobs officially declared Flash a stability nightmare and that Adobe’s CEO responded that OS X is to blame. Hard to take sides in this blame-game, especially without access to Apple’s crash reports data. We do, however, have access to Mozilla’s crash-stats.mozilla.com. Could those figures provide us with at least some relevant statistics about Flash’s reliability?
I imported this csv-file with the top 300 crashers for Firefox 3.6.3 for the last 50 days (3.6.3 was released on April 1th) into a Google Docs spreadsheet and counted the number of crashes for each line where “Flash” or “NPSWF32” is in the signature (SUMIF without wildcard characters, seriously Google!?). You can find the spreadsheet here, but these are the results:
| total number crash reports for top 300 crashers: | 3583582 |
| crash reports with “NPSWF32” or “Flash” in signature: | 1154488 |
| flash-related crashes %: | 32.22% |
That’s right; almost 1/3 of the Firefox 3.6.3 “top crashers” are clearly related to Flash! So yes, there is good reason to consider plugins in general and Flash in particular a stability risk for Firefox. And for the record, the numbers for Mac seem to indicate that the problem is even (much) worse there! So hurray for Firefox 3.6.4 with Out of Process Plugins! And hey Adobe, get your Flash together!
Firefox Lorentz: Flash don’t crash here anymore
A couple of days ago I installed Lorentz, a beta version of Firefox. Lorentz is virtually identical to Firefox 3.6.3, except that it incorporates part of the work of the Electrolysis team. Their “Out-of-process plugins”-code lets Firefox-plugins (on Windows & Linux, they’re still working on Mac OSX according to the release notes) run in a separate process from the browser, meaning Flash (but also Silverlight or Quicktime) can’t crash Firefox any more.
This feature actually is long overdue, a substantial amount of Firefox crashes are indeed caused by Flash failing and Mozilla’s competitors (MS IE, Apple Safari and Google Chrome) already have similar (or even more exhaustive) crash-protection.
Once you’ve installed Lorentz (or Chrome or IE8 or Safari off course) you can safely visit http://flashcrash.dempsky.org/, which exploits a bug that was reported 19 months ago and which may still cause the most recent Flash-version (10.0.45.2) to crash. And if flashcrash doesn’t bring up the plugin-crash-dialog, you can always kill the “mozilla-runtime” process that hosts the plugins, just for kicks!
x-frame-options coming to a Firefox near you
Microsoft IE8 introduced it, Apple Safari4 has it, Google Chrome4 does it and now somewhere in the not too distant future, Firefox will ship it too; support for X-FRAME-OPTIONS.
X-cuse-me? Well, X-FRAME-OPTIONS is the HTTP response header that broke Google Talk chat badge a few months ago, remember? It allows you to specify whether your site or page can be (i)framed or not, by setting it to “DENY” (not allowed to be framed) or “SAMEORIGIN” (allowed if the framing site is on the exact same domain). The most important reason for this functionality is as a prevention-mechanism for “clickjacking” (a.k.a. UI redressing), a type of web attack that tries to trick victims into clicking a framed site by hiding it behind another innocent element.
So now that feature is finally coming to Firefox as well; Mozilla’s Brendan Sterne, one of the driving forces behind Mozilla’s much broader content security policy, grabbed the bug by the balls and came up with a first patch. If all goes well, this would be an ideal candidate to get pushed out with a minor version update as per the new release process, no?