Es Tea Double Eye » browsers

Chrome is gold

Stii — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 19:57:40 +0000

I’m ecstatic! Finally the wait for the Google Chrome browser is over. I have to say, my first impressions justify the long wait. I’m in fact putting Firefox on the same shelf as IE, only using it to test web sites.

On the Mac and OS X Chrome does not disappoint one bit. It is as intuitive and nimble as we’ve grown accustomed to. I don’t know how it behaves on Windows, but it just feels so native and good in OS X. Well done Google. It is FAST! I hope the speed does not degrade over time, but the first couple of hours have been a noticeable speed improvement even compared to Safari.

Stability is key. If you consider that Firefox brings an entire system down if you have more than 10 tabs open at a time. (Okay, I may be exaggerating… but Firefox irks me these days!). Chrome does it well enough. I’m impressed so far. Funny, it loads a new helper for every tab open, so technically it should kill your system, but it just keep going and going. They did it properly, I assume.

If you’re used to Safari and its developer tools, Chrome would feel right at home. Since both are powered by Webkit it uses the same developer tools. Now, here I do miss Firebug, still, Firebug alone won’t make me forgive Firefox!

What also impress me is how intuitive the search functionality behaves. You won’t see a seperate search box like in other browsers. That is because you don’t need it. You simply enter your keywords in the address bar and it defaults to a Google search for your keywords. Very, very slick.

It has been a bloody long wait. I can honestly say, the last time I’ve been this excited about anything was after I installed Leopard. Unfortunately Slow Leopard was a big let down, but since I spend most my day in the browser, Chrome makes it great again! I hope I won’t have to retract most of what I’ve said here. Time will be the true test.

Die, IE6, DIE will you?

Stii — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 09:23:43 +0000

Lets face it, IE6 seems like it just won’t die. Unless we make the experience so shitty for it’s users that they have no choice but to use other browsers. Jayx has a series of statistics on browser usage which is quite interesting, but that may well differ from site to site.

On this blog, I have very few IE6 users visiting me. On Afrigator, it is an entirely different story altogether! The thing is that it would make sense for me to kill IE6. I don’t stand to lose much. It could be fatal for some bigger sites. Yet, what else can we do? If we want to make the web an easier place to design for, we have to bring IE6 down. Here is how:

If you have your own installation of WordPress, install this incredible plugin called Shockingly big IE6 warning. It gives you 3 options. Small, Big and Crash.

The small option simply shows a butt-ugly yellow bar at the top of your site if an IE6 user visits it which suggest they upgrade to a better browser. Elegant, yet undesirable. Consider the stubbornness of IE6 users, they will gladly ignore this. Not recommended.

The second option (a.k.a. the Big option) is quite acceptable. It blacks out the screen and suggest that the IE6 user upgrades or else. See, now they cannot use your site and if they really want to see your content, they need to upgrade to another browser. Highly recommended option.

The third option is the option I’m vying for. The Crash option. Without warning or explanation, IE6 will simply crash and die. Definitely highly recommended.

What is kind of ironic is that should mobile sites become remotely as popular as web sites, designers are going to have hissy fits like an epileptic Burmese snail. Notwithstanding, I think, IE6 has to go. It has successfully completed it’s life cycle about 8 years ago, but simply don’t want to die. Accept it now.

Force tabs instead of new windows for Safari

Stii — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 09:53:54 +0000

The new Safari 4 is awesome. It is in fact better than Firefox/Flock for a change. It looks fantastic, has great new features and is much faster. The only problem is new windows not opening in new tabs. IMHO, it is a silly mistake Apple makes! It should be a setting you can change in your preference window like any other.

In your preference window you can select:
⌘ – click opens a link in a new tab

Brilliant. Clicking on links in different ways does different things with those links.

The problem though is that when a link on a site has the HTML attribute target=”_blank” set (which opens a new window) Safari opens a new window instead of a new tab for that window. Firefox handles it correct in that it opens a new tab, not a new window.

However, this can be fixed easily on Mac. Simply open up the terminal and execute:

$ defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

After that, restart Safari if it was running for the setting to take effect and the problem is solved.

On Windows it seems there are no easy fix. We had a look this morning and could not find something.

This is quite a stupid mistake Apple made. If you look at how intuitive OSX is and how big they are on usability, this is shocking by Apple standards. Even the fix on OSX is such an obscure one. Why not simply add it to the preferences window? Why should one have to run a command to fix it? Blegh. We’ll see what happens.