Latest comments
I Really Need To Fancy This Up
TCMI!!!!!!!!
Not for another week!
tcmi...
nuff said :P
I'm not dead, just busy
Dan: That's what I get for learning about current events from radio 1, I guess...
George: Thank you for your contribution :)
Xob: Today, I shall mostly be using jEdit. Most promising, thanks!
Try jEdit. I used this for a while before I switched to Notepad++. Java, so cross-platform.
Kuwaiti girls are the best!!
People who want disability benefit do undergo a medical check, but it's a one-off thing (or perhaps an annual one). The new system means that health will be assessed on a continual basis.
We Still Love Labour
We need to bring our industries back, going green could be a huge economic boon, not to mention being able to sell our green expertise and technologies to the rest of the world.
We probably import it. Amusingly, we also import a lot of the people who install it for us, who in turn kindly export the money we give them to eastern europe ;)
Don't you actually produce your own loft fluff? We do produce some here in Denmark, anyway - so you might get something out of that.
I know none of the details on the measures your mentioned, but it does seem like something that's hard to oppose publicly, even if it's a terrible idea - helping the poor pay their bills can't be something bad, can it? ;-)
Chrome Falls Short
You may be right - it makes more sense as a channel to push ideas into other browsers, at least at this point. But this is Google, wouldn't put anything past them. Think we'll just have to wait and see.
This is the thing though, I'm not convinced that Google made Chrome to be a good everyday browser. They made it to make a point, and I think it's more successful at doing that than being an actual everyday browser.
Browser innovation has stagnated a bit in the past year. Sure, we had Firefox 3, but people seem to be having a bit of a love/hate relationship with that. It brought the awesomebar, but there was a sense that people were expecting more. Microsoft doesn't seem to be doing much with IE other than copying everyone else. Opera had the speed-dial thing invented, but apart from that haven't come up with much (I don't think). I can see how Google may have become a bit exasperated with the lack of progress being made in browser development because, in a sense, it holds back their business. Chrome seems to be a browser that introduces new ways of doing things, rather than being a polished v1.0 product.
Personally, I'm hoping that this makes Firefox better. I'm sure the Opera users are hoping that this helps make Opera better, and the IE users are hoping this makes IE better.
As a way of injecting life into the browser market, this might be a good step. Maybe Google will continue to maintain Chrome as the ideas-and-innovation browser which you'll never use, but look towards to see what the next great features will be. Maybe I'm just overly optimistic.
This point is mentioned in [[http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/common-google-chrome-objections/|this article defending Chrome]], and I entirely agree that you should develop for a standard and leave it up to the browsers to present things correctly - but a lot of the time, you can't.
At the moment I'm working on a perfectly valid page and CSS stylesheet that is broken in IE6 because of the 3px bug. 60% of the visitors to that site use IE6, including the client. Saying to them that "no, the site's not broken, it's just your browser" isn't a solution, it's the easiest way to lose the client; I've got to fix it.
The other problem is how the browser manages plugins. I can write entirely valid code, but unless I go through and test it in all of the browsers, I miss the fact that IE6 and IE7 break Flash's ExternalInterface if the Flash is in an iframe smaller than 18x18. And if 80% of those visitors are using IE6 and IE7, I have to fix it.
Although I always design for the standard first, I've got to go through, check and fix at least IE5, IE6, IE7 and IE8b2, Firefox 2 and 3, Opera, and Safari 3. Clients don't understand or care about standards, they just want it to work and look good. Chrome's ~3% market share is already dropping, but unless it drops further, I'll have to add it to list.
The javascript engine does look good though - the comparison was done by the firefox dev team (link added to article), so it definitely has to be taken with a pinch of salt ;)
People need to realise that they don't have to develop for every single browser - but develop for a standard, doing markup and suggestions to browsers as to how things could look - but ultimately let it be up the browsers how to present things. That, or go back to having your webpages be on big image-map ... ;-)
I've done it myself, plenty of times, but in the end it's really not a viable solution. You used to be certain that people would at least use 800x600 - now not even that is a given, with all the mobile devices around.
In my very un-humble opinion, the only way forward is to accept that HTML and CSS are to be seen as information to the browser on the structure and "serving suggestions" of a webpage, and hope that the freedom this way given to the browser developers will make them do something nice with.
... otherwise, I like your blog post. I haven't tried Chrome yet, because they said it'd be beta, and I don't really need a beta web-browser. The javascript engine is made across the road from where I work, by some quite talented people, and I think that given time, it'll be able to do far better than the firefox engine. Might even take over the job, since it's free software anyway. ;-)
Firebug Bug Explained: It's Firefox 3
Interesting! It might do! I haven't had a chance to investigate the issue myself, but will do.
Part of the problem would remain though - it would only help me use the net tab, but caching is still broken for any FF3 user.
Does the browser.cache.check_doc_frequency = 1 setting affect this for frames? Just done a quick test and I get requests and 304 responses if I set this to 1, whereas setting this to 3 leads to no requests being made for cached images.
LAAFF 2008 Report
I want to come visit :(
That sounds like a great event! It sounds like you had lots of fun, anyway. Your house also looks very nice on those pictures.
LAAFF 2008
Hiya, we will be in at about 12:20 in Cheltenham spa (turns out it was a 5+ hour train journey) - I alwasys thought it was the Laughably Attrocious Anual Film Festival ;)
We're on the train! Arrive in Cheltenham at about 12.30 I think.