Results tagged “Browsers” from The Hardware is Not Enough
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Useful article on DevCentre on how to overcome the inevitable heartache that IE7 is going to bring.
Webmonkey has a brief look at the new features in IE7 beta 2. Some good things in there, some bad things in there. But then, MS has a hell of a lot of catching up to do. I personally would prefer them to get CSS rendering correct, while still allowing for the hacks necessary in most stylesheets for IE6 compatibility: the last thing we all need is IE7 sticking to the IE box model while finally getting support for more advanced mark-up like “html > body”.
How many web sites would get mucked up if that happened? Rather a lot, unfortunately.
One of the big announcements of MacWorld was the licensing by Microsoft of Flip4Mac's QuickTime components as a replacement for Windows Media Player (WMP) for Macintosh.
On the face of it, this should be good: one fewer media player to worry about; Windows media files accessible within any QuickTime-aware application; a promise of continued updates.
Unfortunately, practice has thrown a spanner in the theoretical works. For one thing, Flip4Mac isn't very good. It frequently has problems displayed WMV content in browsers, despite an accompanying plug-in. It also is slow at converting WMV within QuickTime, a process no other codec I know of has to go through anyway.
But the biggest problem is wretched DRM. Since QuickTime sends a different user agent to servers than Windows Media Player, streams such as those used by radio station XFM will refuse to work with Flip4Mac. It also seems to have even more problems that WIndows Media Player when it comes to viewing content such as Channel 4's The IT Crowd previews; while WMP at least has a stab at redirecting to the Channel 4 web site, Flip4Mac just serves garbled music and a white screen.
Unless Flip4Mac gets a big boost of Microsoft R&D, Mac users are going to be third-class citizens when it comes to Windows Media content. Pity the poor Linux users who come in fourth though.
Can it be true? We can only hope that this article on Publish.com is correct and Microsoft is finally backing away from the most hated invention on the Internet after the <blink> tag: ActiveX controls.
Jakob Nielsen starts off the year with a cracking article on how to stop search engines siphoning off your profit through advertising bid wars. I wrote a similar piece on how to keep customers coming back in one of my recent M-iD columns, so I'm glad our opinions seem to coincide.
Updates and related entries
February 4, 2006:
Various publishers have decided that search engines are a Bad Thing and are stealing too much of their content. Jakob Nielsen suggested some useful techniques for them a while back, so maybe they could just listen to him?
Take a quick look at the Internet Explorer for Mac page. Yes, Microsoft has finally killed off IE for Mac. It discontinued development on the browser back in June 2003, but it's now finally killing off support and, come the end of January 2006, downloads of the geriatric app.
In case you missed the reasons why, a News.com article quoted the then Microsoft Product Manager Jessica Sommer who said that, with the emergence of Apple's Safari browser, Microsoft felt that customers were better served by using Apple's browser, noting that Microsoft does not have the access to the Macintosh operating system that it would need to compete.
This, of course, is cobblers. What precise access to the OS does a web browser need? Opera, Firefox, Camino and OmniWeb don't need it. OmniWeb can even access the same rendering libraries that Apple's own browser, Safari, uses. In fact, dozens of apps use WebKit to provide web content within their own interfaces.
Sure, on Windows, IE is quite snuggly tied into the OS, but that's for providing things like ActiveX support and functions that the OS's interface needs – not the other way around. IE on Mac's support for ActiveX died an early death and if MS were ever planning to resuscitate it, I think most Mac users would have offered a polite “No thank you.”
There'll be a few things we'll miss from IE once it's gone – although it's bound to keep on working for a while, given that it still works fine on OS X 10.4, two OS revisions after it was in active development. Auction tracking was a nice feature, as was the ability to switch off images, a function sadly missing from Safari. Nevertheless, there won't be too many Mac users crying tonight.
Technorati Tags: browsers, Internet Explorer, Macs
Internet Explorer 7, due in about four months' time, is to support RSS feeds – some of which may have Microsoft 'enhancements' (ie proprietary extensions). Following a competition to design a new RSS icon to appear in IE7 whenever a site supports RSS feeds, Microsoft has decided… to use Mozilla's:
It's an odd choice: I don't find the icon used by Mozilla and Firefox to be at all self-explanatory – certainly not compared with Safari's:
What does the Firefox icon actually look like? “Radar site nearby”? “Darts board available”? It doesn't look like an RSS feed, a news feed or anything else that's remotely newsy or time-related. So unless you know that's the RSS feed icon already, you'll never know what it's supposed to mean or be able to work it out. Sure, you also have to know what RSS means with the Safari icon to understand its purpose, but that's easy to find out: you can Google RSS and get good results but someone's going to have to do a lot of SEO work to get “yellow radar picture” to show up at the top of the current Google search list. Please don't suggest that people could use the Help pages. Like that's ever going to happen.
But the adoption of the Mozilla icon is at least in keeping with the cooperation between browser vendors that has been occurring of late. It just makes me wonder what Microsoft's plans will be later on. Given the history of Microsoft, the Internet and Internet Explorer (MS notes it's been lagging on the Internet, uses someone else's tech to catch up, then uses its desktop monopoly and proprietary extensions to edge out competitors), all this does have an eerily familiar ring to it. Is MS pretending to be a good neighbour so that it can borrow other developers' tech without opprobrium? Or is it genuinely trying to play nice?
If the latter, after all the fuss and court cases over anti-competitive practices against Netscape, why is it even bothering to update IE with new features? Couldn't it just fix the massive number of bugs in IE and leave it at that, rather than adding things like tabbed browsing and RSS feeds, which are clearly designed to recapture market share from other browsers? I guess you could put it down to a certain degree of pride at MS in not producing (what it thinks is) an inferior product. But that's never stopped them before...
Probably not, despite a claim from a well-placed source. Ars Technica lists some of the reasons why.
A good article on how AJAX and other developments could lead eventually to universal browser compatibility.
Technorati Tags: AJAX, HTML, web development, WHATWG, XHTML
The Firefox crowd is going for a big marketing push to try to get Firefox onto as many desktops as possible. Good luck guys, but as long as Internet Explorer comes with Windows, you're always going to be in a minority. People are just going to use whatever browser works well enough to access the web sites they like. And as long as IE can use ActiveX controls and Firefox can't, Firefox is going to be locked out of the new breed of banking web sites such as First Direct's that use ActiveX to aggregate financial information from other sites.
Although IE is painful and mostly rubbish, it's not so rubbish that people have to turn to another browser. Still, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for you.
Apparently, the vast majority of public service web sites in Europe are failing to meet international e-accessibility standards. No real surprises there: it's not like they've been meeting any of their other targets. But it's impressive that so few web design companies, despite all their claims, seem to know how to put together a usable web site. Get with the programme guys.
A group of the major browser developers had a meeting recently, to decide the best ways of improving both the security of the browsers and the way they represent that security. There's a report of the meeting from one of Konqueror's developers, which suggests that Mozilla, Konqueror, Firefox, IE and Opera are all going to get the same similar interface for displaying the security of particular sites. Microsoft's IE blog has further details and screenshots of how IE 7 has already been changed to incorporate those ideas.
Technorati Tags: browsers, Open source, security, web development
Who's the undisputed king of the GUI? Apple, of course. Why? Ease of use. There are dozens of studies that show that Macs improve people's performance in everyday tasks. One of the main reasons for this ease of use is consistency: the same menu items and the same keyboard shortcuts perform the same actions in different applications. As a result, you don't spend hours learning that it's Apple S to save in Word, Apple Option S in Excel, Shift F3 in Quark and so on.
So quick question guys: how do you right-click on a Mac (assuming you haven't got a two-button mouse that is)? Long-time Mac users will instantly answer “Hold down the Control key then click”. Try it now, if you've never tried it before. See? A whole range of commands you never knew existed will suddenly appear.
Another question then: how do you right-click in Word? That's right. It's Control click. How do you right click in the Finder? That's right. It's Control click.
Last question: how do you right-click in Safari? If you answered, Control click, you'd be right. Kind of. Try it on this web page and you'll get your menus. Try it on a Java applet though. Doesn't work does it? Why? Because the correct combination for a right-click is Command click. That's right. Hold down the Apple key instead.
Daft, isn't it? Insane even. How long would you try looking for a contextual menu if you didn't know that? You wouldn't. You'd give up.
Now I've looked and looked for a technological or usability reason for this, but can't find one. Anyone know why this should be?
Nifty little plug-in for Firefox I've just spotted that lets you mouse over a link to discover how many pages on the web link to it. It uses Google, Yahoo and MSN so it's useful for working out how well you've optimised your site for each engine.
A piece of interesting research by the University of Glamorgan shows that men and women's taste in web site designs differ.
The main differences are (apparently):
- Women prefer sites designed by women and men prefer sites designed by men.
- Men favour the use of straight lines (as opposed to rounded forms), few colours in the typeface and background, and formal typography.
- They also favour the use of formal or expert language with few abbreviations and are more likely to promote themselves and their abilities heavily.
All interesting stuff, although I notice that the press release itself shows hints of gender bias: there's lots about what men like and all that's really suggested is that women don't like those things as much. A bit more focus on the women, please!
The research is based on a small and limited sample size, but it is at least suggestive, and is another thing for any web designer to consider when building sites targeted at particular gender groups.
A good article on publish.com about the differences between simple cosmetic design and true design. As usual, the theme of usability is high on the list.
That nice man Jakob Nielsen has published another one of his usability lists. This one deals with blogs and the ten big usability mistakes people make with them. Pleased to say I don't do too many, although maybe I should split this up into a couple of separate blogs.
Anyway, it's worth scanning down, just to see if you're making some avoidable mistakes with your blog.
If there's a lesson that's easy to forget, it's “Don't forget to try it in Internet Explorer for Windows”. It doesn't matter how many browsers your web site looks identical in, IE will almost certainly display it a different way.
IBM's decided to donate a big wodge of source code to the Firefox community to help with DHTML accessibility. Now that's very generous of IBM and it's going to be of great help to anyone using AJAX apps on their sites - assuming only Firefox users visit it - but I can't help but think that if you're going for accessible, you don't include DHTML. That's just the way it is.
Maybe I'm an accessibility traditionalist, but forcing disabled users to use Firefox just to have some scrolling maps that are hard to describe anyway seems a little pointless. How about steering clear of DHTML altogether unless you have a text alternative? That seems much more sensible to me.
About me
I'm Rob Buckley, a freelance IT journalist. I've edited infoconomy.com; the XML & Web Services newsletter; and Mapping Awareness, for which I won an award.
I'm also a regular contributor to MacFormat, Computer Arts, Computer Arts Projects, LinuxUser & Developer, SC Magazine and enterprise IT magazine Information Age.
I've hands-on IT experience, having been IT manager for two companies, looking after everything from Solaris, Linux and Netware down to Windows 3.1 and Mac OS 6.
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