Since the big HTML 5 news that there will be no defined codec for <audio/> or <video/> there has been a lot of discussion about the merits of such a decision, and what led to it. To quote Ian Hickson’s email:
Apple refuses to implement Ogg Theora in Quicktime by default (as used by Safari), [...]
There’s some buzz around the web regarding 3rd party web browsers for the iPhone now appearing in the App Store. This really isn’t as good as it sounds. In fact, it’s misleading. From what I can tell they are all using WebKit (Safari) API’s. UIWebView to be specific. These are [...]
The big story over the past 24 hours is Steve Ballmer’s statements regarding WebKit:
“Open source is interesting,” he said. “Apple has embraced Webkit and we may look at that, but we will continue to build extensions for IE 8.”
It’s interesting to watch mobile web browsing UI develop. This is really the first time since web browsers existed that they have received a large overhaul. Sure things like tabs are “major”, but when you really look at it, Safari, Chrome, IE, Firefox are all strikingly similar to the original Mosaic (this is [...]
I figured I’d blog my initial thoughts on Google chrome. Rather than a hard to read essay, I figured bullet points are easier to read/scan, so that’s what I’ll do.
Announcement
Another One Bites the Dust – The classic Queen song was played both before and after the presentation. I can’t help to think this [...]
Opera is said to be sending evangelism emails to websites that have compatibility problems with their browser. What’s interesting is that they are customizing the emails with actual fixes for the problems. This is pretty clever. In theory it will improve the problems regarding compatibility and make the web more standards compliant [...]
Firefox was featured in a Joy of Tech comic today. I think IE and Safari are just jealous. Enjoy.
There’s an announcement on the Safari blog about SquirrelFish, their new JS interpreter. To sum it up:
SquirrelFish is a register-based, direct-threaded, high-level bytecode engine, with a sliding register window calling convention. It lazily generates bytecodes from a syntax tree, using a simple one-pass compiler with built-in copy propagation.
Some performance data can be found here, [...]
It’s happening again. Once upon a time, browser vendors started adding their own features without consulting with each other and agreeing upon standards. What they created was a giant mess of inconsistencies across browsers and platforms that is still in effect today. Ask any web developer and they can tell you of [...]
I presume everyone remembers the whole debate about Apple misusing Software Update to push Safari to iTunes users. For those who don’t, I’d suggest reading John Lilly’s blog post on the topic. Several prominent Mozilla bloggers spoke out about that practice.
It did help their market share according to Net Apps, though we’re talking [...]
Robert Accettura is a web developer by day, a Mozilla contributor, self-proclaimed Mac Addict, and Open Source advocate on the side. more »
