This is actually the second blog post of mine to have that title. The first was in 2004 when I said Thunderbird needs a similar effort. A little more than 4 years later, I’m really glad to see it finally become a reality.
As a side note, a lot of my old blog posts are becoming a reality these days. I find that to be rewarding.
A very cool change landed in Firefox 3.1. View source will now create links where appropriate (a rather old bug I might add). I must have copy/pasted millions of URL’s over the years out of view source so that I can look at a JS or CSS. This is an immense help for anyone who does this quite often.
Just another great piece of polish for Firefox 3.1.
This is the first time I’ve ever seen a Firefox Add-on used as a way to make a political statement. An Add-on called China Channel will replicate in Firefox what it’s like to be behind the Great Firewall of China. So if you want to see what it’s like not being able to read about Tibet or other content China doesn’t approve of, this is a good chance. It appears to use proxy servers in China to replicate the experience.
Perhaps the next version will let you toggle between China’s Great Firewall and Australia’s Great Firewall’s (currently in development). I should note Iran and Saudi Arabia are also known for extreme censorship on the internet.
[Via: icanhascheezburger.com]
I also would love to see camera:// and <input type="camera"> in HTML5. Thirding Daniel Glazman and Asa Dotzler.
With the proliferation of user generated content from YouTube to video comments, making video easier to use in a more standardized way is better for the web. Considering the growth of online video, in particular user generated video, it seems to be an obvious fit.
This one has potential for alternative captions. If your feeling creative, leave a comment.
Hat Tip: I Can Has Cheezburger
Google is now promoting Google Chrome on it’s homepage. Just a few days after release. Previously Firefox 2.0 was promoted on the homepage, a privilege normally reserved for Google products. The text link is a bit more subtle though. Maybe that’s because it’s beta and not 2.0.
It’s being shown to Firefox Safari and IE users. Interestingly it’s being shown to Mac users in addition to Windows users, despite no Mac support as of yet.
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.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13. Noteworthy that they keep “Safari” in there. This looks like what I’d expect.about:, about:memory, about:plugins.Despite Google’s claims that Chrome is fast, it was notably slower in my tests at the common task of launching Web pages than either Firefox or Safari. However, it proved faster than the latest version of IE — also a beta version — called IE8.
Overall it seems pretty smooth. From what I’ve seen, the process model does result in more memory in total than Firefox 3, since most tabs I open stay open for quite a while. It’s clearly still a little rough, but it’s not even out for 12hrs yet.
I await a Mac release. I just realized Pinkerton is working on Chromium as well, so I have a feeling the Mac release won’t suck but will be a real port that looks and feels like a Mac application should.
I don’t think it was mentioned in the press conference, but the Chromium blog is open.
Wired has a great article on inside the project. In addition to the names I mentioned yesterday, Bryan Ryner was also involved in at least the prototype.
I’ll make one prediction: The code most likely to find it’s way into other browsers is the GreenBorders stuff. It was originally for IE/Firefox, making it most suitable for possible adaptation to be included in other browsers. I’m not sure how much of it remains and how easy to adapt it would be though.
I’ll leave this “review” right here and unfinished since it’s still an ongoing project. Just wanted to share my initial thoughts. I’ll follow up at some point in the future when I feel it’s right to do so.
Any thoughts/additions? Feel free to leave a comment.
Edit [9/2/2008 @ 10:55 PM EST] – Added prediction about GreenBorders and link to Wired Article.
Google today released a beta of Google Gears for Safari. Still no iPhone support, but that’s not likely due to Apple’s rather restrictive licensing rather than technical reasons. It’s good to see them keeping true to their original efforts to support all platforms equally. That’s been a gripe of mine recently.
With Google creating Gears for all browsers, Apple creating QuickTime on all browsers, Mozilla creating <canvas /> support for IE, Microsoft creating Silverlight and Windows Media Player for all browsers (though Mac users are through Flip4Mac) it creates an interesting web of technologies. Everyone is starting to fill holes on other platforms. The downside to this is that users need to download multiple components for a good web experience. That is still a major concern for the future of the web. It’s not all about licensing.
Mike Shaver has an awesome blog post on work to speed up JavaScript. Granted Firefox 3.0 is pretty fast already, 4.0 is shaping up to put 3.0 to shame. For those who don’t want to read it all, here’s what you really should know:
The goal of the TraceMonkey project — which is still in its early stages — is to take JavaScript performance to another level, where instead of competing against other interpreters, we start to compete against native code. Even with this very, very early version we’re already seeing some promising results: a simple “for loop� is getting close to unoptimized gcc[.]
That is a very impressive feat, and even more impressive is that it’s so early on. Schrep has a demo for anyone who still doesn’t see what this really means for future web applications.
Brendan has a great blog post with some more details on what has been done so far, as well as some more graphs.
The first thing that comes to mind is that it makes <canvas /> much more useful. While it already is handy, one of the big problems is that it doesn’t take to much to make it feel slow.
I think the real benchmark for most people these days is Gmail and Yahoo Mail, which are likely the two most JavaScript intensive applications most people use on a daily basis. Most people saw a nice gain when moving to Firefox 3.
Considering a substantial part of the browser chrome is implemented in JavaScript, this work has significant impact in the future performance of the browser as well as the web applications that run within it.
This all comes just a matter of hours after querySelectorAll landed, which will also give a boost in performance as John Resig explains.
A few months ago I mentioned SquirrelFish, the WebKit teams attempt to improve JavaScript performance. It’s great to see performance being such a focus.
It’s important to note that this isn’t just about making things feel faster, it opens up the web to handle things that previously couldn’t be done before. It also paves the way for a better mobile experience. Two fantastic things. Things that previously a browser just couldn’t do as well as a desktop application will become possible in the not to distant future.