W3.org’s Historical Browser Statistics.
It’s uncanny. Thanks to “Other/Missing data” and the explosive growth of Chrome, we’ve got the ear. “Mozilla” is the mouth.
One day, IE will be relegated to the bottom tip of the tail. I await for that day eagerly.
Although, I use Chromium almost too much.
Posted at Flickr: Firefox Logo – Prescient?
That’s right. Now they’re FLYING.
Link for those that keep up with this stuff.
My 2 cents: It looks and feels better a LOT more than beta 2. Looks like the final version 3 is going to be awesome.
This post is like a month overdue. Bear with me, because it’s still relevant.
I had started to hate Firefox 2 (on the Mac) a few months back. It was getting bloated and very unstable with multiple tabs open. While I still use it for web development (Web Developer, FireBug with YSlow, Aardvark, etc…), I made the switch to Camino after a friend gave me a tour of the shortcut keys it had.
Sidenote: Yes… Opera… I’ve probably used you every time a new version came out, but for some reason, I can never stay with you. Maybe it’s because you’re so perfect, so far from the competition… 
Camino is definitely a lot more fast, robust, and responsive, and so it has become my browser of choice. Who knows if Opera or Safari will ever take its place… Of course, very recently, I’ve started to use the Firefox 3 Beta 2 exclusively, with Safari and Camino running in the background (another post all on its own as to why I do this).
To be honest, I have web apps that I have “running” constantly. In other words, I have webpages open in tabs, or access them frequently over the course of the day. I have these sites be the shortcuts on the bookmark bar in Safari. That way, I can quickly access them with command + number. Command + 1 = Gmail. Command + 2 = Google Reader. Command + 3 Facebook… so on and so forth.
I was very excited to hear about WebRunner, and went and tried it out. Now called Prism, it basically does these things:
Separate process: When the webapp goes down or locks up, I don’t want anything else affected. Thankfully, Firefox does have session restore, but that is beside the point. When I open many tabs and have several webapps running in a browser, things get slow and unstable after a day or two.
Minimal UI: A generic browser UI is not needed for webapps. If any UI is present, make it specific to the webapp I am using.
Basic desktop integration: Create shortcuts to start the webapp, add ability to show specialized icons in the tray or dock and ability to display notifications.
Platform with extensions: I don’t want to download a full browser runtime for each webapp. I do want to be able to add some custom code/features that are not directly supported in the webapp. I should be able to install one runtime and then get packages or extensions for each webapp. Think Firefox extensions or Greasemonkey scripts. These extensions should be able to tweak the SSB UI as well.
Open external links in real browser: If I click a link in the webapp that opens a new site, don’t change my webapp browser window. Open all external links in my default/real browser.
In summary, it’s a very streamlined (I mean streamlined) browser, meant to do one thing: serve up a web application. Currently, what’s bothering me is that I’m only able to run a single instance of Prism, and only a single web app at a time.
For now, I’m just going to have it open to Gmail all the time. This way, I can command+tab into my email client. Gone are the days of opening a browser and typing command + 1 or typing gmail.com in Quicksilver. Wee!
I hear you. What’s all of this hype for? So I get a crappier browser that does less. However, I feel like bridging that gap between the web apps, only accessible by typing out an address or clicking/shortcut keying into a browser window, and desktop apps, accessible by command + tab or running the application by double clicking on an icon (or single-click on the Dock), is going to be very important in the future. This takes a web application and gives it it’s own container (its own separate process), which makes it behave a lot more like a desktop application.
I don’t know why this is happening recently (I think it started yesterday), but FireFox 3 Beta 2 seems to choke up with HTTPS.
Looking at Bugzilla (Which, by the way, is inaccessible using my version of beta…), there seems to be a few issues with HTTPS. But nothing in particular to what I was looking at.
After trying updating within the program itself (which failed), and looking for a manual update, it seems like I still have the most recent version of the beta. But then, all of a sudden, the https started to work again. Even though it was the same exact version.
I’m beginning to think all of this was in my mind.
How the heck am I going to know how the blog is doing…
Trying to connect to https://, fails. I went to google.com/analytics, and the login box doesn’t appear.
Blah.
You know what, I think it has to do with the browser. The same thing happened with panel.dreamhost.com. I’m unsure as to why the heck something like this would happen, but I’ll be on the lookout.
Robots are awesome. Giant Robots are awesomer.
Seriously, though. Are we supposed to be afraid of the huge building destroying robot? What does the city signify, IE users? And what’s the deal with the UFO’s in the background?
Am I reading too much into it? Highly likely. But it’s much more snappier. MUCH more snappier. John Resig thinks so.
And snazzier too… one example is when Firefox asks you if it should remember your password. No longer is it a separate dialog box which would disrupt the flow between pages, but instead it’s a much more muted slidedown-style dialog row of text. I don’t know what you call it, but it’s awesome. I’m pretty sure this was done before in IE (Insistent IE ActiveX warnings and others), but it’s a welcomed changed here.
And something with the text… is it anti-aliased? It just feels more softer than usual. I guess I should consult the changelogs.
I’ve decided to ditch Vienna for my RSS feeds. It’s been getting on my nerves with a lot of little bugs (double downloading, “recent post” count problems), and I decided it’s time I should make the web app jump for this type of application.
I’ve written before on how a problem encourages me to move and try something new. Here’s what’s relevant from that post.
Feeds
- I dislike most online feed readers. I love Vienna, because it’s free and open source and fast and responsive and does EXACTLY what I need.
- I can go through feeds in very quickly, by being able to delete articles that are completely worthless (about 90% of which are Digg crap stories that link to the blogs I’m already subscribed to…)
- I still want to be able to set it up so that OPML file is still saved somewhere…
Looks like I’m going to be going against my own words. I still don’t like online apps for certain things, but for feeds, google reader is quickly becoming something that… just works.
Only a subset of the advertised short-cut keys work for me, since I turned on “start searching when I type” feature in Firefox (BonEcho for the mac users). But these seem to work:
I think there might be more, but this is more than enough, I think.
What would be really nice is if I had the ability to scroll down an article using a shortcut key also. For example, if the post I’m reading is longer in height than the window it’s in, I want to be able to scroll down on just that story. I’d much rather have j and k be the “scroll key” and have l and ; be the “next/previous post”… thereby solidifying Google’s love for vi. I’m probably asking too much.
http://www.positioniseverything.net/articles/ie7-dehacker.html
This has to be the… best… thing I’ve read all day, possibly, all month. It helped me so much in solidifying all the unhappiness and anger at the state of the CSS world… up through the recent release of IE 7.
Today, I sat down with some code I had written for a site I’m doing, and ripped it apart. I came across this really strange bug that happens with using ul and li as navigation. For some reason (well… I kinda saw it coming…), the margin attribute is poorly defined. I have yet to look up the proper behavior from the W3C doc, but I’ll do so tomorrow.
Regardless, since there is a difference between the way Firefox and IE handles this situation, I was actually going to pull out the star-html hack… but lo and behold, this hack does not work anymore for IE 7.
http://24ways.org/2005/avoiding-css-hacks-for-internet-explorer
What is a CSS hack? Such a great read… Time to use method #3… if only I had read the positioniseverything article before this one… see, now I know for a fact hack #1 doesn’t work. And since #2 is a hack… boo.
http://www.brainjar.com/css/positioning/
Good refresher for anyone that wants to learn more about positioning. I love the images… I love how I don’t have to click on ANYTHING, but just to go from page to page. I hated how for some tutorials how I’d have to go and manually load up the page in a separate page and have to close it back down just to realize I want to open it up again.
Thumbs up, Mr. Mike Hall. I look forward to going through some of your other stuff at brainjar. (Except, I just realized it’s all in ASP. Tee hee…)
This has been more or less a brain dump. I bet I’ll be dreaming in CSS tonight.
And… I need a new category for articles like this. And also, I need to come up with a new method of posting these entries, because I have a feeling more than half the readership at this point doesn’t care about CSS.
This weekend, I hope, I’ll be able to tinker with the site and make sure that the right people get the right content. Xanga/Facebook people need to get the personalized feeds, while social sites or technology-related blogs need to get the nerdy feeds. Yum.