In another marketing gaff, this is a real Microsoft ad that they recently pulled because people found it, well, um… tasteless. It was meant to be promoting their newly released browser IE8 which they’ve tried to sell people on in other shonky advertising. It seems Microsoft is realizing it is really behind in the browser race / war and is desperate enough to try any trick to get you to use their browser. I think I would do the same thing as the woman in the ad if I too had to use Internet Explorer.

Internet Explorer helps you explore your stomach contents.

When you exit Private Browsing mode in Firefox 3.5, you cannot pick up the trail again from where you left off — anything your browser remembered up to that point, has vanished.

Does the Incognito Window in Chrome work the same way? Surprisingly, no — and this is where one starts evaluating the browser makers’ design decisions. If you exit the Incognito Window (”Nothing, honey, wasn’t doing anything…just checking statistics”)re-enter it again, and then re-enter the page you were on, you’ll find your shopping cart is intact, right where you left it. So exiting that window did not erase your trail.

Read the full article here:

Firefox 3.5 vs. Chrome 3 Showdown, Round 1: How private is private browsing?

The forth coming Firefox 3.5 brings with it a slew of DOM and CSS advances, while not forgetting to mention the rendering and JavaScript speed improvements. These improvements ratchet up the competition for Adobe’s Flash and Microsoft’s Silverlight. (Silverlight? I’ve never found a site that uses it yet.)

Firefox 3.5 adds support for the HTML 5 audio and video elements and now fully supports the HTML 5 offline resource specification. Rich internet applications here we come.

The full list of improvements can be found on the Mozilla page Firefox 3.5 for Developers.

Exciting things lie ahead with emerging browser technologies supporting the new HTML5  standard.

I found this blog post “Video Tag and Subtitles” which demonstrates the new video tag, but also uses JavaScript to add subtitles.

The demonstration requires a standards compliant browser supporting the HTML5 video tag, which currently is Firefox 3.1 / 3.5 or the nightly build versions of Safari (Webkit) or Opera.

While the other browsers are screaming ahead in developments and speed, there is still no sign of Internet Explorer 8. There are dribs and drabs of information that surface from time to time. And the latest one is not encouraging at all.

It seems Mircrosoft think it a good idea to turn their browser into spyware, after of all these years of monthly security patches to protect users against those with malicious intent gathering your personal information, they will go ahead and do it themselves. “Trust us”.

The component in the next version of Microsoft’s browser software “discover websites you might like based on sites you’ve visited”. Collecting a user’s browser history and using it to create profiles that steer users towards one website or another may seem like a useful pointer to Microsoft’s developers, but the feature is giving some privacy-conscious surfers the fear.

The addresses of websites visited are sent to Microsoft, together with data such as IP address, browser type, regional and language settings. Microsoft cautions (in a draft for its IE8 privacy policy here) that “information associated with the web address, such as search terms or data you entered in forms might be included”.

It sounds like a security disaster in the making.

More on the story from the Register.

Several iPhone emulators and simulators are put to the test. While working on an Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) project for one of our clients Alan Moore, SMLXL, we were exploring options for testing how the site appeared on an iPhone. Here’s some that we looked at:

• Firefox Iphone Emulator – forget it, it is only a an iFrame wrapped with an iPhone image. You won’t get any “real” results as Firefox is being used to render the pages instead of Safari the native iPhone browser.
• TestiPhone.com – iPhone Simulator – Being web based, I could actually run this simulator in the Safari browser. (Yes I am actually running Safari under Linux.) It looked promising to start with, but when I gave it the home page, it displayed no scroll bars. They appeared on the subsequent pages, but not on subsequent pages they did. Strangely enough the they did appear under Firefox on the home page. It has a landscape mode for viewing.
• iphonetester.com – starts of better, immediately detecting if you are visting the site with Safari, and if not, helpfully suggests that you do for a more accurate rendition. I found this one to be the best of the pick.

Having recently migrated to Linux from Windows XP, I needed all of my development tools to continue my work as web developer. Part of my kit of tools is an assortment of web browsers. Firefox, no problem (of course), Opera (of course), Chrome (a bit of searching and not perfect) and Safari which required some tricks. "Internet Explorer?" you ask, well let me get back to you on that one.

Safari of course has only been released for OS X and Windows. So Wine comes to the rescue and allows me to run many Windows applications within Linux and without any virtualization or emulation.

OK, it kind of worked first go and then crashed. After some googling I discovered that you have to install Safari without Bonjour for Windows and Apple Software Update. Some extra Windows XP fonts are also required. Detailed instructions for installing Safari under Wine are available at WineHQ.

Safari appears to perform well, tabbed browsing works, HTML and CSS rendering is in order.

What doesn't work is HTTPS connections, and book marks.

So for normal everyday use it is a bit handicapped, but as a web developer's testing tool its just fine.

Chrome condition of service that effectively lets Google use any of
your copyrighted material posted to the web via Chrome without paying
you a cent.

Google Chrome Browser

The internet is a buzz since Google's release yesterday of its browser named Chrome. There are many wild predictions about its future, what it means for Microsoft and Firefox and a share of nay sayers. I downloaded and to it for a test drive myself. But I waited a day to see what reactions would be and if more detailed information came to light before I went shooting my mouth. Overall the reaction seems to be very positive.

A number of things stand out about Chrome.

1. On the surface, its page rendering seems fast. It uses WebKit
2. Browser tabs are spawned as separate tasks. This the most talked about feature so far, because it means that if one website's scripts are running slow, the other tabs will not slow down. The problem child can then be killed off. This point gets my vote.
3. Chrome uses the V8 JavaScript engine. It means Chrome has speed advantages over many of the other browsers.

The general consensus seems to be that the new browser is clear pitched at web applications, and specifically web applications that continue to work when off line. Many see this as the way of the future, where applications are not tied to any one particular operating system, and are available anywhere, any time.

The browser then coupled with Google's Gears, a collection of web widgets, clearly puts in competition with Adobe's Air and Microsoft's Silverlight. As JavaScript engines become faster and if a standard HTML video element was adopted, the future looks dim for these two proprietary platforms. This is one point that seems to have garnered much applause from the technical community.

The next thing that seems to be rather sensational and wildly exaggerated, is that Chrome is Window's killer. As many people have pointed out, Chrome needs an operating system to support it. So Windows is not about to go away. But, where it does spell trouble for Microsoft, is when Chrome and other browsers create a fast, stable platform for web based productivity software, its Office cash cow is in serious trouble.

For me, it has been interesting to use Chrome for the past day, but four things stop me from using it more regularly.

1. No add ons – I love my Firefox ad blocker, Firebug development debugging tool, as a developer, I can't live without this one.
2. Its CSS rendering is not up to date. It fails the Acid 3 test. My WordPress admin theme does not work properly. So I'm using Firefox right now to write this.
3. There seems to be some JavaScipt incompatibility, some of the WordPress Editor Monkey features didn't work.
4. I can't install Flash. While this Chrome is meant to ultimately mean the demise of this platform, the nearly the whole internet still uses it. For instance, Google's own Analytics.

None of the other browsers are sitting still, so the competition is on. I believe we can expect to see some amazing developments from all of the browsers in the near future.

 Life as a modern web developer would not be bearable without a decent debugger tool such as Firebug for Firefox. It allows you to debug your JavaScript, inspect XMLHttpRequests, the DOM, CSS, and edit them.

While I love Firefox and Firebug, there are other browsers out there that I also have to develop for, the dearth of decent debugging tools these has often left me grumbling and lamenting.

But on one of those procrasting whims, I started googling. And much to my suprise I discovered that the latest version of Opera, 9.5, comes with a built in debugger called Dragonfly.

Dragonfly is only in beta, but what it offers so far is very promising indeed. It may not have all of the features that Firebug currently has, but it is certainly a very useful tool as it is. With the addition of this feature to Opera, the browser is now a serious contender as a developer tool. One thing that was a little annoying, was that Opera's Dragonfly web page doesn't clearly state that, you only need to be using the latest browser, and can activate it under the menu option Tools / Advanced / Developer tools.

My curiosity then led me on to look at Safari next. And yes, there appears to be a similar tool also, but after server attempts at following the instructions from multiple websites I can't activate it. The steps one has to go through to enable it are counter intuitive. With both Firefox and Dragonfly, they are easily accessible via a menu of icon. So I've given up on Safari's development tool until they make it easier to access.

Now there is one browser yet to mention, and I hear the collective groan, Internet Explorer. Once the darling, it is now the millstone around the necks of developers across the world. For years they have had a developer tool in beta, that just has never progressed anywhere. It doesn't even offer an integrated JavaScript debugger.

The future of browsers is becoming very competitive again, with those clearly moving in the right direction, the others that need to pick up their game or be left out of it.