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Archive for the 'Browsers' Category

No More Google Browser Sync

Friday, June 13th, 2008

Aw… this was a really useful tool that helped me keep my copies of Firefox on my portable and desktop machine synchronized.

It never made a lot of sense to me that it was a Google offering, but it was there and it just worked… no hassles beyond the occasional credential verification. It always just worked.

Unfortunately, the people who worked on it have moved on and rather than find new people to make it work with Firefox 3 (out next week), Google has decided to discontinue the project. So enjoy it for the rest of the year, because then it’s history.

Mozilla’s Weave project is supposed enable similar sync services, but it’s still in the early stages.
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Posted in Browsers, Firefox | No Comments »

Apple WebClib Bookmark Icons

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

Software update 1.1.3 for the Apple iPhone introduced the “WebClip icon”, which gives you a convenient shortcut button from your iPhone to a web site. There are now over 4 million iPhones in the hands of users… probably not all 4 million of those people want to go to your web site, but if they do then surely you want to reward then with a pretty bit of WebClip swag, don’t you?

WebClip icons work similarly to the favicon.ico file, but in this case you store the icon as a PNG file in /apple-touch-icon.png

You can specify a different location in the <head></head> element with a line of HTML similar to this:
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Posted in Browsers, iPhone | No Comments »

F’ing Microsoft: IE8

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008

Microsoft acknowledges that there were many bugs in IE6 and IE7, and promises IE8 will be much more standards-compliant. In order to make it act in a more standards-compliant way, however, you will have to include a non-standard tag in your HTML HEAD section. Otherwise it will continue to act like the pieces of bloated crapware that IE6 and IE7 were.

Thanks for the big “fuck you”, Microsoft. How about paying everyone back for all the time they’ve wasted dealing with your crappy browsers?

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Posted in Browsers, Internet Explorer | No Comments »

CSS Primer on Centering

Tuesday, December 11th, 2007

Here’s a handy primer on centering things using CSS.

Remember, the <center> tag is sooo 20th century.

Horizontal centering isn’t very difficult, though vertical centering could use a little better support.

Via: CSS: centering things
[tags]css, center, html, align, alignment[/tags]

Posted in Browsers, CSS | No Comments »

Safari CSS Reference

Wednesday, November 28th, 2007

Apple has published a new reference to CSS support in Safari version 3 which any web developer concerned with Macintosh support will probably be interested in. You can download the reference as a PDF file so you can use it offline as well.

Safari version 3 is bundled with Leopard, included in the iPhone and is in beta for Windows.

The reference includes CSS properties that are Safari-specific and not supported by other browsers. While I’m not a proponent of using browser-specific extensions they can be helpful to enhance the experience for specific browsers.

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Posted in Browsers, CSS, Macintosh, Safari | No Comments »

Multiple Versions of Internet Explorer on One Computer

Saturday, September 22nd, 2007

Love it or hate it… well… does anyone really love Internet Explorer?

But you have to live with it, at least if you’re doing web development, because it’s necessary to test against it. It’s so buggy that many people code first against it, make their site work on it (given that it has the bulk of the browser market share) and then try to get their site working with other, less buggy, more standards-compliant browsers without breaking their Internet Explorer compatibility.

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Posted in Browsers, Internet Explorer | No Comments »

iPhone Resources

Wednesday, September 5th, 2007

Right now I have enough work to do on uvfood.com without adding iPhone support that only I would use, so I will (reluctantly) wait to work on an iPhone interface to it.

In the meantime, I’m going to stash some iPhone-related links here.

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Posted in Browsers, Design | No Comments »

Why Aren’t My CSS Changes Showing Up in Firefox??

Saturday, August 25th, 2007

No, this isn’t an “Internet Explorer is crap” article.

This was very frustrating. I was rewriting the CSS for the web site I’ll be opening up later today, doing a first test of the changes in Firefox, and none of the changes were showing up on the page.

Using Firebug and XRAY, the changes weren’t even appearing in the CSS as they reported it.

I started out tweaking the CSS and became more and more confused as the changes I was doing failed to make any impact on the appearance of the page. Once I found that they weren’t being recognized I thought that Firefox must be caching the CSS file and not reloading it… I found an extension to give me a handy “clear cache” button… that didn’t do it… I went into the preferences and cleared the cache by hand… no good.

I tried the page under Safari and it rendered the way I expected it to. I tweaked the CSS and saw the effects of the tweak. That was good news… but why wasn’t Firefox working? I’d never run into this kind of problem with it before.
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Posted in Browsers, CSS, Firefox | No Comments »

XRAY

Friday, August 3rd, 2007

A very nice new tool called XRAY showed up recently. XRAY works with the Safari, Firefox, Camino and Mozilla web browsers (unfortunately no Opera or Internet Explorer support yet). It helps you examine elements on a web page, bringing up information about their dimensions, inheritance, attributes and styling. Best of all, it requires no installation and it’s free. Just drag its bookmark to your bookmarks bar and click on it when you want to examine a web page.

Thanks very much to Western Civilisation Pty Ltd for sharing this with everyone.
[tags]x-ray, javascript, css, web, bookmarklet[/tags]

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Posted in Browsers, CSS, Design, Firefox, HTML, Safari | No Comments »

Developing Web Content for the iPhone

Friday, July 6th, 2007

Apple has published guidelines for developing web content for the iPhone. Some of the guidelines are just good practice (separating HTML, Javascript and CSS, for instance). Some of it is informational (how many pixels you can expect to be available in the iPhone - at least, in this version of it). Some of it is very iPhone-specific (META tags to help control the viewport and scaling).

The article also includes guidelines for encoding audio and video for access over EDGE and Wifi networks.

The iPhone runs a slimmed down version of Apple’s desktop browser “Safari” - you get real HTML, Javascript and CSS support, and it can do Ajax. In my few days with an iPhone I haven’t found any web sites that simply didn’t work on it, including Javascript-heavy sites like Flickr.

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Posted in Ajax, CSS, Design, HTML, Javascript, Macintosh, Safari | No Comments »