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Musings from Mars » Web Browsers
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July 23rd, 2011

“Just Say No To Flash”
Join The Campaign! Add A Banner To Your Website

Just Say No To Flash: Join The Campaign!In the past few years, Adobe Flash has become more than an annoyance that some of us have kept in check by using "block Flash" plugins for our web browsers. More and more, entire web sites are being built with Flash, and they have no HTML alternative at all! This goes way beyond annoying, into the realm of crippling.

I had noticed the trend building for quite awhile, but it only really hit home when I realized that Google, of all companies, had redesigned its formerly accessible Analytics site to rely heavily on Flash for displaying content. This wouldn't be absolutely horrible except for the fact that Google provides no HTML alternative. I tried to needle the company through its Analytics forums, but only received assurance that yes, indeed, one must have the Flash plugin running to view the site.

Keep in mind that content like that on Google Analytics is not mere marketing information, like the sales pitch on the Analytics home page.

Those of us who are disturbed by the trend need to be a bit more vocal about our opinion. Hence, I'm starting a "Just Say No To Flash!" campaign, with its own web page, graphics for a banner, and the CSS and HTML code to deploy it on your own web pages.

I've mentioned this to some of my family and friends, and they often come back with: "So, Why should I say no to Flash?" I admit that as a power browser and a programmer geek type who, shall we say, makes more efficient use of the web, I'm more keenly aware of the ways that Flash is chipping away at the foundation of web content.

In the beginning, it seemed harmless: Flash was an alternative to animated GIFs, and an easy way to embed movies on web pages. But then advertisers wrapped their meaty mitts around it, and that's when Flash started to be annoying. However, one could block Flash in the browser, as part of a strategy of shutting out obnoxious advertising.

But publishing content via Flash is just wrong, for a number of reasons.

    
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March 2nd, 2011

Theming A Web Page With Crystal Black:
A CSS Design for Web Inspector

For awhile, I've wanted to theme Safari's Web Inspector—the incredibly useful built-in website viewer/debugger/designer assistant—with the Crystal Black look and feel, but it wasn't immediately obvious how to do this. I assumed that the tool was just a part of Safari, and therefore built with classes and widgets from the Cocoa AppKit (which is the framework all Cocoa apps are built with). However, when I began to inspect the Inspector, I discovered that everything contained within its borders was simply web content: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images.

In other words, the Web Inspector tool is nothing but an intricate, sophisticated, and extremely well designed web page!

Having built a Crystal Black CSS file for web pages in general, and with my past expertise in CSS, I attacked this challenge with relish! It reminded me of the time I realized that Dashboard widgets are, at their core, nothing but little web pages (as are simply apps for the iPhone). In tackling this one, the main question was, How should the various elements look? And the hardest part was inspecting the various parts in of the Inspector in great detail to determine which CSS rules governed their default appearance and behavior.

As I discovered, the WebKit has a a sub-framework called "WebCore," which in turn has a folder of resources specifically for the Web Inspector. In the Inspector folder, among other things, is a suite of CSS files that handle different aspects of the Inspector's design and behavior. Of these, the primary one I needed to tweak was called simply "inspector.css."

    
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June 23rd, 2009

WebKit Introduces Styleable Scrollbars

    
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December 3rd, 2008

Review of Six Alternative Web Browsers

    
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Posted in:Reviews, Web BrowsersTags: |
October 12th, 2008

WebKit’s Web Inspector Tool Gets Major Workover

    
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September 5th, 2008

Analyst Pushes WebKit Over Google’s Chrome Browser

    
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Posted in:Safari & WebKit, Web BrowsersTags: |
August 12th, 2008

Phishing and Safari (Part 2): A Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing

    
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August 12th, 2008

Phishing and Safari (Part 1): A Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing

    
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July 25th, 2008

A Close-Up Look At Today’s Web Browsers: Comparing Firefox, IE 7, Opera, Safari

My, we've come a long way in browser choices since 2005, haven't we? It's been a very heady time for programmers who dabble in the lingua franca of the World Wide Web: HTML, JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets, the Document Object Model, and XML/XSLT. Together, this collection of scripting tools, boosted by a Browser choicestechnique with the letter-soup name "XMLHttpRequest," became known as "Ajax." Ajax spawned an avalanche of cool, useful, and powerful new web applications that are today beginning to successfully challenge traditional computer-desktop software like Microsoft Word and Excel. As good as vanguard products like Goodle's Maps, Gmail, Documents, and Calendar apps are, one only has to peek at what Apple has accomplished with its new MobileMe web apps to see how much like desktop applications web software can be in 2008.

That this overwhelming trend toward advanced, desktop-like applications has happened at all is the result of the efforts of determined developers from the Mozilla project, which rose from the ashes of Netscape's demise to create the small, light, powerful and popular Firefox browser. The activity of the Mozilla group spurred innovation from other browser makers and eventually forced a trend towards open standards that made the emergence of Ajax possible.

This article starts with a brief history of web browsers and then jumps into a look at the feature set of the four primary "modern" web browsers in 2008. The comparison of browser features begins by listing the core features that all these browsers have in common. The bulk of the article lists in detail "special features" of each browser and each browser's good and bad points, as they relate to the core browser characteristics. Following that, I present some recent data on the comparative performance of these browsers. The article concludes with recommendations I would make to organizations interested in making the switch from IE6 in 2008.

    
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June 17th, 2008

Apple Weighs In To Web 2.0 With Sproutcore Framework

    
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April 21st, 2008

InfoWorld Article Dispels Many Enterprise Mac Myths

    
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April 14th, 2008

WebKit/Safari Keep Blazing the Trail to CSS 3.0

Looking back,Cascading Style Sheets!This is an update to the article I wrote last summer, when Safari 3.0 was first released. In the 9 months since then, a lot has happened, and I wanted to try to keep this info up to date. Opera, iCab, Konqueror, and Firefox have all made progress in adopting CSS 3.0 specifications, the next generation of the W3C's Cascading Style Sheets standard.

However, the WebKit team continues to lead the pack, as they have since I first contemplated this article over a year ago. In the last 6 months, that team has not only adopted more of the CSS 3.0 specs ahead of the others, but they have proposed several exciting new specs of their own, which the W3C is taking up as draft recommendations.

In addition to updating the state of CSS 3.0 in WebKit/Safari, I've also added some new demos for the Backgrounds section.

Here are the CSS 3.0 features I wrote about in July 2007:

  1. Box-shadow: Yes! Add drop shadows through CSS!
  2. Multi-column layout: Can we really do this now? With HTML?
  3. Resize: Give JavaScript hacks a rest and let users relax when typing input on web pages.
  4. Rounded corners: Any
    can be made round.
  5. Colors with transparency: There goes another ugly hack from way back!
  6. Background image controls: Remember how great it was when you could add images as well as colors to an element's background CSS style? Well, it's about to get a whole lot better!

And since then, WebKit and Safari 3.1 have adopted the following new ones:

  1. Adopted last October, WebKit introduced its first take at CSS Transforms, which it has submitted to the W3C for consideration. With CSS Transforms, <DIV>s can be scaled, rotated, skewed and translated... all without using JavaScript!
  2. Announced at the same time is the equally exciting implementation of CSS Animations. At the moment, the only type of animation that's documented and demonstrated on the WebKit blog is based on CSS Transitions, which let you define how an object or attribute changes over time from one state to another.
  3. Also in October, WebKit added the CSS Web Fonts feature, which lets designers beam fonts to users through CSS and HTML, approximating the capabilities of PDF in a much lighter-weight form.
  4. Then, after a lull, things started to heat up again last month, when Apple released Safari 3.1. Safari 3.1 incorporated all of the CSS 3.0 features WebKit had pioneered earlier, plus it added a bunch of things the WebKit team hadn't blogged about. Chief among these was support for CSS Attribute Selectors. This is something of a holy grail to advanced web developers, since it opens up a whole world of possibilities for using the Document Object Model (DOM) to build better web interfaces. When released, WebKit was the first and only browser to support this geeky, but highly practical feature.
  5. And then, just today, WebKit added support for CSS Gradients to its portfolio. Gradients are not yet a CSS 3.0 specification, but they are part of the HTML 5.0 spec. No doubt Apple's implementation will be referred to the W3C for consideration.
    
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March 28th, 2008

Mac Hack Makes for Good Headlines, But…

    
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March 18th, 2008

Apple Posts Major Update to Safari

    
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November 21st, 2007

Safari 3.0’s Hidden Jewels

    
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August 10th, 2007

Mac Users Get A New Web Browser Choice: Demeter Started Life As “Super Shiira”

    
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June 11th, 2007

Apple Releases Public Beta of Safari 3… For Windows, Too!

    
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May 3rd, 2007

Googalyzer: Open Source Search Browser Has Great Potential

    
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April 23rd, 2007

Shiira 2.0 Finally Launched!

    
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Posted in:Safari & WebKit, Web BrowsersTags: |
April 20th, 2007

Latest Performance Tests Make WebKit’s Superiority Hard To Deny (But Some Still Try)

    
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April 14th, 2007

Charlotte: Freeware Puts Spotlight on the Web

    
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April 2nd, 2007

Worldmark: Bookmarks Made Universal (Then Abandoned)

    
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March 24th, 2007

Adobe’s WebKit-Driven Apollo Desktop Now Available in Alpha Release

    
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March 22nd, 2007

Ajaxian » Cross Browser Keyboard Handler

    
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March 18th, 2007

Quietly, Safari Finally Gains WYSIWYG Editing Powers

A quiet revolution has taken place for Mac OS X Safari users, but I haven’t seen anyone celebrate it… and I’ve looked! There isn’t even a mention of this dramatic change in Safari’s powers on the Surfin’ Safari blog, where the open source team that’s evolving the WebKit rendering engine used in Safari announce new features and updates. Lately, this team has implemented a number of really amazing features from the CSS 3.0 specification, and each has been trumpeted with some eye-popping examples. But not a word about this.

Well, I for one am celebrating the upgrade with this article and proclaiming to the world that finally, at last, Safari is gaining parity with the other modern browsers in letting users perform WYSIWYG editing whenever the application calls for it. Mac users like me who have simply done without rich-text editing in their WordPress blogs and Gmails, bristling with an unfamiliar envy at the vast majority of users who take this functionality for granted by now, can finally save ourselves some typing and edit in our web browser with the same ease we do in a word processor.

    
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March 9th, 2007

Web Kit DOM: Unbelievably Rich Documentation of WebKit’s DOM Implementation

    
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February 1st, 2007

1Passwd: Unify Password Support Across All Browsers

    
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January 22nd, 2007

MiNews: Free RSS Reader Gets A Major Update

    
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January 13th, 2007

WebKit Browser Adds Support for CSS3 Multi-Column Text Layouts

    
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January 10th, 2007

WebKit Adds Support for CSS Box Shadows

    
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January 9th, 2007

iPhone: OK, I’m Impressed… Now Gimme The Goods!

    
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January 2nd, 2007

Songbird: Cool New Web-Savvy Media Player Taking Flight

    
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December 28th, 2006

Renkoo Thinks They Don’t Need Mac Users

    
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Posted in:Ajax, PC Prejudice, Web BrowsersTags: |
December 26th, 2006

WebKit Team Adds New CSS Methods for Text-Stroke

    
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December 18th, 2006

Creammonkey: Greasemonkey for Safari Slowly Gaining Traction

    
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December 7th, 2006

Rage WebDesign: A Complex, Powerful, and Daunting HTML Editor

    
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December 5th, 2006

Apple Publishes New “How-To” for Manipulating Quartz Compositions with JavaScript

    
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December 5th, 2006

Protopage Adds Support for Safari

    
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November 28th, 2006

One More Reason Why Discerning Mac Users Choose Safari Over Firefox

    
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November 27th, 2006

NetFixer: Freeware Captures Whole Web Pages in One Shot

    
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Just Say No To Flash