{"id":78,"date":"2006-10-09T20:02:15","date_gmt":"2006-10-10T01:02:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.powrsurg.com\/blog\/?p=78"},"modified":"2006-10-09T20:02:15","modified_gmt":"2006-10-10T01:02:15","slug":"browser-round-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.powrsurg.com\/blog\/2006\/10\/09\/browser-round-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Browser round-up"},"content":{"rendered":"

It looks like the month of October is going to be a big month in the world of Web Development. Microsoft has announced that IE7<\/acronym> is will be coming this month<\/a>, and Firefox 2.0 has reached release candidate 2<\/a> and is rumored to have the official release this month. Microsoft has announced that IE7<\/acronym> will be pushed to Windows XP users via Windows Update<\/a>. I gotta admit, that’s a bold move. I hate to work in a help desks right now with the flood of calls complaining that IE<\/acronym> is “broken”.<\/p>\n

So, what does this all mean? What’s is the point in upgrading? Glad you asked. In essence, both browsers have improved in numerous areas — improved memory management, speed, security fixes, and the addition of phishing protection.<\/p>\n

Internet Explorer 7<\/h3>\n

IE7<\/acronym> is the first major upgrade to IE<\/acronym> in a whopping five years! As a Web Developer, all I have to say is thank you. It finally<\/strong> adds native alpha-transparencies for PNGs<\/acronym><\/a>, native XMLHTTPRequest objects<\/a>, and most importantly to me improved CSS<\/acronym> support<\/a>. For users, IE7<\/acronym> finally adds tabbed browsing and RSS<\/acronym> feeds. Tabbed browsing has been available in every other Web browser for at least three years, and is essentially the reason why there are about a billion browsers out there are essentially wrap IE<\/acronym> into an environment with tabbed browsing support. While I find their implementation lacking, I think the push for RSS<\/acronym> will raise awareness and thus increase support. While this comes as a result of how developers code, users should be ecstatic that Microsoft has improved the garbage collector in IE7<\/acronym> so that certain JavaScript closures should no longer cause memory leaks. About damn time. Also, IE7<\/acronym> will finally have a search box in the menu, like how every other browser has had for at least two years.<\/p>\n

Now the developer in me is a bit annoyed because the claim for “native” PNGs<\/acronym> seems to be a bit half-assed, not adding all PNGs<\/acronym> features<\/a>, but being able to do transparencies is good enough. In addition, the CSS<\/acronym> improvements are definitely appreciated, but it is seriously lacking compared to that of Firefox. Support for generated content and the addition of the table-* values for the display<\/code> attribute would literally revolutionize Web Design — no longer would designers have to go through unnecessary hacks to produce columns or rounded corners.<\/p>\n

Firefox 2.0<\/h3>\n

Now on to Firefox. Big changes for Firefox involve an in-line spell checking, a session manager, improved tab browser support (adding an undo close tab, arrows for scrolling tabs, and a close button on the tabs), an improved add-on manager, JavaScript 1.7, search term suggestion in the search box and better search engine plug-in support, improved SVG<\/acronym> support, and a new default theme. Now, the spell checker, session manager, and the tab browser changes are already possible with Firefox 1.5, but those require extensions. While I definitely find a spell checker useful (heck, I have the extension installed), I don’t see why it should be a native feature. I already use an extension that does all the changes for tabbed browsing and the session manager, so I’ll be happy to remove that extension as I definitely see those features as necessary for a great tabbed environment. That said, I do not know if they will add a “duplicate tab” feature, which is the only killer requirement to me for tabbed browsing, and I will look for an extension to add only that feature after I drop the then useless extension that I currently use that has that feature. All of that sounds good, and I’m looking forward to its release (though I will not upgrade until my mouse gesture extension gets upgraded).<\/p>\n

Swift<\/h3>\n

Surprisingly I never wrote about this new Web browser. Why would I do that you ask? Because it intended to give Windows users a Web browser that used the WebKit rendering engine — the same rendering engine that Apple’s Safari Web browser uses. No longer would Windows users have to switch to a Mac to test their pages … or so we thought. The browser only reached a 0.1 release when it hit the blogosphere. Unfortunately, this achieved more success than the sole developer hoped, and resulted in him spending $350 to keep his site running for the two-three months that it was open, and he only took in like $140. He said he was going to have the site up for a little bit and just give up after he released version 0.2, but as you can see by his Web site being down<\/a>, I don’t think we’ll ever see his next iteration. Kind sad, because I know there are thousands of Web Developers that would like to have seen this take off. Personally, I wish that it got further, as version 0.1 hadn’t implemented enough features, and crashed whenever I went to my Web site. \ud83d\ude41<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It looks like the month of October is going to be a big month in the world of Web Development. Microsoft has announced that IE7 is will be coming this month, and Firefox 2.0 has reached release candidate 2 and is rumored to have the official release this month. Microsoft has announced that IE7 will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-web-stuff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.powrsurg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.powrsurg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.powrsurg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.powrsurg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.powrsurg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.powrsurg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.powrsurg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.powrsurg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.powrsurg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}