Posts Tagged browsers
Using Google Chrome, a Web Designer’s Experience, Part 5: The Little Things
written 2 Jul 2010 in the earliest morning
I’ve discussed issues I’ve noticed with Google Chrome that are specifically related to using it for building web sites. There are a few other minor annoyances about Google Chrome that add up to big hassles when you combine the time they waste throughout the day, and these are likely to affect any user, not just those of us with our digital hard hats donned.
RSS Feeds
Chrome doesn’t handle RSS Feeds natively by default. Is that redundant? Can Natives be Defaults? Only if their parents are interested in unusual names. But enough with the hilarious jokes making you laugh too loud in your cubicle, aka, the bus you’re reading this on. While I understand that the majority of users don’t know what RSS is let alone use it, it’s a handy protocol that’s changing the way people consume information and will continue to do so at a growing rate as Grandpa checks into the afterlife and little Suzy’s desk at school is replaced by a giant iPad. With Chrome, you either have to use an extension to read RSS feeds, or open Firefox. I don’t want to use extensions, the whole point of using Google Chrome is to keep it raw and fast, as Firefox as a browser is still better functionality-wise, just not in the performance department.
Gmail Support
Click a myemailaddressis@gmail.com link in a browser and Chrome tries opening up Outlook, Mail, or whatever your default desktop email client is. I don’t use a desktop client, and like everyone else who isn’t still wearing scrunchy socks or remembering how great the 1800s were, I use Gmail for my Internet communication type things. Google makes Gmail, Google makes Chrome, but Google doesn’t let Gmail and Chrome play nicely together. I can only assume it’s because of that one time that they were left alone at the house for the weekend while Mama and Pappa Google went off to the Bahamas and the two of them threw an online bash like nothing Windows ME could have ever imagined. So the only solution to avoid having Mail open up on me every time I want to easily send an email to someone is to copy/paste the address, switch over to a tab running Gmail, and proceed from there like I’m some kind of common task manager.
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Using Google Chrome, a Web Designer’s Experience, Part 4: Bookmark’s Toolbar
Browser testing is essential, and I use a wonderful online browser testing solution from Cross Browser Testing. It has this great feature where you can add a Javascript booklet to your toolbar, visit the page you want to test, click the booklet and it’ll open up a VPN connection to the machine / browser combination of your choice. The process is so incredibly simple that it makes browser testing as easy as Tony Hawk’s video game empire made skateboarding for posers.
Read more on Using Google Chrome, a Web Designer’s Experience, Part 4: Bookmark’s Toolbar…
Using Google Chrome, a Web Designer’s Experience, Part 3: Webkit Annoyances
It’s already annoying enough that Mac browsers render fonts all nice and perfectly smooth while Window’s machines still refuse to automatically implement anti-aliasing on fonts. Aside from making fonts (and the @font-face CSS selector that’s now a reality) look bad on every browser available to Windowleans, it comes with the side effect that Mac browsers will often render type that takes up fewer pixels on the screen itself. This can be an issue when the length of your text matters. For example, say you have a background image for your navigation bar. You want to have part of the navigation bar’s background blue while the rest of the bar is red, but you don’t want to use any image replacement technique for rendering the text itself (you might have a dynamic menu bar running off of your CMS so that when the pages on your site are updated, the navigation bar is as well). If your text renders at different sizes on different Operating Systems, you need to provide different CSS to each OS. Annoying, but doable.
Read more on Using Google Chrome, a Web Designer’s Experience, Part 3: Webkit Annoyances…
Using Google Chrome, a Web Designer’s Experience, Part 2: Inspect Element
Firebug is like a baby made of candy. If you don’t get that analogy, no one will blame you but best not to bring it up around the hitching post, water cooler or back of the garbage truck, wherever you take your particular daily break. Suffice to say, this little plugin developed for Firefox is like having a twin brother who will go to school for you, do all of your homework, sit in the waiting room until the doctor is ready to see you and let you take his girlfriend home after he did all of the wining and dining.
Read more on Using Google Chrome, a Web Designer’s Experience, Part 2: Inspect Element…
Using Google Chrome, a Web Designer’s Experience, Part 1: The History of My Web Browser
I jumped on the Firefox train as quickly as any other up and coming computer nerd Web Designer hopeful way back in the turn of November, 2004. How wonderful were those days? Blogging was cool, Google didn’t have a sidebar and when I went to the bar with my friends, no one sat on their phone showing me how great the latest app that tracked everything you do everywhere you go was the whole time.
Safari Browser Screenshot Template (PSD)
I often find myself, as a designer of the Internet, in need of providing screenshots that actually set inside of a browser’s chrome, so that I can show an example of a web page as it would appear in the browser itself.
The Thing About Microsoft is…
Microsoft just recently admitted making mistakes when Vista was released, stating that “We broke a lot of things.” and “There’s a conversation going on in the marketplace today and it’s just plain awful.”
We broke a lot of things.
The conversation referred to is presumably the one where word of mouth is spreading Vista’s incompatibility with many devices and the general feeling of the new OS being a step back from XP. It might also include the conversation where many users, as much as 40% of current college students, are deciding that rather than upgrading to Vista ($130 – $220 depending on the version) they’re going to shell out for a new Mac (who’s computers are now only about $500 more expensive and who’s OS upgrades are only around $80.) Apple’s market share (for Macs) is up to almost 8% (from less than 1% in the late 90′s). Corporations (especially in China) are switching to Linux more and more often. Firefox has as much as 41% of the browser market, which just a few years ago was all but completely dominated by Internet Explorer.
So what happened, and what’s going to happen?
Firefox vs. Safari, the Sequel
I had posted about my ongoing debate on whether to use Firefox or Safari as my main browser. I had a look at both Firefox 2.0.0.12 and Safari 3.0.4 in Activity Monitor on my Mac (Activity Monitor, for you Windowsers, is similar to Task Manager).
Firefox vs. Safari
I’ve been quite happy with Firefox for the past few months. Last summer and into autumn though, FF was crashing for me on a daily basis. Having 5 or more tabs open and running any sort of FTP program seemed to be the culprits, but for a Web designer who works primarily with cloudware, having 5 tabs open is about the minimum and running my browser while FTPing is basically my job.
So I began experimenting with Safari Read more on Firefox vs. Safari…
A Single Rendering Engine for All Browsers
The current state of Web standards has left us far from the mark that the movement intended to satisfy. Even in a world where Firefox has finally taken a bite out of IE6 and IE7 continues to pick up speed and help the effort, we’re left with discrepancies that, if nothing else, making building and owning a website more expensive.
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