Safari passes Acid2!
Looks like Dave Hyatt has done it. Safari is the first browser to pass Acid2 – now when do the rest of us get that version? Still though, very cool.
Browser war, how have I missed thee.
Looks like Firefox is hitting the 50 million downloads mark along with a decent contest. That is pretty exciting considering it is a relatively new kid on the browser block.
Now 50 million downloads and we have 7% or show of our users on the home page using it. So what is the big deal? Well considering most lab and staff computers have no choice, what would happen if they did? If your lab machines run Firefox let me know, and let me know when you made it available. If it is going to be in the future then I can see if that impacts the average on the home page.
Microsoft may never admit it, but the growing popularity and potential of Firefox likely forced their IE team into gear. IE 7 is being promised in Beta by summer along with some encouraging features, albiet expected features that most CSS web folks have figured out work arounds for.
The buzz that comes from a new browser and its popularity may be encouraging innovation in other places. That is a good thing™. Dave Hyatt looks to have Safari passing the Acid Test 2 pretty soon and I bet other browsers are looking to as well. Netscape is revived with a bloated version 8 and Javascript is the coolest thing going.
Hrm, browser war that never ended has certainly flared up again and that is pretty cool.
Firefox growth at UW: April 2005 edition
There is plenty of talk about browsers. With IE 7 coming out in beta this summer and Firefox buzz things are pretty interesting. For the Firefox vs IE debate though, here is the change over the past month at UW:
- UW home page March 2005:
- 97% Windows, 1.3% Mac.
- 89.7% MS IE, 6.2% Firefox
- UW home page April 2005:
- 96.1% Windows, 1.5% Mac.
- 88.1% MS IE, 7% Firefox
With over 150 000 unique visitors a month, IE users have dropped 1.6% this month with the Firefox users up 0.8%. Lets wait and see what happens in May.
Note: I do not have accurate browser stats before March 2005 for the UW home page.
Development… design… testing… make it stop.
This is another late night of working on things. Tonight the work is actually so everything works for the usability test tomorrow. Checking links, sorting out colour oddness, trying to figure out some odd bug in a nifty cornered box – it never ends. Lots of features dropped that would help with usability but this is just the beta (how can web pages be ‘beta’ as they aren’t software? – the web is a platform – but it is still a hybrid of communications and software development). What features you say? Wait for the recommendations 
Then I read Derek’s Browser Elitism Part 2 and nearly start a rant in the comment box. A good rant on how trying to get things to work in IE are just not worth it! Ok suppose they are but sheesh. Funny how IE use to be the easiest browser to design for, now Firefox is.
Other cool things that I have come across though:
- Edit in Place with JavaScript and CSS – wow, just like Google News!
- Oh goodness me… Clearing floats is driving me nuts.
- Colour paletes are a very good idea when doing your custom.css. The free plug-in for windows Fireworks users might be worth it. For those that want a quick online version, check out this brilliant colour palete generator that is mentioned in the Malarkey link posted earlier in this sentence.
Back to work with me. We have around 20 people signed up for tomorrow and Friday. Not bad. Preliminary results of the study will be out later next week. A full report with recommendations will be out the end of May or early June – if your site is in a template scheme it will be easy to adjust to the recommendations if you would like to.
Adobe buys Macromedia: blogs on fire
Announced early this morning, Adobe is merging with Macromedia to the tune of 3.4 Billion dollars. Is this a good thing™ or bad? Not entirely sure. As some have already pointed out, the death of Fireworks may be at hand. Which is too bad. A really light weight and usable app like that shouldn’t go away.
The Macromedia blogs are on fire with speculation but there is also some clarity being offered. Worth a browse if you are interested.
It could mean a huge boost to applications like Dreamweaver and Contribute, but time will tell.
