Who You Calling A Jesse?

I have been using Minefield (Firefox 3 beta) for a little while now and just didn’t use any extensions. It is just too fast and way better than Firefox 2 I just couldn’t go back. Now extensions are starting to work – Web Developer now does and all I need is Firebug and life will be back to normal. Decided I should try out ScribeFire too. Using Simplelog means I can’t find a blogging tool that works (why don’t I just use Wordpress??? I like pain I guess) and it crashes every few days but generally I like it ;) Anyway, lets see how this post looks.

Update: seems to work well beyond not turning on comments, see what editing a post does (it removes comments, odd because they are set to ‘on’ by default).

In my lost week last week Opera went and released version 4 of its Opera Mini browser in Beta. Their new features list sums up all there is to love about it. It loads the pages much like the Symbian Webkit browser but its fast, easy, and sorta looks like what the iPhone browsing quality does on the Apple site. The nice thing is that Opera offers a browser for everyone, not just a device.

I loaded it on my E62 and gave it a try over the weekend. What I really love about this is that it is a solid browser, no mobile version rendering. This should mean you can build a decent looking small screen version that will run nicely in your mobile device. What I need to do this week or next is try out the rendering and see what I can and can’t do.

Overall I really like the beta. With the iPhone coming the end of the week I really do think the mobile browsers are going to get used a lot more. I am just wondering how to raise awareness about Opera? Is it worth it? Should Adobe drop the Flash mobile and get me a plug in for the mobile browsers?

Well after last night’s party at the Palms I was shocked that anyone made it to the sneak peak this morning… that is dedication indeed. The highlight of day 3 was the sneak peaks that was nicely live blogged by Jen de Haan. Besides that there were sessions and a lot of smirks and nods as everyone bonded over the Palms. You can see in the MAX 2006 Flickr group that a lot of fun is had at MAX… mixing learning with fun is always a good thing.

I did finally meet Mike Potter who promises that Adobe is going to focus a little more attention to Waterloo. There is a Flex demo on campus next week.

I will need to think a bit more about this years MAX before I write a summary. It was a bit odd for a MAX, Adobe certainly did some things differently (like where is the schwag?)… Overall though I finally got to meet some people that I have missed over the years and putting faces to email is always a good thing. I do think that the stuff we saw this year at MAX will change the web and make a lot of people happy—like how last years progressive downloading in Flash 8 for video enabled Youtube’s much loved simplicity.

An evening of rest and then a day of travel tomorrow. Should have a summary next week sometime ;)

No more RC status, IE 7 appears to be out and ready to go. The release notes have a bit of information for those that were testing it or looking to see what happens when you upgrade. Check out the post on the IE team blog as well. Not sure when it hits the Windows update and I am not booting over to Windows to find out ;)

This is good for the CSS/HTML folks although I imagine a lot of headaches testing as the switchover goes on. UW pages have a print issue with conditional comments hiding a call for CSS because IE 5.5 was picking up the print CSS. I honestly can’t remember the exact problem but it was two years ago… The fix is simple, remove the conditional comment and make that your standard print.css call.

RC 1 of IE 7 was in fact the warning shot across the web development community. IE 7 is coming soon and it will be almost everywhere before Christmas. The IE Blog has more details but it still makes me shake my head… Why must the web be ready for IE 7? Is IE 7 ready for the web? Do they care?

On a positive note, IE 7 should make a lot of things easier with web development… especially with CSS. I think it will take about 6-8 months before IE 6 drops to IE 5.5 numbers as most organizations (UW included) will not update IE for several months.

Check your pages and make yourself familiar with Virtual PC or VMWare, etc. You will need to have IE 6 around and running in XP for a while I am afraid ;)

CNET has a nice warningarticle on how IE 7 will be pushed to users via Windows Update. It was reported on Slashdot where you can find the typical insightful conversation about it (a little bit of scarcasm, yes). What this essentially means is that you should probably start to think about getting those hacks out of your CSS and learn a bit about conditional comments. You also might want to read up on the known issues with CSS and IE 7 on the CSS discuss wiki. I would assume the CSS tweaks are pretty much done but if you want to hold out until the end it is still worth your time to identify potential problems and workarounds.

For UW sites there doesn’t appear to many CSS issues beyond printing. Not sure if anyone will be effected by other changes but it is worth you getting your hands on IE 7 to find out. Hopefully I can look at that in August although I would prefer to see a near final beta to be sure it is worth my time.

Update: I left out a buzz post discussing the end of IE 6—which points out that the automatic update is a good thing although it likely won’t mean the death of IE 6.

Inspired by Veerle’s post on the issue to actually fix this problem on the UW home page and IE 7, I went through and applied a simple fix to the CSS that is in the custom style sheet to the home page. This is what you get if you use the holly hack to fix IE 6’s whitespace issues because IE 7 ignores the holly hack but didn’t fix this bug… What I started with is a menu that looked like:

…and changed it to:

So now it looks like:

Applying a width to ‘li a’ (not just li, it doesn’t work) is all I needed to do. I likely would have saved myself some time if I did it properly in the first place. Oh and its IE 7’s improvements that make it ignore the fix for IE 6… is that not swell? ;)

This weekend is the big Moz party weekend for Firefox. 4.5 million downloads of version 1.0 since November 9th and counting is worth celebrating. In the Kitchener-Waterloo area you can join the party at the Huether tonight. If you are one of the 4.5 million, you will enjoy these links even more ;)

• BBC News web site has won an award from the Online News Association. This after three Webby awards!
• Web Design references from the University of Minnesota. Great resource.
• ABC redesign – another major site goes with Web Standards.
• Flash Image Replacement greatly improved. This is an advanced technique for prettying up your web site that is just cool.
• An assessment of the above method by the CSS Zen Garden creator.
• Search engine optimization and increased usability.
• For the mathies – every web designer/developer should have a Venn Diagram.
• Shift in usability culture.
• Accessibility: The Human Factor from a UW Alum.
• Browser, Browsers Everywhere

Now where did I put my party hat?

I have asked google, why run IE 5.5 and I get a list of sites dating back to 2001 and earlier. But I don’t get an actual reason as to why anyone would run it today.

Being a non-Windows person (have win98 and XP on Virtual PC for testing only) and somewhat computer literate, I often marvel at the lack of updates people apply to their machines be it OS X or Windows 98. After running Windows Update on my VPC win98 install it defaults to install IE 6… so I can only assume that those who are using IE 5.5 are doing so on machines that are not secure just from the lack of updating.

Upon checking with W3 Schools stats page I am relieved to see IE 5 down to 5% but somewhat alarmed that win95, the only windows system that can’t run IE 6 (I think), is at 0.1%. So that means there could be 4.9% of web users definately not updating windows? or maybe some of that are IE 5.1 OS X users?

As an OS X exclusive member (no perks) of the computing public I must have the wrong idea. Why would you keep IE 5.5 around?

I have come across a really odd bug in Safari only. If you call a CSS file that is not there the margins on the p tag lines up with a ul. Really strange. This is in Safari 1.2.x too. If any Safari users want to see what I am talking about, comment below and I will post some links.

UPDATE: Seems the problem also appears on a media=”print” style sheet call. An example of the bug of calling a CSS not there and this page is when it is there. Anyone have any insight into this?

It has hit slashdot that there might be an IE 7 soon-ish. What does this mean? Not sure. One would expect that little 1% drop woke up MS engineers to the fact that a significant number of web users do upgrade browsers, and do like new features. CSS support may just happen by default… we will see.

Here is to hoping that they take the list of features users want and build a better IE – or just tell everyone to download Firefox where they will find all the features IE users yearn for ;)

Update (Jan 11/05): If you search Google for IE 7 this post ends up 5th on the list so I thought I should update this. The number one result is this /IE7/ which looks pretty cool. It is basically a hack so you don’t have to hack your CSS. Not a bad idea.. but other than that, IE 7 isn’t real… yet.

Update (Feb 15/05): Looks like IE 7 is real and Google still has this post ranked high. I will make sure today’s post has lots of links ;)