Nikoport

This week, Apple has released much awaited and anticipated new version of their Safari web browser - 3.1, which brings quite a number of improvements to this already quite competitive browser.

Through the system of automatic upgrades for OS X Tiger and OS X Leopard, as well as through the Apple Update for Windows, everyone on those platforms can have their own copy of Safari 3.1. Interesting is that Apple actually distributing new Safari version through the ITunes for Windows - for OS X there is no need, because it is already pre-installed. It is quite unusual and may be even considered disturbing, but there is no doubt, that Apple is going to test and to push the limits of their money cow - ITunes.

Lets get back to the browser itself. Besides speed, and all the usual small stuff, there is a number of very delicious improvements, which are putting Safari in front of the other browsers are: HTML5 Client-site database storage(creating basically a real database at the client side with SQL commands), Downloadable fonts (think of supplying your special font to the site visitor - here is an article at “A List Apart” on this topic), CSS transforms and CSS animations (scale,rotate,translate,skew etc - from this one there can be some interesting animations, though one should be always careful with this one, otherwise we will end all blinking, scaling and flipping our heads), HTML 5 video and audio tags (no other descriptions are needed, i believe), SVG graphics inside IMG tags.

Not to forget, the most anticipated and awaited feature of Safari for web developers - “Web Inspector”. To enable it goto Safari Preferences, select “Advanced” tab and there enable “Show develop menu in menu bar” - and voilá, your have this feature enabled. It should remind you of Web Developer toolbar for firefox and its microsoft IE6/IE7 copy, though i might add an advice of exploring “Web Inspector”, there are some small delicious things, which will make your work easier. So - play the trumpets, we finally have a tool to work and develop websites on Safari - my deepest bow to its developers, cause it was right on time (being the late one, does not take away the sensation of happiness of web developers who can see their job getting a bit easier.)

Ah one more thing - the native “getElementsByClassName” javascript function just rocks!

I like the idea of putting to test new HTML and CSS standards, because all the standards in the world are dead, as long as they are not supported. One could only hope, that other browsers will follow with more complete support of the new HTML and CSS features. No words just thumbs up for “Web Inspector”.

A couple of days ago, Microsoft has launched open beta version of the Internet Explorer 8, also known as IE8. This should be quite an important release, which actually should have been IE7, because of the complete CSS 2.1 implementation, for which all webdesigners around the world have asked, screamed and cried for quite a number of years.

The final release of the IE8 be passing the ACID 2 test, which depending on the release time, may be even ahead of the Firefox. (Opera and Safari are already passing it for some time). Besides ACID 2 being just a synthetic test of the CSS 2.1 standard, it is quite an important mark as well - it at least tests some of the important functionalities of the Cascading Sheets and represents the dreams and wishes of a lot of webdesigners for years. I hope, that there will be an ACID 2.5 test, including some of the most complicated situations in CSS standard, especially those where the major browsers are still having problems. Such test would always be a motivation for browser developers to improve their respective products and for the rest of us mortals a simple comparison tool to see which one is making bigger effort in providing a higher quality product.

The most interesting thing about IE8 web standards compliance is that it won’t support standard compliance mode like IE7 by default. One will have to use much talked and contested “X-UA-Compatible” header. I do not like this idea at all - but i have no illusions that no scream of web developers community will make Redmond change its mind.

2 interesting technologies included in IE8 are those to combat Google: Activities (think embedded Google Maps,) and WebSlices( selecting a part of the web page for saving for later viewing - for years there are quite a number of plugins for Firefox allowing this functionality).

Activities will allow to check out the address on the webpage by selecting it and then viewing it on the maps (microsoft maps, of course), and also social services links like digg it, facebook share links, etc. There must be a number of plugins in the future to include your preferred social services. I hope it will eliminate all those useless social links on the pages in the nearest future. =O)

I am still testing IE8 beta and still not sure if i keep it for more time. What i am concerned at the moment is whether we will have a possibility to have 2 browsers at the same time on the same computer - we are about to have IE6, IE7 and IE8 active - i don’t remember seeing 3 Microsoft browsers being in statistics for quite a number of years… With the recent death of the Netscape browser it brings a lot of nostalgia to me. I do not think about having IE6 on Vista - it is impossible, but for argument’s sake i need to have IE7 and IE8 on Vista, cause i won’t buy another license for a virtual machine just to get 3 browsers working at the same time.

p.s. A lot of sites are broken, quite broken if i might add - some of mine are included. Also there are a lot of cases when text adjustment does weird things, and IE7 emulation is far from perfect - many cases text justification sometimes is quite weird, but i do understand that it is just a first beta.

Last week, Apple has released the new version of their browser Safari to all operating systems - Safari 3 final version was included into the 0s X 10.4.11 update for Tiger users, and Safari 3.04 for Windows users. It was quite an important update remembering that a couple of weeks ago, with the release of the Leopard, Apple has launched the 3rd version of Safari for the OS X users who has upgraded their system. The new Safari has brought some restyling to the user interface - now it has the unified look and feel of the Leopard operating System. Also it finally includes (after 4 years of waiting) the possibility of styling the form controls with a css. This is a major improvement for GUI development, i believe every web developer went nuts with Safari, because of not being to style the controls.

This is a major upgrade for all systems. On windows a new beta version is much faster then the previous version. Not only the so called “cold start” but also the navigation, loading times and all the rest appears to be quite faster then before.

The list of the recent improvements to WebKit - on which Safari is based is quite impressive - it includes stability and speed improvements, improvements to the Enhanced Rich Text Editing: it includes TinyMCE and FCKEditor (think visual editors for Drupal and Wordpress), SVG (after Opera and Firefox one more player coming to this market, IE team - are you still sleeping ?), XPath and XML improvements (think XMLHttpRequest and Ajax).

OS X safari version include some development tools, which must be enabled by hand (do they continue to be in alpha stage?)

There are some bugs though to work on the Windows version - thats why it is still a beta, i believe. I have managed to see Safari loosing its look and feel and some of the windows control buttons appearing (quite an unpleasant change).

Apple is taking quite serious this Safari offensive, and if they will spend just a little more time implementing Web Developer tools and stabilizing the Windows version, i believe the time when some users will start switching to Safari.

It has been more than a year, since Microsoft has released the most awaited and anticipated version of their browser - Internet Explorer 7. 18th October 2006 saw the final release of the browser - available for Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003, from the start it has been released only for the users who passed “windows genuine advantage” validation procedure. A couple of weeks ago, on the 5th of October 2007, it has been released for all the other users as well.

Now, one year after the initial release i decided to take a look at what part of the share of the browser market it has conquered so far, since the removal of the validation for installation is being a clear attempt into a wider distribution of it.

So, lets start with the numbers:

1. this site has a total of 44.84% of the Internet Explorer Market (not total one, just between all IE visitors), being about 10% behind Internet Explorer 6 (54.44%). For one year, i think these results are very nice, but this site contains more technical information, and tech people are fast for upgrades

2. One local portuguese site, has a 15.24% of visitors using IE7, with 82.78% visiting with an old and not so good IE6. The missing percentages are going for IE5 likes. It shows that in Portugal users still are bound to IE6, and thats sad, cause we desperately need to move on.

3. Portuguese on-line shop, which has actually more Brazilians visiting than Portuguese has 18.50% of the visitors using IE7, and with slightly more then 80% are still using Internet Explorer 6.

4. One web design firm, has 33.33% of the IE visitors using Internet Explorer 7.

5. Another web design firm, shows 29.98% of Internet Explorer 7 users between all the IE users.

6. Furniture store site shows 30.18% of the IE vistors using IE7.

7. A site dedicate to the medicine has 23.14% of the Internet Explorer market conquered by IE7.

8. W3schools on their statistics page shows for September of 2007 shows that globally 20.8% are using IE7, 34.9% - IE6, and 1.5% are still stuck on Internet Explorer 5. If we do some math, then the global market of Internet Explorer is 57.2% of which Internet Explorer 7 users are representing around 36%.

9. A site, with some references to the literature, has 16.39% IE7 market share of the all Internet Explorer visitors.

10. w3counter has a 29% of the IE market attributed to the IE7.

Looking at all those values, i am thinking that the true values should be ranging somewhere between 20% and 30%. I believe that the 25% should be the real value of the conquered market for Microsoft’s IE7.
I know that these statistics are not covering every possible area, and are not really, but i feel that they give the general feeling of what progress IE7 has made in one year.

I think that these results are fine, obvious is that Microsoft is not satisfied with them, and even more obvious that a lot of big companies are not going to do the upgrade, before fixing all incompatibilities in their sites and intranets. We all would be much more happier if in one year we would have another the situation when IE7 will dominate the failing IE6, and i believe that after the last Microsoft’s move this situation is going to happened for sure.

A couple of days ago, W3C has released a new version of a html markup validator (0.80). 8 months after the last release and a lot of work with 2 beta versions, W3C has presented a new “revamped” markup validator. They describe it as a “major milestone in the development of the validator”, that besides various functional improvements finally includes a major visual overhaul. Since the beginning, the W3C pages besides being accessible were having a really bad design, but the new markup validator is already a good change.

The usability of the validator has been greatly improved - one of the new “features” that i liked is the icon status which represents the status of the validated content - green when the markup is valid and red when it is not. This way it is easy to see which documents are valid, when you have a couple of them validating.
It is remarkable that the new markup validator works in resolutions until 640×480, in which it while having a small horizontal scrollbar, it is still represents everything on the screen.
The colors have been altered from straight #0f0 and #f00 to much smother #669900 and #1f2126 respectively, though i have to add that may be the color for the red is not a “web safe” one, and should be reconsidered for the newer version.

The functional changes, every regular user should notice in the next couple of days, while validating - for example for the XHTML 1.0 strict doctype the <html> tag started requiring “xmlns” attribute, and so on. This small things should affect the results of a lot of the already validated content, but it is for better - because it will help web designers to improve and to perfect their html and xhtml code.

Overall the changes are for better and W3C markup validator team have done a good job improving the most useful instrument from W3C.

For the last 2 weeks I have being using and testing the latest release of Safari for Windows. Having a “new” browser on such saturated market as browsers for Windows, is a subject which will stay one of the headlines for the rest of the year. At least, as long as Nintendo or Sony are not thinking about launching their own version of browser for windows =O)

First of all, one of the most important Apple claims about Safari for Windows as being “designed to be secure” - has already being proved to be wrong. Till this day, there have been reported several security flaws. Apple has already included 2 patches in 1.02 version of Safari - it was quite a lot for a new browser, i have to confess. Claims like that reminds me about Microsoft claims about Vista security, and everybody knows that security updates for it are still coming out. =O) Important to say, that it does not make Safari for Windows an insecure browser - go to Frsirt or Secunia and check the list of the unpatched problems of the IE and Firefox, for example. There is no absolutely secure software, and Safari for Windows will have quite a number of security holes during the next year. What is important - how Apple is going to handle them and how many will be there after the version 1.0 FINAL RELEASE will be available.

Secondly - the first 1.0 beta version was quite unusable on a lot of computers where i have tested it - constant crashes after visiting sites with some national characters, no help available, bookmarks completely unusable (immediate crash after the launch), between some quirks with bold fonts etc. Some of the bugs were to fix with just copying some of the files from one folder to another (unacceptable for normal users), while others seemed to be more like an implemented “features”. Safari for Windows 1.02 update has solved the majority of that problems and right now it is finally possible to use bookmarks and help system.

Safari for OS X is quite a standards compliant browser, and everybody knows about it. For example, Safari for Os X have passed the famous ACID2 test, while many other browsers are still fighting to get there - Mozilla Firefox for example. I have checked the ACID2 test on Safari for Windows, and it seems that it perfectly passes it, without errors.

About the browser speed - it seems to be on the line with other major competition and for the most i have to confess, that a “hot-start” of Safari for Windows is quite impressive, not even IE6 is somewhere near, it is really instant.

The update mechanism is quite irritating - for each update (1.01 and 1.02) i had to download about 9MB of the content; even Firefox had less stuff when it had no automatic updates, and Opera while is below 5MB. Apple have to do something about it, as for example while using a laptop and having a bad connection it may take some time to download each update.

What Safari for Windows gives ? It gives you the feeling of how it will be on Apple Os X platforms. On one of the latest projects i have saved quite a lot of time and stress aligning things in OS X, while developing and testing for Safari for Windows. It will give the opportunity for Web 2.0 developers to adjust their sites for iPhone.

I see absolutely no reason of dropping Firefox and switching to Safari right at this moment - besides the absence of the extensions, which make work easy in Firefox, Safari for Windows continues to perplex with different and unexpected crashes. It would take quite a lot for anyone i know to switch to safari right now, when it still lacks the stability and its security still needs to pass the most essential of the tests - the test of time.

Today, while browsing an old book called “Designing Web Usability”, written by Jakob Nielsen in the far 2000 (some 7 years ago), i have found a reference to the idea of distributing site content to the search engines in the form of the. On the page 238 there is small subtitle “Integrating Sites and Search Engines”, where he discusses the idea of integrating sites more closely with search engines. The problem for its implementation was considered at the time of writing - the agreement of a standardized method for encoding the user’s query terms. Right now we know, that the Search Engines can agree on the way of crawling the websites, but at the same time we know, that they use a lot of own “meta-extensions” to the crawling, like Google’s “no-follow” or Yahoo’s “no-content” for example. While user’s query terms are really far away from being interpreted by the sites (at the moment of writing it seems that only Yahoo pays attention to the meta content tag), the search engines have already done the first step into the direction of a better cooperation with website administrators and into the assuring of a better quality and better search results content.

Interesting, is that recently the governments of Arizona, California, Utah and Virginia announced they would use Sitemaps on their web sites. Of course it is quite a publicity stunt with a support for Google in the first place (creators of the sitemap protocol), but at the same time it is a quite a recognition of the Sitemap protocol. First Yahoo, then Microsoft and Ask.com has recognized it, and now we have some “enterprises” from the public sector coming for its support. Way to go, Jakob, i am looking for your next book =O)