Browsers

A tale of how typesetting a beautiful poster led to an exploration and explanation of how manually kerning type on the web can be tricky, but also made to work across browsers.

When inline images are displayed in box with -webkit-border-radius applied to it, the image is not cropped as expected. There is a simple workaround, at least for Safari.

There’s more to the lives of many typefaces than just Bold and Regular, but almost no browsers follow the proper CSS 1 way of specifying Light, Semibold, Black and other weights. There is a workaround, but it’s nasty.

I believe Microsoft has got it right, but pity the IE development team.

Earlier this week it was announced that WebKit now supports CSS @font-face rules. There has been a mixed reception in some quarters, but this leap forward (for that’s what it is) has to be a good thing.

Just recently Jeffrey Zeldman was bemoaning the sub-standard state of text rendering in Firefox on a Mac. And the sad truth is he only skimmed the surface; Firefox, Safari, Opera and Camino may render even the same font differently.

Firefox 1.5 is now a fully fledged release and it’s well worth a look, especially if you’re a web developer.

Eric Meyer recently posted Don’t Read; Speak!, from which I quote: [S]creen readers need to become speaking browsers: they need to ignore how the page is visually displayed, and read the content. Use semantic markup when it exists, and otherwise [...] ignore the…

Over on the ‘official’ IEBlog, Chris Wilson confirms that support for PNG alpha channels and some CSS fixes, in particular the peekaboo and guillotine bugs, have been added to IE7 beta 1. Bring on max-width and friends.

Those of you who have just updated OS X to 10.3.9 may have noticed that Safari is now a full point release older at 1.3. And this means that the clear:none bug I reported a year ago is finally fixed. In fairness Dave Hyatt fixed this bug ages ago but he’s had to wait…

Internet Explorer 7 has been announced to beta in the summer.

PPK has a new browser resource called Bug Report. Design Engaged looked to be hugely successful and fascinating (link to a terrific animation). Veen talks about the difficulty of ditching the PowerPoint mentality.

Anyone know if it’s permanent and where the sidebar might be replicated?

Link toolbar is an excellent Firefox extension replicating the Site Navigation Toolbar in Mozilla.

WaSP have just released a minisite, designed by Ethan Marcotte. The purpose of Browse Happy is to spread the message to all and sundry that there are alternative browsers to Internet Explorer.

And there are photos. And a list of what’s been happening: Odeon crapsters, AMG retrograde, per-site stylesheets, disabling IE6 imagebar, Mozilla security flaw, Malarkey forms, Colly links, Gmail whitelist, XHTML to RSS and fantasy footie.

Peter Morville, co-author of the classic Polar Bear book, has recently launched Findability, a portal to anything and anyone related to findability. Or as Morville puts it: [A] complex query, run against the brains of users, who will hopefully contribute additional ideas,…

The Web developers among you may be interested in what appears to be a Safari bug. Essentially clear:none does not over-ride clear:left. I’ve posted more details and an example in my sandbox.

Mozilla’s DOM Inspector (also available in Firefox) can seem daunting at first but is amazingly powerful. Amongst other things, it allows you to see which CSS rules are affecting any given element in order of cascade priority.

It seems that some of the images on Clagnut are being rendered as skinny strips in Safari 1.2. I’m confused as to why.

It seems Firebird has been renamed to Firefox. Im looking forward to the plug-in that enables you to enter a URL just by ‘thinking in Russian’. Jon Hicks implemented the lovely new icons and posted details of the branding process, as have others.

You can now run more than one version of Internet Explorer on the same PC.

Peter Paul Koch has just released QuirksMode, a huge resource exploring, explaining and working around the vagaries of browser support for CSS and JavaScript.

As Director of the W3C Tim Berners-Lee has written a typically cogent letter to the US Patent and Trademark Office in protest against the Eolas ‘906 Patent.

A summary of the furore surrounding the potential capitulation of AOL and the demise of Internet Explorer.

You may have heard that MSN does not work correctly in the latest version of Opera, because MSN sends Opera 7 different HTML and CSS files than it sends to earlier versions of the browser. Well Our Norwegian friends have got their own back by releasing the Bork edition of…

Breeze is an elegant new minimalist theme for Mozilla. Googlebar is another great add-in from mozdev (source of the afore-mentioned Checky). It’s just like the IE Google toolbar, but for Mozilla. I’m a bit of a foodie, so it won’t come as much…

Checky is a great plugin for Mozilla that gives you one-click page validation, configurable across any of 18 different online validation and analysis services. It’s not quite as groovy as the tool in Opera which will validate local files, although Checky’s scope is…

Some recent browser releases: Mozilla has released 1.3 Alpha and 1.02. Opera has released 7 for Windows Beta 2. Apple has released Safari Beta 2. For web developers, the last one is of particular note as Safari will presumably be making its way on to all new Apple machines. …

A discussion of the Upgrade Your Browser message so often placed at the top of web pages which can only displayed as intended by browsers with good CSS capabilities. Personally I find find it annoying…

Mozilla 1.2.1 is out. It contains a fix for the DHTML bug that resulted in Mozilla 1.2 being pulled.

I’ve added a page which lists the last 50 tunes I’ve played on WinAmp (an idea gratuitously lifted from What do I Know). It uses the BlogAmp plugin, which unfortunately requires JavaScript to view the list. However I managed to find a PHP version on the BlogAmp…

The new W3C Validator has come out of beta and released unto the world. There is an improved UI and loads of links to the Specs, as well as help, documentation, tips and improved accessibility (accesskeys a-plenty). There also seems to have been a few changes to the…

The welcome demise of the pop-up, and some welcome alternatives.

The way I’ve coded the Clagnut CSS shows up a bug in IE6 Win. All the left and right margins (actually padding) around my text are doubled in width for no apparent reason. In fact it’s not even that straightforward – the page isn’t rendered consistently…

I have rediscovered the long-forgotten link tag. Use it to make your site more accessible.

The new issue of Digital Web mag sees Peter-Paul Koch extolling the fine virtues of graceful degradation. That is the honourable action of building web sites that work† on all browsers without worrying if they are pixel perfect. With care, attention & experience this…

Something of an exclusive: AOL are definitely moving over to the Gecko (Mozilla, Netscape 6+, etc.) engine. There’s been rumours, but how do I know for sure? Because AOL are making sure the most popular sites work with Gecko before they make the switch; remember I said we…

Mozilla 1.1 is now out with some lovely new icons. It also claims to have improved application and layout performance, stability, CSS, DOM and HTML standards support. Official news on the forthcoming all-new Opera 7.

I have recently come to the conclusion that, as a Windows user, Mozilla has ‘officially’ become my browser of choice. For some time now, we’ve known about its superior support for The Standards, so why has it taken me so long to change? Because at home I…

Jakob mourns the demise of the text sizing buttons IE but fails to point out that it won’t have any effect on a Windows machine if text is sized in pixels. Microsoft have stopped giving away their free web fonts.

Those of you using quality browsers other than IE PC may have noticed the rather fetching drop shadow on said popup. This is PNG’s alpha transparency at work folks. While supported natively in Mozilla, Opera and IE for Mac, IE PC requires an ActiveX plugin which I decided…

Here in the UK, Home Secretary Blunkett is pushing through proposals (“opening up a discussion”) for national identity (“social security entitlement”) cards. Let’s just state here and now that this is flawed thinking and just plain wrong. George…

Over in MacCentral there’s a few interesting thoughts from Marc Andreessen on why he thinks the browser wars are long gone and how divergence of browsing applications across different platforms is inevitable. Although quite how both the interviewer and Andreessen manage…

Mozilla 1.0. Stick a fork in it. It’s done and looking good. Posted a few pikkies from the Mini Rally recently held in Brighton. Check out those wonderfully ridiculous chopped cars – why have a small car when you can have a tiny one? Like me, Owen Briggs has been…

Some gizmos for improving your IE5 experience. Particularly helpful for developers. Google toolbar – quicker searching, page ranking etc. Validate HTML – using WDG validator. Disable style sheets – toggle CSS to check accessibility. Web Developer Accessories…

Netscape have released a Version 7 preview. Still based on the Gecko rendering engine driving Netscape 6 with a few added features. While we’re on the subject, for a bit of fun trying downloading on old Navigator from the browser archive at evolt.

Opera launches Opera 6.02 for Windows (my browser of choice). The upgrade fixes some issues with kiosk mode and adds SMS capability. Mozilla has come out with Release Candidate 2 in response to feedback from RC1

Mozilla 1.0 Release Candidate 1 is now available for download. This is a trial run for the upcoming Mozilla 1.0 release.

Web designers are forever sticking curves in their designs, particularly when smoothing corners of boxes. Designers have good reasons for this, but those of us charged with building the reality find it a pain in the bum, usually having to resort to tables to quickly get the job…