Archive for April, 2011

File Under: Browsers
Apr
20
2011

Mozilla: Soon Your Add-Ons Will Work With Firefox Beta and Aurora

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Mozilla is revamping the way Firefox add-ons are tested. The changes will ensure that fans of the new Aurora and Beta early release channels can test future versions of Firefox and have working add-ons.

Previously Mozilla would not mark add-ons compatible with a new version of Firefox until the add-on author had tested it against the latest release. That frequently meant that those of us who enjoy using Firefox betas had to go without our favorite add-ons until the final release arrived.

Under the new proposal, add-on testing will be automated. Add-ons hosted on Mozilla’s website will be tested against any new Aurora and Beta builds and automatically marked as compatible unless some problem is discovered. For those add-ons that are not hosted on the official site, the updateURL mechanism will accomplish the same thing. The Mozilla blog says that the new setup will mean that the Aurora and Beta channels will be compatible with the vast majority of add-ons.

If you’re a fan of the bleeding edge, using Firefox nightly builds, you’ll still need to disable add-on compatibility check as the new testing model does not apply to nightly builds.

Also note that Mozilla is still working on the tools that will power the new add-on testing scheme so it won’t be in effect for the current Aurora builds. Mozilla expects to be able to automatically bump 4.0.*-compatible add-ons to 5.* during the Beta period, but Aurora users won’t see the benefit until the next six-week cycle begins.

The change in add-on testing is part of Mozilla’s move to speed up the development of Firefox to match that of Google Chrome. The chief difference from the old Mozilla model is that releases will be staggered. In other words, like Chrome, the nightly channel might be at Firefox 7, while the Aurora channel might still be at Firefox 6, the beta channel at Firefox 5 and so on. Aurora, the new channel in the mix, is designed to bridge the Wild-West bugginess of the nightly channel and the much more stable beta channel.

The new add-on development model solves one of the two potential problems we pointed out for those who want to use a prerelease channel alongside the final Firefox release. The other problem is that there may be profile conflicts if, for example, Aurora changes something in your default profile and Firefox final doesn’t know what to do with the changes. For some solutions to that problem, see our earlier writeup.

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File Under: APIs, Programming, Web Services
Apr
19
2011

Where 2.0: Bing Maps Partners With FourSquare, Fwix Builds Open Places Database

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Map nerds unite, this year’s Where 2.0 conference is in full swing and there are already several notable announcements, including a partnership between FourSquare and Bing Maps to create Foursquare Everywhere, and a much improved API from local news site Fwix.

The Bing Foursquare partnership pulls Foursquare data into Bing Maps to visualize check-ins, tips, badges and mayorships. Bing announced the new Foursquare feature earlier this year, but it was not available until today. Even now the rollout of the new features appears to be staggered so if you don’t see it yet, be patient.

The more interesting announcement for developers is the revamped Fwix API which now allows third-party developers to pull in names, locations and web content about places. There’s also an ad layer you can include in your app, pulling in ads from Fwix’s partners (like AT&T and Comcast).

Part of Fwix’s goal is to create an open database of places. To do that the company has partnered with Factual, a large-scale geodata aggregator founded by Gil Elbaz, the man behind Google’s AdSense technology. Factual provides the geodata backend and Fwix builds on that with its aggregated info about each place.

Fwix’s new Places API allows developers to request business listings, cities, and neighborhoods. Combine that with Fwix’s Content API and developers can request reviews, news, check-ins, photos, video, and tweets about any particular place ID in Fwix’s database.

For more information on the Fwix API, head on over to the site and read through the documentation. The Fwix API is free, just sign up for a developer key to get started.

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File Under: CSS, JavaScript
Apr
19
2011

Adapt.js Offers JavaScript Alternative to CSS Media Queries

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With the mobile web comes a new set of design problems: how do you fit your content on a much smaller screen, and, more generally, how do you make your site look good no matter what size screen it’s on? The growing consensus is that Responsive Web Design — websites that adapt to the size of the user’s screen — is the way forward.

For many developers that means using @media queries to selectively target the device screen size and orientation through CSS.

While the @media approach is a good one, it won’t work for every site. That’s why Nathan Smith, creator of the 960 Grid System, has released Adapt.js, a lightweight JavaScript library (894 bytes minified) that allows you to specify a list of stylesheets and the screen sizes for which they should be loaded. Essentially Adapt.js does the work of @media, but will work in any browser, even those that don’t understand @media.

All you need to do is include Adapt.js in your pages and then define the sizes and stylesheets to go with them. Here’s the code from Smith’s example:

var ADAPT_CONFIG = {
  // Where is your CSS?
  path: 'assets/css/',

  // First range entry is the minimum.
  // Last range entry is the maximum.
  // Should have at least one "to" range.
  range: [
    '760px            = mobile.css',
    '760px  to 980px  = 720.css',
    '980px  to 1280px = 960.css',
    '1280px to 1600px = 1200.css',
    '1600px to 1920px = 1560.css',
    '1920px           = fluid.css'
  ]
};

While using JavaScript to load CSS might seem a bit strange, even if you use @media queries you’re still going to need some kind of polyfill (usually JavaScript-based) to handle those browsers that don’t know what to do with @media rules.

Of course Adapt.js isn’t right for every situation. Smith has a very nice take on the debate over @media, JavaScript, separate mobile websites and other options for dealing with the small screen:

As with any field in which technological methods are open for debate, there is the danger of religious fanaticism, where we each rally behind a respective technique and defend it vehemently. I would advise you to consider your audience, weigh the options, and find an approach that makes sense for that particular context.

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File Under: Multimedia, Web Services
Apr
18
2011

The Demise of Google Video, and How to Rescue Your Movies

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Google informed its lingering Google Video users over the weekend that videos hosted on the service will not be available for playback after April 29. The e-mail warned users to download their old content before May 13. After that, Google Video will be a search-only service.

While disappearing internet services are always cause for concern, the demise of Google Video shouldn’t come as a huge shock. Google, after all, owns the far-more-popular YouTube, and Google Video stopped accepting new video uploads nearly two years ago.

Still, given that Google Video was a popular place for instructional videos, scientific lectures and university presentations, its passing won’t go unnoticed.

It’s unclear how many videos remain on Google Video. Wikipedia claims 2.5 million, while the Google Operating System blog says there are 2.8 million. (Google was not available for comment before this post was published.) Even assuming most of those videos are moved elsewhere, the number of videos lost, links broken, and embedded content rendered inoperative will be significant.

Unfortunately, Google is not offering much in the way of migration options. Users can download movies and then upload them to YouTube, Picasa or another video hosting service, but there is no automatic transfer to YouTube — presumably due to potential copyright issues.

Another problem is that YouTube videos are limited to 15 minutes, while Google Video allowed much longer videos. That means, for those looking to move longer videos, YouTube isn’t an option.

To save your own videos from Google Video, head over to the Video Status page. Once you’re signed in you’ll see an option to download your videos. Click the download button, and the button will change to let you know you’ve already downloaded that file.

Be aware that Google Video encoded your original video into an FLV file, which is what you’ll get when you click the download button. Sadly, Google Video never offered high-quality video encoding. So, if you still have the original, uncompressed version of your movies somewhere else, you’re better off uploading the source material anew, rather than using the Google Video version. And of course you’ll have to re-create metadata you may have added to Google video — descriptions, tags, resource links and so on — regardless of where you upload the video.

The Archive Team, which helped preserve much of Geocities and other once-popular but now-departed web services, has a project up and running to archive as much of Google Video as possible. If you’d like to help out, head over to the new Archive Team wiki page for Google Video to learn more.

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File Under: Browsers
Apr
15
2011

Microsoft’s Raw Deal for Vista Users: IE 10 for Windows 7 Only

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One of the minor “features” Microsoft included in the Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview released earlier this week was reduced operating system support; it will only install on Windows 7, leaving Windows XP and Windows Vista users out in the cold. Microsoft confirmed to Computerworld that this was no accident, with a spokesperson saying “Windows Vista customers have a great browsing experience with IE9, but in building IE10 we are focused on continuing to drive the kind of innovation that only happens when you take advantage of the ongoing improvements in modern operating systems and modern hardware.”

That’s a claim that’s hard to make any sense of.

When the company announced that Internet Explorer 9 wouldn’t support Windows XP, the decision made sense. Though it meant cutting off a large number of Windows users, Internet Explorer 9 was written to depend heavily on Direct2D and DirectWrite for all its hardware accelerated high-performance graphics, and on Windows’ Mandatory Integrity Control (among other things) for security. Direct2D and DirectWrite were both introduced on Windows 7 and back ported to Windows Vista; MIC was introduced with Windows Vista. In neither case were the features available on Windows XP, nor even readily ported to that operating system.

But no such disparity exists between Windows Vista and Windows 7. Windows 7 is undoubtedly better than Windows Vista. It’s three years newer, improvement was inevitable. What it isn’t, however, is substantially different. Windows Vista did the hard work—radically new display subsystem, new audio subsystem, new media framework, and so on. Windows 7 just consolidated those changes. As we noted when we reviewed Windows 7, the decision to upgrade from Windows Vista was not entirely clear-cut.

So unless Microsoft is planning to back port some big chunk of Windows 8 functionality to Windows 7—and then make Internet Explorer 10 depend heavily on that functionality, just as Internet Explorer 9 depends on Direct2D and DirectWrite—the talk of “ongoing improvements” is hard to fathom. Windows 7 is an incremental improvement on Windows Vista now, and it will be that same incremental improvement this time next year. To imply that Windows 7 is somehow “modern” in a way that Windows Vista is not is disingenuous in the extreme.

There’s also a question of support. Windows Vista is still in mainstream support. This means that it’s still, in theory at least, eligible for nonsecurity bug-fixes and improvements. It’ll be in mainstream support until April 10th 2012. Assuming Internet Explorer 10 comes about a year from now—just as Internet Explorer 9 took about a year from its first Platform Preview at MIX10 to the final release—then, depending on which day of the week the software ships, Windows Vista will either still be in mainstream support when Internet Explorer 10 ships, or will have dropped out of mainstream support by a matter of days, after having been generally available for just over five years.

In contrast, when Windows XP received Internet Explorer 8 on March 29, 2009, it was out of mainstream support by 11 months (Windows XP Service Pack 3′s mainstream support ended on April 21, 2008), and had been on the market for more than seven years.

Of course, Windows XP had one thing that Windows Vista does: substantial market share. Windows Vista’s usage is declining, and by next April it will probably be down to five or six percent of the market. A small share, to be sure, but still many tens of millions of users. Users that will be ceded to the competition. Microsoft may feel that such a small market share isn’t worth supporting, but if so, surely the company should say so instead of fobbing people off with comments about “modern operating systems”.

Whatever the real reason, this is a pretty raw deal for Windows Vista users. Not as bad as the Ultimate Extras farce, but bad all the same. It also means that when Microsoft released Internet Explorer 10, it is likely that it will support just one operating system, with a second, Windows 8, due later in 2012. The company is already being criticized for supporting a mere two operating systems with Internet Explorer 9. Cutting back to one, leaving Windows Vista users out in the cold, is hard to defend.

This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news. For more from Ars Technica, follow the links below.

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File Under: CSS
Apr
15
2011

Start Small, Build Big With ’320 and Up’

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There are dozens of HTML5 and CSS 3 boilerplate code samples floating around the web — HTML5 Boilerplate is one popular example. But most of those projects start with a desktop-specific stylesheet, then add @media queries and styles for progressively smaller screens.

That’s backwards in our opinion. After all, the smaller the screen is, typically the simpler the stylesheet is, so why not start with the smallest screen and work your way up? That’s the thinking behind the new 320 and Up CSS 3 boilerplate from developer Andy Clarke.

Technically, 320 and Up is an extension of the HTML5 Boilerplate project, but it works just fine on its own as well.

No boilerplate is ever going to cover every use case, but 320 and Up does a nice job of hitting the sweet spot between too much and too little. Thanks to neatly divided CSS files it’s easy to take what you want from 320 and Up and leave the rest behind (though there is also an option for a single stylesheet if you prefer).

To handle CSS 3 in older web browsers 320 and Up uses the Respond JavaScript library, which we mentioned earlier this week. 320 and Up also relies on imgsizer.js to improve IE’s rendering of resizable images, and a fix for iOS Safari’s viewport scaling bug, as well as some other key JavaScript components. In other words, if you expect a high percentage of your visitors to have legacy browsers with JavaScript turned off, then 320 and Up isn’t for your website (nor, at this point, is CSS 3 in general).

Fortunately for most websites that isn’t likely to be the case and 320 and Up makes a great starting point from which to build a site that looks good on any screen. 320 and Up is licensed under the Creative Commons MIT license. Grab a copy today.

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File Under: Browsers
Apr
14
2011

How to Use Firefox’s New ‘Aurora’ Release Channel

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Aurora's snazzy new logo

Mozilla has announced the launch of Aurora, a new Firefox release channel designed to get experimental builds of the web browser out to a wider audience. The Aurora channel is part of Mozilla’s effort to speed up the Firefox development cycle.

To get in on the pre-release fun, head over to Mozilla’s new channels page and download the channel of your choice (note that, because this is the beginning of the first cycle, there currently is no beta release).

Firefox has long had the concept of release “channels,” though they did not work exactly like what Google Chrome users are accustomed to until now. From here on out Mozilla is patterning its development releases after the model pioneered by Chrome. The chief difference from the old model is that Aurora and its ilk will not require freezes on the mozilla-central repository.

In other words, like Chrome, the nightly channel might be at Firefox 7, while the Aurora channel might still be at Firefox 6, the beta channel at Firefox 5 and so on. Aurora, the new channel in the mix, is designed to bridge the wild-west bugginess of the nightly channel and the much more stable beta channel.

There two possible gotchas for users who want to try out the Aurora or beta channels. The first is add-ons; it’s unlikely that most add-ons will stay up to date with the earlier builds found in Aurora. In my testing, Ad Block Plus was the only add-on out of the seven I use that worked with Aurora. While it won’t guarantee that your add-ons work, you can install the Nightly Tester Tools add-on to override the version check.

The other, and possibly more serious gotcha is that all the channels, by default, will use the same Firefox profile, which means that there might be profile issues if you are regularly switching between a stable Firefox release and Aurora builds.

Fortunately, you can configure Aurora to use a different profile. All you need to do is grab the Firefox Profile Manager and follow the instructions for creating a new profile. Then copy all the info from your default profile into the new one. The next time you start Aurora it will ask which profile you’d like to use. Just pick the newly created profile and you’re done. Now you don’t need to worry about Aurora rendering your profile folder incompatible with other Firefox channels.

Like Chrome, Mozilla plans to update each channel roughly every six weeks. In the case of Aurora, Mozilla will do a bit of quality assurance testing before pushing out new release, but expect Aurora builds to be rougher around the edges than what you might be used to with beta releases. Still, if you’re looking for the latest in new Firefox features and emerging web standards support, Aurora is looking like the channel of choice.

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File Under: Browsers
Apr
12
2011

Microsoft Shows Off Internet Explorer 10

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Webmonkey.com in Internet Explorer 10

Just a scant four weeks after the launch of Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft is back with the first platform preview of Internet Explorer 10. Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Internet Explorer, unveiled the new platform preview of IE10 at the ongoing Mix developer conference in Las Vegas.

If you’d like to try out this very early release of IE10, head over to the IE Test Drive site and download a copy. The company plans to update the IE10 preview every eight to 12 weeks. Although Microsoft hasn’t set a final date for IE10, with Windows 8 reportedly in the works, it seems likely that both will arrive together sometime next year.

According to Microsoft, IE10 builds on the hardware-accelerated graphics tools which Microsoft touted with the release of IE9. IE10 will also continue the improved HTML5 and CSS3 support in IE9. Web developers will be pleased to note that two popular requests for CSS3 in IE9 — Gradients and Flexible Box Layout — are both already part of IE10.

In fact Microsoft already has some demos up to show off IE10‘s newfound box layout and gradient features. Impressively, the IE10 platform preview does a better job of handling many of the layout demos than the nightly build of Chromium which serves as my main web browser.

IE10 is still very much a preview release and not recommended for anything beyond testing, but based on this early look those fears that IE9 would be the end of Internet Explorer were misplaced. Not only is IE10 off to a good start, but — provided its development cycle is similar to that of IE9 — we should see the final release early next year.

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File Under: CSS, Visual Design, Web Basics, Web Standards
Apr
12
2011

How to Have Your @Media Queries and Eat IE Too

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CSS 3 media queries make building a mobile version of your site incredibly simple — just add a few lines of CSS to handle the smaller screen size of tablets and phones. The only problem is that not every web browser understands @media queries, and in those that don’t your elegant, responsive design is going to fall apart.

There are several ways around this problem. Since the main culprit when it comes to not understanding @media is Internet Explorer, conditional comments can load an entirely separate stylesheet for older versions of IE. But if you’re starting with a purely vertical layout (for mobile phones) and then applying your floats and positional rules for larger screens — which is the design pattern we recommend — that means you’ll need to handle older versions of other browsers as well.

If the extra http requests of additional stylesheets (to say nothing of maintaining those stylesheets) isn’t appealing, there are a couple of very nice polyfill solutions that use JavaScript to apply @media rules to browsers that don’t understand them.

Respond is a very lightweight (~1KB) JavaScript library that will detect CSS 3 media query support and apply the rules to browsers that don’t natively understand them. All you need to do is end every min/max-width media query block with a comment: /*/mediaquery*/.

The main downside to Respond is that, in order to keep it fast and small, developer Scott Jehl chose to only support min-width and max-width media queries and media types. That means if you’re using orientation or other media queries, Respond won’t solve your problems.

For something more robust, you can use the css3-mediaqueries-js library. Css3-mediaqueries-js supports just about every type of media query, but of course it takes a bit longer to render the page and it’s a significantly larger file for browsers to download (15.6 KB minified).

Don’t want to rely on JavaScript at all? Well, then you’re stuck with multiple stylesheets. Developer Jeremy Keith has a nice overview of how he handles media queries on Huffduffer without the need for JavaScript.

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File Under: Browsers
Apr
12
2011

Speed Improvements ‘Turbo’ Charge Opera 11.10

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Opera 11.10

Opera software has pushed out the final version of Opera 11.10, an upgrade to the company’s flagship desktop web browser. Opera 11.10 brings a significant speed bump for Opera’s Turbo browsing mode, new Speed Dial features and some more HTML5 support.

You can download Opera 11.10 for Mac, Windows and Linux from the Opera website.

Opera’s Turbo mode has been around for several years now and allows you to download sites faster over slow connections. Turbo works by proxying your connection through Opera’s servers and compressing websites before you download them. The latest version compresses sites even more, making it up to four times faster than previous Turbo releases, and 15 percent faster than Opera without Turbo, according to the company.

Turbo’s new compression tricks now take advantage of Google’s WebP image format to shrink photos and graphics before you download. WebP is Google’s effort to improve on JPG, making images smaller without degrading the image quality. Thus far only Opera and Chrome support the WebP image format.

WebP does an impressive job of making images smaller in Turbo, though in my testing there were still some compression artifacts visible, particularly with larger images. Still, for those times you find yourself with a slow internet connection, Turbo makes Opera significantly faster than the competition, and that alone makes Opera worth having around, even if it’s not your primary web browser.

The other big news in this release are the chanes to Speed Dial, which shows frequently visited site thumbnails in the new window or new tab view. Several other browsers have since copied Opera’s Speed Dial, but Opera keep tweaking it with new features. Speed Dial in Opera 11.10 is more customizable and allows you to set how many thumbnails you’d like to see.

Opera has long been a leader in web standards support and the latest release continues that transition adding partial support for the HTML5 File API. Unfortunately the “partial” File API support does not extend to the drag and drop file uploading used by some websites (notably Gmail).

Other new features in Opera 11.10 include automatic updates for plugins like Adobe Flash, and some IMAP improvements for Opera’s built-in mail client. For a complete list of everything that’s new in Opera 11.10, check out the full changelog.

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