NetMarketShare’s browser stats for April 2013. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 10 saw a meteoric rise in market share last month, jumping from 2.93 percent in March to 6.22 percent in April, according to NetMarketShare.

Some of IE 10′s growth might be attributable to more Windows 8 machines coming online, but it also comes close on the heels of the release of Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7.

As we noted in our review, IE 10 is a huge step forward for Microsoft’s oft-maligned browser, bringing much better web standards support and considerable speed improvements over IE 9. And there’s plenty to like even on Windows 7 where Microsoft claims users should see a 20 percent increase in performance over IE 9, as well as better battery life on Windows 7 laptops.

While web developers should be happy to see IE 10 gaining some ground given its vastly superior web standards support and speed compared to previous releases, looking at the bigger browser share picture is still disheartening. While IE 10 use may have doubled last month, it still trails IE 6 use worldwide.

The most widely used version of IE on the web remains IE 8, which, while much better than IE 6, still has next to no support for modern web development tools like HTML5 and CSS 3.

As always, progressive enhancement and feature-detection tools like Modernizr are your friends when it comes to older versions of IE.

Collaborating with Codassium Image: codassium.com.

WebRTC is a proposed standard — currently being refined by the W3C — with the goal of providing a web-based set of tools that any device can use to share audio, video and data in real time. It’s still in the early stages, but WebRTC has the potential to supplant Skype, Flash and many native apps with web-based alternatives that work on any device.

Codassium uses WebRTC to bring together WebRTC-based video chat and Mozilla’s Ace code editor. The result is what Wreally Studios, creators of Codassium, call “a better way to conduct remote interviews.” Of course Codassium could be used for more than just interviews — think code reviews, remote pair programming or even just discussing code with remote employees.

To use Codassium you’ll need to be using a web browser that supports WebRTC — recent versions of Firefox and Chrome will both work. Head on over to Codassium, click the Start button and allow the site to access your camera and microphone. Once the video chat and Ace editor load, just click the Invite button and send the resulting link to the person you’d like to work with.

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is deceptively simple — plug in a website and you can see copies of it over time.

What you don’t see is the massive amount of effort, data and storage necessary to capture and maintain those archives. Filmmaker Jonathan Minard’s documentary Internet Archive takes a behind the scenes look at how (and why) the Internet Archive’s efforts are preserving the web as we know it.

The interview with Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, especially offers a look at not just the idea behind the archive, but the actual servers that hold the 10 petabytes of archived websites, books, movies, music, and television broadcasts that the Internet Archive currently stores.

For more on the documentary, head over to Vimeo. You can learn more about the Internet Archive on the group’s website.

Robert Cailliau’s original WWW logo. Image: CERN.

Twenty years ago today CERN published a statement that made the World Wide Web freely available to everyone. To celebrate that moment in history, CERN is bringing the very first website back to life at its original URL.

If you’d like to see the very first webpage Tim Berners-Lee and the WWW team ever put online, point your browser to http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html.

For years now that URL has simply redirected to the root info.cern.ch site. But, because we all know cool URIs don’t change, CERN has brought it back to life. Well, sort of anyway. The site has been reconstructed from an archive hosted on the W3C site, so what you’re seeing is a 1992 copy of the first website. Sadly this is, thus far, the earliest copy anyone can find, though the team at CERN is hoping to turn up an older copy.

Be sure to view the source of the first webpage. You’ll find quite a few things about early HTML that have long since changed — like the use of <HEADER> instead of <HEAD> or the complete absence of a root <HTML> tag. There’s also a trace of Berners-Lee’s famous NeXT machine in the <NEXTID N="55"> tag.

CERN has big plans for the original website, starting with bringing the rest of the pages back online. “Then we will look at the first web servers at CERN and see what assets from them we can preserve and share,” writes CERN’s Dan Noyes. “We will also sift through documentation and try to restore machine names and IP addresses to their original state.”

In the mean time, have a look at the web’s original todo list and read more about the project to restore the first website over on Mark Boulton’s blog.

Viewing MS Office docs in Chrome. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey

Google Chrome OS users have long enjoyed the ability to open Microsoft Office documents right in the web browser. Now Google is expanding its MS Office support to include Chrome on Windows and Mac as well.

The new Office Viewer beta is an extension for Google Chrome. You’ll need to be using Chrome 27 or better (currently in the beta channel), but provided you’re willing to use the prerelease version, you can install the new Office Viewer (also a beta release) from the Chrome Store.

The new extension can open most Microsoft Office files including .doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .ppt, .pptx. The interface is very similar to the existing PDF view in Chrome and comes from QuickOffice, which Google acquired last year.

The main downside to the new plugin is that it’s definitely still a beta — very buggy and rough around the edges. In my testing two very simple spreadsheets simply didn’t open and selecting text in .docx Word documents was hit or miss; sometimes it worked, other times it was as if the document had been converted to an image.

On the plus side your MS Office files open in a specialized sandbox which protects you from any malware and viruses lurking in the files.

Still, there are enough rough edges that Chrome’s Office plugin isn’t ready for prime time. While it’s a necessity on Chrome OS, which has no Microsoft Office suite, everywhere else you’re probably better off using Google Drive to view files when you’re online (assuming you want to use Google services, Zoho Docs works well if you don’t), and Microsoft Office or Open/Libre Office when you’re not.

Tubes so fast they’re blurry. Image: Wetsun/Flickr.

The team behind Nginx (pronounced engine-ex) have released version 1.4, which brings a number of new features, most notably support for the SPDY protocol.

SPDY, the HTTP replacement, promises to speed up website load times by up to 40 percent. Given that Nginx is the second most popular server on the web — powering big name sites like Facebook and WordPress — the new SPDY support should prove a boon for the nascent protocol. Apache, still far and away the most popular server on the web, also has a mod_spdy module.

SPDY support should also help make Nginx more appealing, not that it needs much help. Nginx’s winning combination of lightweight and fast have made it the darling of the web in recent years with everyone from Facebook to Dropbox relying on it in one form or another.

Indeed, part of Nginx’s success lies in its versatility. The server can be used for everything from a traditional high performance web server to a load balancer, a caching engine, a mail proxy or an HTTP streaming server.

It’s worth noting that if you’re installing Nginx 1.4 on a Linux server directly from your distro’s repos the new SPDY support may not be enabled. See the Nginx documentation for instructions on building from source with SPDY support enabled.

SPDY isn’t the only thing new in Nginx 1.4, there’s also support for proxying WebSocket connections and a new Gunzip module that decompresses gzip files for clients that do not support gzip encoded files.

For more details and to grab the latest Nginx source, head on over to the Nginx website.

Blend mode example in Chrome Canary. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey.

To see the new blend modes in action, grab a copy of the latest Chrome Canary or WebKit nightly builds, enable the CSS Shaders option in about:flags and point your browser to Adobe’s sample code over on Codepen. Previously, CSS Shaders required a special build of WebKit [Update: As Adobe's Alan Greenblatt points out in the comments, CSS shader support has been in Chrome stable since v25 (you still need to enable the flag). But if you want to play around with these new blend modes then you'll need Canary (or a WebKit nightly).]

The new blend mode support is part of Adobe’s CSS Shaders proposal, which recently became part of the W3C’s CSS Filter Effects specification. There are two types of shaders in the spec, CSS fragment shaders, which provide features similar to what Photoshop’s blending modes offer, and CSS vertex shaders, which handle the 3D animation filters we’ve showcased in the past.

The blending modes currently available include all the familiar options you’ll find in Adobe Photoshop, such as multiply, screen, overlay, luminosity and other photographer favorites.

For more details and links to the corresponding specs, be sure to check out this post from Max Vujovic, who is working on the CSS Filters implementation in WebKit and Blink.

As the CSS Filter Effects specification progresses through the standardization process (and stabilizes), hopefully other browsers will add support as well.

The Firefox OS-based Geeksphone. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey.

For the average user that’s probably a good thing. Despite being a 1.0 release on real hardware these phones are not, according to Mozilla, ready for prime time.

Instead these devices are intended for developers looking to build and test applications for Firefox OS. And clearly there’s a lot of interested developers. That’s not terribly surprising given that apps for Firefox OS are built using web basics, like HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which means anyone who can build a website can build a Firefox OS app.

Indeed, thanks to the Firefox OS simulator there are already quite a few Firefox OS apps available. But while the simulator is helpful, it’s just not the same as testing on an actual device. Having actual hardware allows developers to “test the capabilities of Firefox OS in a real environment with a mobile network and true hardware characteristics like the accelerometer and camera,” writes Stormy Peters, Mozilla’s Director of Developer Engagement.

While Geeksphone may be the first company to produce an actual Firefox OS phone (albeit a “developer preview”), Mozilla has some more familiar hardware makers lined up to produce consumer devices, including Sony, LG and Alcatel, all of which have signed up to turn out Firefox OS mobile phones.

There’s still no official word on when these manufacturers will be joining the Firefox OS party, but Mozilla’s plan is to have a more polished version of its OS out in the next few months, with official releases in Brazil, Venezuela, Portugal, Spain and Poland over the next several months.

One of the Geeksphone devices is on its way to the Webmonkey lair, so we’ll give you the lowdown on what it’s like to develop for Firefox OS as soon as we get a chance to play with it. In the mean time, if you missed out on the Geeksphone today the company is hoping to have more available for sale later this week. Alternately, you can always install Firefox OS on your own device or just use the Firefox OS simulator.

IE voodoo doll by Cheryl Brind/Flickr.

Created to simplify the process of writing JavaScript and manipulating HTML, jQuery began life a mere seven years ago, but quickly found favor with developers sick of dealing with cross-browser JavaScript hassles. According to one survey published last year, jQuery turns up on roughly half of all sites on the web.

Will dropping support for older versions of IE change that? Probably not. If your site needs to maintain support for IE 8 and below (or even IE 9 and 10 running in compatibility mode) you’ll just need to stick with jQuery 1.9 or below.

“jQuery 2.0 is intended for the modern web,” writes jQuery’s Dave Methvin on the Query Foundation website. “We’ve got jQuery 1.x to handle older browsers and fully expect to support it for several more years.”

If you want the best of both worlds you can use a conditional comment to serve 2.0 to newer browsers and 1.9 to older ones, but the far easier way to go is sticking with jQuery 1.x. For now at least the primary use case for the 2.0 line is situations where IE support isn’t a consideration — think Chrome or Firefox add-ons, PhoneGap apps or node.js.

Somewhere around here you’ll find the Archive Team. Image: JOPHIELsmiles/Flickr.

Yahoo has finally decided to shutdown its long-neglected Upcoming.org, a social event calendar website. Under Yahoo’s leadership (or lack thereof) Upcoming.org went from a reasonably popular way to discover things to do — concerts, art shows, conferences and the like — to a ghost town of self-promotion and spam.

Upcoming.org’s creator, Andy Baio, posted his thoughts on the official demise of Upcoming.org, noting that he was most upset about the data being lost. “In Yahoo’s typical fuck-off-and-die style,” writes Baio, “they’re [shutting] it with 11 days notice, no on-site announcement, and no way to back up past events.”

Of course there’s a well known group of people that have made something of an art out of saving disappearing internet data — the Archive Team, headed by computer historian Jason Scott.

The Archive Team has already saved data from the demise of huge sites like Geocities and Friendster, and the group is currently working to backup Posterous, Formspring and now Upcoming.org.

And you can help the Archive Team save all this disappearing data. All it takes is Virtualbox (or VMWare or the like, but Virtualbox is free) and the Archive Team’s ArchiveTeam Warrior, a virtual appliance all set up to scrap and save data.

ArchiveTeam Warrior is dead simple to use and it works on OS X, Windows and Linux. Just install the appliance, fire it up and pick a project you’d like to help archive. Alternately you can go with the (preferred) option to let the appliance decide, which helps the Archive Team prioritize projects. If you prefer it’s also possible to run Warrior on Heroku.

Baio has put together a little video showing exactly what you need to do to get Warrior running. The only real overhead on your end is disk space and bandwidth. So long as you’re using a recent version of Virtualbox, it’s pretty easy to limit a virtual machine’s bandwidth so you can help out with backup and make sure your web browsing doesn’t slow to a crawl. See the Warrior wiki page for details.