All posts tagged ‘Browsers’

File Under: Browsers, Web Basics
Jul
21
2011

Bad Browser, No Donut

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The Monkey is back from an extended vacation spent surveying the state of the internet around the world. I’m happy to report that things are, well, things are good, but far from perfect. Having spent the last eight weeks with unreliable, often very slow, internet connections we’d like to tell you about something we now consider evil — rapid release cycles for web browsers.

Why? What’s wrong with getting the latest and greatest out to users as fast as possible? When it comes to security, nothing. When it comes to so-called features there are two annoying things about the release cycle that both Google and Mozilla have adopted for the Chrome and Firefox web browsers.

First and foremost the web browser has turned into a version of Windows XP — constant updates continually sap your bandwidth. In Chrome’s case that means surreptitiously downloading new versions in the background. For most that’s no big deal, but when you’re on a tiny island in Indonesia, and have waited hours for the clouds to clear so the line of sight wifi link to the larger island works, it’s annoying to have your limited bandwidth choked further by an updating browser. You might even curse the local internet some more before you realize, oh, it’s just my browser choking my internet connection so it can update itself. Isn’t that helpful. I mean why would I want to access the web when I have this awesome web browser to play with?

So I ditched Chrome and moved on to Firefox. Firefox is slightly better behaved, at least asking if I wanted to download the latest update. But Mozilla plans to do away with that in future updates. And frankly they might as well, it gets annoying to have dialog boxes flying open every time you start up your web browser.

For most people the bandwidth concerns might not be a big deal, but I can assure you that outside the bandwidth-rich countries most of us call home, bandwidth constraints remain a very real problem. There’s nothing quite so annoying as waiting for your web browser to update so you can load a website, which is really the only reason you have a web browser.

The second major annoyance about the constant update model is that — particularly in the case of Firefox — it means constantly breaking add-ons. What’s doubly galling about this problem is that often the add-ons work just fine, they just haven’t updated the version string to match the latest Firefox release. The user is left with a choice — don’t update, don’t get whatever security fixes might accompany the flavor of the month UI redesign; or, update, but be left with a browser that can no longer do the things it did moments before (thanks to now disabled add-ons).

Imagine trying to build a house and your hammer decided to re-invent itself every couple of weeks, sometimes disabling your screw driver in the process and other times adding a pair of pliers you don’t need. That’s pretty much where web browsers are at today.

I was somewhat heartened to find, on my return to the States, that I’m not the only one to have grown thoroughly disenchanted with the new “let’s update every day” approach of browser makers.

Software development veteran Dave Winer calls Firefox’s new approach a form of corporate suicide, and neatly sums up what a web browser used to be, should be:

Browsers should be like the lens in my glasses. If you’re thinking about it, your attention is in the wrong place. You use a browser to look through, at other things.

Can I get an amen? Web browsers have, as Winer points out elsewhere in his post, approached where text editors were 10 years ago, namely, feature complete. Done. Nothing more to add.

What’s interesting on the web these days is not the browser, but the web. The browser is just a window into the web. It’s already feature complete — you can see the web. The browser doesn’t need new features, it needs to be faster and support new standards. What most of us want to do is look through the window at the web and interact with people inside the web. Unless you’re really into productivity porn you probably don’t care about yet another way to order and sort your tabs.

With decent HTML5 and CSS 3 support available in all the latest releases from the major browser makers, the browser is, at least for now, done. Will browser makers one day create some feature that blows us all away? Perhaps, but in the mean time could you please stop screwing with our window, we just want to see the web.

For the curious, I must report that somewhere in my travels I became a huge fan of Opera. Opera doesn’t want to update every time I open it, it has all the features I use regularly and, perhaps more importantly, Opera Turbo really does vastly improve browsing on a slow connection.

[No donut image by kabelphoto/Flickr/CC]

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File Under: Browsers
Jan
21
2011

Chrome 10 ‘Obliterates’ Your Browsing History

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Version 10 of Google’s Chrome web browser has entered the dev channel, available to those who enjoy living on the edge. This release features an update to the V8 engine that powers Chrome’s speedy JavaScript, a more refined preferences dialog and print and save options for any PDF files you view in Chrome.

If you’re already subscribed to the dev release channel you should be automatically updated. If you’d like to take the dev channel for a spin, Google has instructions on how to switch Chrome channels.

Of course the dev channel releases often have bugs and Chrome 10 is no exception. Commenters on the Google Chrome blog report that Google Sync no longer works with this release. If that happens to you, you might try disabling any startup flags you might have been using with previous releases, which reportedly solves the problem.

Along with the update to the JavaScript engine, this release features a number of bug fixes (particularly on the Mac platform) and some welcome refinements to the new tabbed preferences dialog. In addition to a better looking UI, the new settings page now has a search box to quickly find the preference setting you’re looking for.

Chrome 10 also features an updated message for the “clear browsing data” option on the preferences page. Instead of just deleting your browsing history and other items, you can now “obliterate the following items from the beginning of time.” We doubt that bit of linguistic whimsy will make it all the way to the stable release of Chrome 10, but it’s certainly more entertaining than the old “clear browsing data” message.

Provided Google sticks with its six week update schedule, Chrome 10 should arrive as a stable release in April 2011.

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File Under: Browsers, Multimedia, Security
Jan
13
2011

Adobe Working on an Easier Way to Delete ‘Flash Cookies’

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When it comes to erasing your tracks on the web, nothing is more pernicious and difficult to delete than the Flash-based cookie. Technically known as “local shared objects,” Flash cookies don’t go away when you clear your browser-based cookies. Instead they hang around, potentially collecting data without your knowledge or consent.

To delete Flash cookies you have to navigate through the Flash Player settings dialog. Unfortunately most users don’t know how to do that and Adobe has, until now, put very little effort into simplifying the process (it has at least made Flash respect the “private browsing” mode in modern browsers).

Now Adobe is finally taking some steps toward simplifying the process of deleting Flash cookies. The company has announced it is working on a new API that will allow your browser to delete Flash cookies along with the rest of your cookies. For now only Mozilla and Google are working on the API with Adobe, but presumably Adobe is talking to Microsoft and Apple as well.

While there’s no shipping code at this point, if the API were to make it into Firefox and Chrome it would give users an easy-to-find menu for quickly clearly Flash cookies. Adobe’s blog post says users can expect to see the changes “in the first half of the year.”

The move would no doubt by a small boon to privacy, but as Ars Technica points out, Flash cookies aren’t the only source of hard-to-defeat, persistant online tracking. For instance, the dreaded “evercookie” stores data in no less than 13 places and is nearly impossible for the average user to delete.

Still, for those annoyed at the complexities of deleting Flash cookies, things may soon, thankfully, get a bit simpler.

Miniature Food photo by Stéphanie Kilgast/Flickr/CC

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File Under: HTML5, Multimedia, Web Standards
Dec
16
2010

Microsoft Adds H.264 Video Support to Firefox

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Thanks to licensing issues and exorbitant fees, Mozilla doesn’t support the H.264 video codec in Firefox, but Microsoft (yes, Microsoft) is aiming to change that.

Microsoft has created a Firefox plug-in that will tap into Windows 7′s native H.264 support, allowing Firefox 3.6 and the 4.0 betas to play H.264 encoded video.

If you’d like to give it a try, you can download a copy of the HTML5 Extension for Windows Media Player Firefox Plug-in from Microsoft’s Interoperability Labs.

The HTML5 video tag promises to eliminate the need for third-party plugins like Flash or QuickTime. Sadly, it’s a long way from “promises” to “delivers.” While HTML5 offers a video tag for authors to easily add videos to their webpages, it’s up to the browser to actually play that video. And that’s where the problem arises — what video codec should the browser use?

Apple is standing firm behind the H.264 video codec. But H.264 has licensing requirements, fees and is not free in any sense of the word. Mozilla Firefox supports Ogg Theora and WebM, both of which are open and free. Google’s Chrome supports all three codecs. Opera supports Ogg Theora and WebM. Microsoft has decided to support H.264 and WebM in IE9.

In short, varying codec support across browsers has made native HTML5 video a mess.

Microsoft’s new add-on brings support for H.264 to Firefox whether Mozilla wants it or not. The add-on parses HTML5 pages and replaces video tags with a call to the Windows Media Player plug-in. Unfortunately it’s not perfect. To deal with the different codec support in each browser, many sites use JavaScript to determine the browser’s codec support before presenting a video. If that’s the case, the new add-on won’t work because the detection code won’t see the H.264 support (the H.264 support is an add-on, not a native part of Firefox).

Ironically, native web video isn’t supported at all in Microsoft’s own browsers, regardless of the codec used (IE9 will introduce support for HTML5 video when it is released next year). Third-party developers have already created an experimental IE add-on to help current versions of IE get in on the native web video fun.

Microsoft’s add-on is far from ideal, but if you’ve been frustrated by Firefox’s lack of H.264 support, it does offer a partial solution. Hopefully, in the long run, browsers will standardize around WebM, which seems to enjoy the most widespread support (Apple’s Safari is current only browser that hasn’t pledged WebM support), but if that doesn’t happen solutions like this one may become even more common.

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File Under: Browsers, HTML5
Dec
9
2010

Security Flaws Force Firefox, Opera to Turn Off WebSockets

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Firefox and Opera have both disabled support for HTML5 WebSockets in the latest builds of their respective browsers. The move comes on the heels of a protocol vulnerability that could leave thousands of sites harboring malicious code.

New in HTML5, the WebSocket protocol enables a key mechanism found in modern web apps, allowing servers to independently send data to a client browser without the need for page refreshes or complex JavaScript. The most immediate use for WebSockets are apps that rely on full-duplex communication channels, like web-based chat tools and other real-time sharing apps.

Unfortunately, flaws in the WebSockets protocol also make the current spec easy to exploit.

The vulnerability was discovered by Adam Barth, who has demonstrated that a serious attack against the protocol could poison caches that sit in between the browser and the internet. That means, for example, a common JavaScript file like a Google Analytics script, could be replaced on a cache with a malware file.

As Mozilla’s Hacks Blog notes, the exploit doesn’t just affect browsers implementing WebSockets, but also Flash and Java. As the blog post says, “to avoid a lot of malware showing up without being easily traceable, we need to fix the protocol.”

Details of the exploit can be found in Barth’s paper [PDF link] and a series of messages to the Internet Engineering Task Force mailing list. Fortunately there appears to be a solution, but it will require rewriting some of the WebSockets spec.

However, until that solution is implemented both Mozilla and Opera have disabled support for WebSockets. Mozilla expects other browser to follow suit, though so far Opera is the only other browser to disable support. WebSocket support isn’t just a feature in desktop browsers either, the recent Mobile Safari upgrade in iOS 4.2 added support for WebSockets.

So far neither Adobe, which makes the Flash Player plug-in, nor Oracle, which oversees Java, have addressed the issue.

If you’ve been experimenting with WebSockets, be aware that the as of Firefox 4 Beta 8 (due in the next few days), Mozilla will no longer support your code. Neither will Opera 11. We really don’t expect this to be a long-term issue, so if you want to continue testing apps based on the nascent protocol, you can re-enable the features by changing a hidden preference in Firefox and Opera.

Photo by Andy Butkaj/Flickr/CC

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File Under: CSS
Dec
3
2010

Why Percentage-Based Designs Don’t Work in Every Browser

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Here’s a rule any web designer can live by: Your designs don’t need to look exactly the same in every browser, they just need to look good in every browser.

It’s a maxim that will spare you many a hair-pulling hour. That said, there some things you would expect to be the same across browsers that aren’t. One such problem that’s likely to crop up more often as designers jump on the responsive, flexible-width bandwagon is percentage-width CSS rules.

According to the spec, browsers, given a percentage width, would simply render the width of the page based on the size of the container element. And, in fact, that’s what browsers do, but how they do it varies quite a bit. As a result, percentage-based widths are often displayed quite differently across web browsers.

Developer Steffan Williams recently ran into this problem when trying to create a percentage-based version of his Gridinator CSS framework. Williams created a container <div> with a width of 940 pixels and then wanted to create a 12 column grid within that container. Do the math and you end up with columns set to a width of 6.38298 percent.

Pull that up in Firefox or Internet Explorer 6/7 and you’ll see what you expect to see. In Safari, Chrome and Opera, however, you’ll see something different. IE 8 and 9 are also slightly off.

The problem is not a new one; developer John Resig pointed this out years ago. But as Williams notes, it’s odd that browser behavior when rendering percentage-width grids is still so inconsistent across vendors, especially given how much today’s browsers tout their CSS 3 support.

The problem isn’t necessarily a simple case of Firefox and IE being right and the others wrong. As Opera CTO and CSS creator Håkon Wium Lie tells Webmonkey, the problem is “the CSS specification does not require a certain level of precision for floating point numbers.”

This means browsers are free to round your carefully computed percentages up or down as they see fit. According to Lie, Opera considers the result of Williams’ experiment to be a bug. Same with the WebKit project, the engine that handles rendering in both Safari and Chrome, though in Webkit’s case the bug has been unassigned since 2006. But really, there is no right or wrong here, just different ways of rounding.

Continue Reading “Why Percentage-Based Designs Don’t Work in Every Browser” »

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File Under: Browsers
Dec
3
2010

Chrome 8 Offers Built-in PDF Tools, Security Fixes

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Staying on track with its rapid-fire, six week release cycle for its web browser, Google has pushed out the final version of Chrome 8. The latest release packs in some 800 bug and security fixes, as well as a new inline PDF viewer.

If you’re using the stable, everyday version of Chrome, you should be automatically updated to Chrome 8. If you’re using another release, or would just like to give Chrome a try, head over the Google Chrome download page.

The new, built-in PDF viewer means that when you click on a link to a PDF now, Chrome will no longer download the file to your PC. Instead, Chrome will offer a preview in the browser where you can view and search the document. Also, thanks to the sandboxing model, this decreases the chance of malicious code, malware or anything else bad being delivered through the PDF. Of course, if you then decide to download the file, Chrome won’t protect you from anything that might be lurking inside.

The PDF reader joins Flash in the list of things that Chrome manages for you. That means Google can push out updates and security fixes as needed to these components of its browser, rather than relying on users to update plug-ins themselves. You can disable the PDF viewer (or any other plug-in) by navigating to about:plugins inside Chrome.

Chrome 8 is also the first version capable of connecting to the Chrome Web Store. Although there’s nothing to see at the moment, Google is planning to release a store similar to the Android Marketplace or Apple’s App Store, but with a focus on web applications, Chrome extensions, and Chrome themes.

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File Under: Browsers
Nov
23
2010

Opera 11 Beta Lets You Stack Your Browser Tabs

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'Tab Stacking' in Opera 11 beta

Opera software has released the first beta of the upcoming Opera 11 browser.

New in Tuesday’s release is an innovative feature called “Tab Stacking,” which gives you the ability to stack and group your tabs together to better organize the pages you’re viewing.

An alpha release of Opera arrived earlier this autumn, and it gave us a taste of some other new features, like lightweight browser add-ons and some hardware acceleration features new to version 11. Those features have been refined and are included here along with the new tab tricks.

If you’d like the take the beta release for a spin head over to Opera download page.

Tab Stacking is the standout feature in this release. It is ingeniously simple and works a little bit like the way you create folders of apps on the iPhone’s home screen. You group related tabs by dragging them on top of each other. Your “stack” then collapses down into a single tab. To access the tabs in a stack, you simply mouse over the group and it expands, or you can click the arrow to the right of the grouped tab, which has the same effect.

The idea of grouping tabs is nothing new. Firefox 4 will also introduce a new interface for grouping tabs when it is finalized in a few months.

Only a slim one or two percent of the desktop browser market uses Opera daily. Still, the company is known for building innovative user interfaces into its browsers ahead of its larger, more widely-used competitors. Things like mouse gestures, or the page that shows thumbnails of your favorite sites when opening a new tab were first introduced in Opera. So it’s a change of script to see the company in the position of playing catch-up to the big names when it comes to grouping tabs and supporting lightweight add-ons.

However, Firefox 4′s current implementation (also still in beta) suddenly looks awkward and primitive next to Opera’s take on the same idea. It more elegant, and it plays on a behavior many users — those with iPhones or iPads — are already familiar with.

The best way to understand Tab Stacking is to see it in action:

Continue Reading “Opera 11 Beta Lets You Stack Your Browser Tabs” »

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File Under: Browsers
Oct
26
2010

The Battle for Choice on the Web Isn’t Over

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A thoughtful essay by Stuart Turton at PC Pro argues that Mozilla, having already completed the shake-up in the browser world it set out to achieve, needs a new direction:

Like the catalyst in a science experiment, I’m beginning to wonder if Firefox’s greatest contribution to browsers is not its continued existence, but that it existed at all. Put another way: Mozilla has won all its battles, is it time the company picked a new war?

Turton goes on the suggest that Mozilla apply the Firefox model to develop a desktop office suite to rival MS Office, but I’m not convinced that’s a good idea. How many of you use Thunderbird instead of Gmail or Yahoo Mail?

Since we’re playing armchair quarterback here, I’d argue that Mozilla hasn’t come close to winning all its battles. There’s still a great deal of work to be done in the “choice” department on the web: the choice of open web technologies or proprietary technologies for video, audio and games; the choice of where to store your personal data on the web (and how the browser handles that decision); the choice of whether you get your apps from a store run by a corporation, or through an open, cross-browser platform with no Central Scrutinizer.

In other words, the “choice is good” fight isn’t over, it’s just about different stuff now. If Mozilla is going to change direction about how it promotes its philosophy, these are the places to concentrate. And it seems to me like the company is already doing so.

Of course, these issues are of little importance to the general public, many of whom are mostly concerned that pages load quickly, and that YouTube, Facebook and Gmail deliver the goods day in and day out. For all the browser vendors, that’s an ongoing competition with no finish line.

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File Under: Browsers
Oct
20
2010

Chrome 7 Arrives With Bug Fixes, Better HTML5 Support

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chrome logoIn keeping with its recently accelerated release schedule, Google has released version 7 of its Chrome web browser for Mac, Windows and Linux. The latest release of Chrome offers hundreds of bug fixes and under-the-hood improvements like an updated HTML5 parser, but is light on the new features.

Chrome users should get the update automatically, but if you’d like to download the new version directly, you can grab the browser from the Google Chrome download page.

The big news for this release is the huge number of bug fixes — hundreds have been fixed, though hundreds are still waiting. There are a few new features, like support for the HTML5 File API, which allows sites and web apps to read the content of local files. This should be a boon to web apps that rely on that feature. Also new is the ability for Chrome 7 to upload complete folders from your PC — very handy if you’ve got a lot of files to attach to an e-mail or dozens of pictures to upload. Unfortunately, the new feature relies on the HTML5 forms, which very few sites are using at the moment.

There’s also some new AppleScript support in the Mac OS X release, which means you can script Chrome or use it with OS X’s Automator tool.

Two things you won’t find in the stable release of Chrome 7 are the Hardware Acceleration and “Tabpose” features we looked at in the developer release. Both features are currently available in the developer builds of Chrome 8, though they may not make it to the stable release category until Chrome 9.

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