Steve Jobs has touched the lives of people everywhere in the world. His influence is unquestionable worldwide and we can expect to see many tributes created for the many since his death earlier this year. The first known statue was unveiled in Budapest, Hungary, where a life-size bronze rendition of the Apple Inc co-founder shows him in traditional jeans and a turtleneck addressing an invisible crowd.
The statue, commissioned by GRAPHISOFT founder and chairman Gabor Bojar. Hungarian artist Ermo Toth sculpted the piece and was present as it was unveiled in front of the GRAPHISOFT headquarters.
Last time we sent you over to Brad Frost’s blog it was for a slideshow about building a future-friendly web. Now Frost is back with some more tips for web developers in a post entitled Support vs Optimization, which tackles the thorny subject of what to do about the wide range of mobile browsers on the web.
As Frost points out the mobile world is more than just the WebKit-based iOS and Android browsers that often grab all the headlines. In fact the most widely used mobile browser is not even a WebKit browser (it’s Opera) and there are dozens of other mobile browsers out there as well. And, as the tablet market begins to expand beyond the iPad, there will likely be dozens more coming in the near future.
Faced with the diversity of the mobile browser market developers can either stick their heads in the sand and develop exclusively for WebKit browsers, or, as Frost suggests, we can be more considerate to other browsers. It can seem daunting to support dozens of mobile browsers, but if you aren’t up to the challenge of a few mobile browsers now what are you going to do when you need to support car dashboards, refrigerators, televisions and toasters, all with dozens of varying browsers? (For a more far-future look, check out Scott Jenson’s The Coming Zombie Apocalypse).
The solution, according to Frost, is to recognize the difference between supporting a browser and optimizing specifically for it.
The typical argument against supporting older BlackBerry browsers or Nokia’s WebKit fork, for example, is that these browsers don’t support nearly the number of features that iOS and Android browser’s offer. While that’s true, as with most things on the web, it doesn’t have to be an either/or choice. It can actually be both. That’s what Frost means be the difference between support and optimization:
You don’t have to treat these browsers as equals to iOS and Android and no one is recommending that we have to serve up a crappy WAP site to the best smartphones on the market. It’s just about being more considerate and giving these people who want to interact with your site a functional experience. That requires removing comfortable assumptions about support and accounting for different use cases. There are ways to support lesser platforms while still optimizing for the best of the best.
For some practical advice on how you can take a more supportive approach to the wide range of mobile browsers on the market, head over to Frost’s site and read through the post. Be sure to check out the links to the various mobile emulators and brush up on the ideas behind progressive enhancement.
It’s a big web out there, with dozens of browsers and an ever-increasing number of devices connecting to it. If you want your site to be part of the future it’s going to have to work everywhere — perhaps not perfectly optimized, but at least working.
Mozilla has released Firefox 9, which brings speed improvements and uses less memory than previous releases. In fact, this release effectively puts Firefox back on a level playing field with Google Chrome when it comes to speed.
If you’d like to try out Firefox 9, head on over to the Mozilla downloads page. If you’re already using Firefox you’ll be automatically updated to version 9.
The big news in this release is under the hood where Firefox now supports what’s known as Type Inference. Type Inference is a new feature for Firefox’s SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine and means that complex JavaScript websites — which, let’s face it, is pretty much every website these days — should run faster. According to Mozilla, Firefox 9’s Type Inference should make the browser between 20 and 30 percent faster.
Alongside the faster JavaScript processing Firefox 9 continues to show improvements from Mozilla’s MemShrink project, an ongoing effort to reduce memory usage in the browser. Indeed, for the first time in a very long time my testing showed Firefox 9 using less memory than Opera (which has long been the least RAM-hungry browser I test). Opening the same dozen tabs in both Firefox and Opera used only 367MB of RAM in Firefox compared to 378MB in Opera 11.60 [Update: Note that the memory test was performed with the following Firefox add-ons running: AdBlock, Ghostery, BetterPrivacy and HTTPS-Everywhere.] There’s no longer much difference between the two, which is a testament to Firefox’s dramatic improvement over the last six months of MemShrink efforts.
Web developers get a few new toys in this release, including a fullscreen mode that allows any HTML element to take over the screen. Although fullscreen is primarily associated with video elements, there may be occasions (for example, HTML elements used in web-based games) where it makes sense to take over the screen. For now the fullscreen feature needs the -moz prefix to work.
Firefox 9 also includes a new “dim the lights” feature for HTML5 video. Dimming the lights means that Firefox will overlay the rest of the browser window with a gray background that let’s you focus on the video in question. Check out this demo video which shows the dimming in action.
While most of what’s new in Firefox 9 is under the hood, Mac users will notice a few cosmetic changes like a slightly tweaked look and feel that more closely matches the Mac OS X Lion toolbar styles. There’s also now support for two-finger swipe gestures to navigate back and forth in history (mirroring the same features in Chrome and Safari).
Firefox 9 is well worth the upgrade. If you moved away from Firefox due to speed problems and bloat this release warrants another look. Those plagued by the rapid release cycle’s habit of breaking add-ons may want to hold off, though. Firefox 9, for all its other improvements, may still break some add-ons. Mozilla has a solution to the breaking add-ons problem in the works, but it won’t arrive for another six weeks when Firefox 10 is released.
If you’re still waiting for winter to arrive, Google can help. The search engine might not be able to bring you a white Christmas outside, but it can at least add some snow to your web browser. A recently uncovered Easter egg uses JavaScript to bury your search results under a fresh coat of snowy pixels.
To see the hidden feature just head to Google.com and search for the phrase “let it snow.” Provided your browser is up to the task — the latest versions of Chrome, IE, Safari and Firefox should all work — the search results page will begin to fill up with frost and snow.
Once the search results are sufficiently covered in white you can click and drag your mouse to write a message in the frost. And because nothing from Google is ever without a tie-in to Google+, just click the “+” button to share your Easter egg drawing with other Google+ users. To clear away the frost, click the “defrost” button.
Google is well known for its Easter eggs, the search results page recently did a flip for the phrase “do a barrel roll” and the company has even gone so far as to embed an entire flight simulator in Google Earth. If you’d like to see some other Google search Easter eggs, try typing “tilt“, “ascii art” (check out the Google logo) and our personal favorite, the quite subtle “recursion.”
The dollar bill has some weird shit plastered on it. This we know. But even more weird are the outlandish interpretations people extract from the seemingly cryptic symbols (most of which are just old and Christian and zzzzzz…zzzzzzz…zzzzzz). But if you’re conspiracy-minded, well, take your pick from these five ridiculous one dollar delusions: More »
Airports. Hotels. Cabs. Ugh. There’s a class of wayward wretch who’s condemned to spend more time in these horrible places than in his own home. This is the man in a suitcase. These gifts will help him survive his Sisyphean labor even when the final destination is nowhere in sight. More »
Yes, 4G is super fast and yes, we love it. But not all 4G is created equal. Even when you’re talking about the same kind of 4G—LTE. Now that AT&T’s launched their LTE network in a handful of cities, we can finally ask, “Who’s faster? Verizon or AT&T?” Well, it’s not quite that simple. More »
Mozilla has released Firefox 9, which brings speed improvements and uses less memory than previous releases. In fact, this release effectively puts Firefox back on a level playing field with Google Chrome when it comes to speed.
