Oct 30
This is Joe Walker’s presentation from The Ajax Experience last week. It is about web application security issues and possible solutions.
Jun 19
The guys at ajaxian.com have new interesting post describing the new features in the last Firefox Alpha 5 release. Check it out here:
Firefox 3 is to support SQLite for offline storage. The new alpha release tells us this and a lot more (below).
The world of the RDBMS has come to the browser, and has jumped from server to client in the Web platform.
- Bookmarks portion of Places has been enabled
- New crash reporting system, Breakpad. It’s
enabled by default on Mac OS X, on about 50% of Windows installations, and not yet available on Linux.
You can also view crash reports at this site. - New Javascript-based Password Manager. More details available here.
- Support for Growl notification under Mac OS X
- Support for native controls on Mac OS X
- Miscellaneous Gecko 1.9 bug fixes
Apr 04
Yesturday a new version of Live Maps was launched, the sixth major rev since July 7, 2005 when V1 went out. Among the new feature items are a bunch of bug fixes, performance improvements and enhancements to existing functionality.
What is interesting to see is new Firefox support for 3D mapping. You have to install one plugin and there you have it. Thats major improvement since GMaps doesnt have that kind of feature.
I have only one concern about Live Maps, I think they should spend more attention on Europe and focus on the geocodes there and bring more details.
View original article here
Mar 05
Presented by the Silicon Valley WebBuilder, this event brought together Mike Shaver from Mozilla, Chris Wilson from Microsoft’s IE team, Håkon Lie from Opera, and expertly moderator Douglas Crockford from Yahoo! to talk about the current state of the browser landscape.
At first, each person got a chance to say their peace. Here are some core items that each person said:
Chris Wilson
We are not about to enter another browser war. This isn’t about destroying each other. This time it is about building the standards based web future, which means we need to work together. This isn’t 1995, so let’s not build that platform. The problem that we have is that as soon as you improve something, you break the web. This is especially hard since Microsoft has ~500 million users.
Chris queried the top 200 web sites and 50% of them are in strict mode. When he did this in IE 6, only one of them was like this. He hinted at having developers opt-in to standards mode in a different way.
Mike Shaver
Mike also said that he doesn’t consider it to be a browser war….. but rather a “mindshare struggle”.
The new “war” is having cool applications being built on the web itself. If the next flickr/gmail/… is built on the web, it is winning.
Don’t look to the W3C for the future.
Håkon Lie
“If you need a good browser for Windows 98 we have it”
Ajax is bad. We need to add HTML, CSS, and the like, and he had some funny acronyms.
He then discussed the ACID 2 test and had a lot of fun with IE 7 showing how it compared to Opera 3.6 from 1998.
The Wii (which uses Opera) is going to change the web. More people are trying to get their sites rendering correctly with the Wii than “who cares about that Opera browser”.
We need to support video as a first class citizen (and sound). “We can’t leave it to plugins anymore”.
What video formats should we support? There aren’t many open formats, so they use Ogg formats.
Where’s Apple?
They refused to send someone saying that “we are busy writing software”.