Posts in the Browsers Category

A lot of people have been saying it for years.  Within the last day or so, Scott Andrew said it.  Then Meryl said it.  Now I hear that the Department of Homeland Security says it, or so it would seem (I couldn’t find corroborating information on the DHS site).

Security is becoming more and more important, especially given the rise in organized attacks that exploit holes in IE and Windows, not to mention Outlook Express (known around the Meyer house as Virus Express).  It’s definitely worth looking into switching to another browser, if you haven’t already done so, and to strongly recommend the same to people you know.  Firefox is most often mentioned as a suitable replacement, and it will even import bookmarks, cookies, and settings from IE.

Of course, you may get pushback that Explorer is required for this site or that one.  Just point out that they can do 99% of their browsing in Firefox, and only launch Explorer for those few sites that need it.  After all, it isn’t like IE will be unavailable—they couldn’t get rid of it even if they wanted to do so.

Update: not only has CNN run a story along these same lines, but they mentioned Porter by name.  Way to go, dude!  Now when do I get namechecked by the news media?  <pout type="smirking" />

• Exploring Other Alternatives was published on Friday, July 2nd, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Browsers category.
• There have been five replies.

c|net seems to have injected a note of disbelief into its headline “AOL plans to revitalize Netscape?” and I suppose they could be forgiven if that was intentional.  My read on the situation is that AOL is going to put their efforts into the portal; the fact that the positions are in Columbus, Ohio, the site of their Compuserve division, was my primary tip-off.  Apparently there will be a new version of the Netscape browser this summer, based on Mozilla 1.7, but that to me bespeaks a piggyback strategy.  They’ll employ enough coders to wrap the Netscape/AOL chrome around Mozilla, and call it macaroni.  Not that this is a bad approach.  I just expect that it means Netscape isn’t about to re-enter the browser development space, nor will they be asking me if I’d like my old job back.  I’d love to be wrong, but I get the sense that they’re going to chase eyeballs.

Enough about my former employer; let’s have me talk for a bit.  I did just that with Russ Weakley of Maxdesign and the Web Standards Group, and the result is now available for your enjoyment, or for your frustration if you’re of certain persuasions.  Font-size zealots of all kinds, I’m looking in your direction.

There was more stuff I was going to talk about, but a severe cold/stomach bug/allergy condition has my brain operating at about one-fifth its usual speed.  Maybe it’ll come back to me tomorrow.  The only reason I’m even typing this entry is that I accidentally took a daytime medication instead of the nighttime equivalent, so now instead of sleeping off the illness I’m propped up in bed snuffling my way through it.  Bleah.

• Cold Comfort was published on Wednesday, April 21st, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and Interviews categories.
• There have been no replies.

Ever since the day after Carolyn came home, our cat Gravity has mostly ignored Carolyn’s presence.  We’d been somewhat concerned that there would be hostility between them in the months to come, which wouldn’t really end well because Gravity still has claws.  Those concerns are now, for the most part, erased.  This afternoon, we discovered that not only has Gravity gotten used to Carolyn’s presence, but now regards her as a part of the family.

We know this because Gravity left Carolyn a gift—a freshly killed mouse, lying on the floor right next to the bassinet where Carolyn sleeps during the day.    From what I understand, this is typically how mother-cats feed their children, and start training them to hunt for their own food.  I wished there were some way to communicate to Gravity that she could have her hunting spoils back, since Carolyn’s fairly well fed even without rodent supplements.  When you think about all this, it’s really rather touching, in a morbid way.  Kat and I both got a pretty good laugh out of it.

Of course, then I had to dispose of the carcass.

So Safari 1.2 is out, and of course was released just two days after I changed designs.  So the fix for the first-letter bug that occurred with “Thoughts From Eric” in the previous design is in place, but you can’t see it working here.  On the other hand, my recently constructed test page demonstrating Safari 1.1’s bugs with :hover and generated content show that 1.2 fixed the problem.  So, that’s cool.

What is even cooler is John Gruber’s in-depth exploration of the OmniWeb beta.  The “tabbed” interface, although not what I personally think of as tabbed, is still a welcome addition; I’ve found that I basically can’t live without tabs.  (I do a sweep of all my regularly read blogs by opening them all in tabs, via a bookmark group.)  What sounds really outstanding, though, is OmniWeb’s workspaces and site-specific preferences.  It’s probably enough for me to tolerate the obsolescence of the rendering engine, which is equivalent to Safari 1.0, but we’ll see.  You should see, too—go read John’s review of the browser, which is comprehensive and detailed.  Truly excellent.

Complete topic shift: back in September, Molly was aghast at the Quizno’s television commercial featuring an adult male human suckling at the teat of a wolf.  Well, their new ad campaign has launched, and if anything it’s more wrong.  Sure, it’s a complete ripoff of the Spongmonkeys, mostly because it turns out the same guy did both.  Warning: if you follow the Spongmonkeys link, I am not responsible for any psychological damage you may suffer, but it is very much like the commercial.

Is it just me, or are commercials in general getting a lot weirder of late?

• Love, Feline Style was published on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Browsers, Carolyn, Humor, and Mac categories.
• There have been no replies.

The e-mail backlog has finally forced me to do something I’ve long resisted: the site now has an FAQ.  I thought about calling it a QAF (Questions Frequently Asked) or maybe an FRE (Frequently Received E-mails).  But in the end the weight of tradition got me to go with the traditional nomenclature.  If you’re thinking of sending me e-mail, please read the FAQ first to see if the answer is there.  As much as I love correspondence, I just can’t keep up any more.  In fact, I couldn’t even before Carolyn arrived, and so now I’m doubly unable to keep up.  Hopefully the FAQ will help, just a bit.  Thanks for your collective understanding.

This is truly excellent: arbitrary-element hovering in IE/Win.  In other words, stuff like pure CSS menus and such can actually be used in real-world designs, thus reaping the benefits of dramatically reduced markup weight.  The approach the behaviors take reminds me a lot of what we did to get the Netscape DevEdge menus working in IE/Win, except we did it in JavaScript, which may have made our technique a little weightier on the back end.  Either way, they’re both excellent solutions.

There’s a lot more gold to mine in the behaviors/script/structural markup vein, I suspect; the melding of IE-specific behaviors with lightweight scripts and CSS could lead us to a great many advances in standards-oriented design.  While it would be nice to see IE advancing so that we didn’t need these kinds of solutions, at least they exist.  Here’s my short, off-the-cuff wishlist for things for which we can hopefully use behaviors to replicate CSS2 functionality:

• Support for generated content; counters would be a truly awesome bonus
• Fixing the box model in versions of IE previous to IE6
• Better (read: more smoothly scrolling) support for fixed-position elements and fixed-attachment backgrounds than current scripts provide

I think there’s a way to use behaviors to get alpha-channel support in PNGs, too.  Can anyone confirm that?  If not, it’s something to investigate.

Now on to slightly more surreal matters.  Sure, I’m fairly well known as an expert in CSS and Web standards, and some of you know that I do a weekly Big Band-era radio show, but how many of you were aware of my career as a shoe designer?  Doug Bowman wrote to let me know that Matt Haughey had spilled the beans, so I’ll own up to it here.

Okay, not really.  But if you go to the Medium Footwear site, wait for the Flash interface to load, hit “Collections,” and then click anywhere on the splash page, you’ll see—and I swear that, like Dave Barry, I am not making this up— the Eric Meyer Collection.  There are nine different models, and the really funny punchline to the whole affair is this: guess which of those shoe styles I like enough to consider buying?  As it turns out, the “Structuralist” design.  Seriously.

• Running Just To Stay In Place was published on Monday, January 5th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Browsers, CSS, and Humor categories.
• There have been no replies.

This completely and utterly rocks.  I’m going to set up a Virtual PC drive just to try it out.  But Matt Haughey’s question is worth considering: why didn’t we know about this sooner?

• One System, Many Explorers was published on Thursday, November 6th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.

Even in the bright, shiny, translucent world of Mac OS X, Windows haunts me like a vengeful spectre.

Upon deciding to strike out on my own, I knew I’d have to buy a laptop.  The older-model TiBook and two-months-old Dell Latitude both belonged to AOL Time Warner, and they would want them back.  When I went somewhere to speak, or to train, I would need a portable computing node.  I would need the ability to carry everything needed to deliver my presentation: all the slides, the working files, the examples.  Too often have I seen speakers show up assuming they could run their presentation via the net and be told, “Sorry, the connection is down.”  Or arrive with a CD-ROM they burned containing everything, only to have the presentation machine absolutely refuse to read the disc.

So I bought a new 1GHz TiBook, with the gracious assistance of a local Apple employee.  It’s shiny on the outside, and shiny inside too.  After a quick hard drive repartition and reinstallation of both OS X and the Classic OS, I spent a couple of hours adjusting the OS look to at least vaguely resemble my old Mac’s desktop, customizing the Dock and System Preferences to put the important things within quick reach, and learning how the new OS works as compared to the Classic OS.

Then I installed Virtual PC 6.  And the pain began.

Please realize I have very little against VPC6.  It does a stunning job of recreating a Windows operating system right there in a Mac OS window.  If I launched a Classic application, I could run three completely separate operating systems on the same machine.  Slowly, of course.

But anyway, I installed my Windows 2000 Professional edition of VPC6, and there it was.  Windows.  Mocking me.  Can’t live without me, eh? it sneered.  In a sense, no, I can’t: I need to be able to test designs and templates and CSS techniques in Windows browsers as well as Macintosh browsers.  And I need to be able to test in different versions of Internet Explorer.  To do that, you either need multiple Wintel boxes, or one Wintel box running Virtual PC for Windows—think about that for a minute—or one Macintosh running Virtual PC for Macintosh.  In the latter case, I’d also get OS X, which I haven’t been running but need to, since Safari is a serious browser that deserves to be taken seriously.

Economically speaking, there was no contest: one laptop that gave me everything I needed.  Aesthetically speaking, there wasn’t much of a choice either.  TiBooks are just so darned… cool.

I fought with virtual Windows for almost 12 hours yesterday, trying to make it behave with some semblance of normalcy.  Discovering that I’d done something sensible yet still horribly wrong, and having to start over, more than once.  At least with Virtual PC, a badly botched installation is no big deal: you just throw away the drive image and empty the trash can.  It’s like reformatting the hard drive on a Windows machine, except it takes less time.  You can also, once you get a drive image set up as a baseline, copy it to new images and make changes to the copies.  So I can have images with IE5.0, IE5.5, and IE6.  I can also install Opera, Mozilla, Netscape, Firebird, and all the other Windows browsers.  (I’ll probably install them into the IE6 image.)

But getting to that point, making my life easy, was amazingly hard and deeply frustrating.  And I’ve been using Windows 2000 Professional on a regular basis for the last two years.

At least VPC6 has a “go to full screen mode” that will let me present my presentation slideshows using Opera, as I’ve been doing for more than a year now.  I was very glad to see that feature.  Now, if only the software had a “shrink drive image to eliminate unused drive space,” I’d be a really happy camper.

Oh, and the next time someone tells you how bloated Mozilla or some other browser has become, kindly point out to them that the install package for Internet Explorer for Windows 5.5, Service Pack 2, is 84.1 megabytes; IE6.0 is 76.7 megabytes.  Even at T1 speeds, those take a while to download—almost as long as it takes light from the sun to reach Earth, in fact.  The only reason nobody ever complained is that nobody had to download Explorer.  Funny, that.  Imagine if Microsoft had been required to offer Explorer for download instead of bolting it into the OS.  I wonder how many copies would be in use today?

• Windows Pains was published on Monday, August 11th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and Mac categories.
• There have been no replies.

There has been more detailed information written about yesterday’s events, so it’s worth reading if you still care.  Personally, I thought Dave Shea’s summary was quite amusing.

I indicated yesterday that DevEdge would likely not be updated.  That’s because the standards evangelism team has been disbanded.  Two team members were among those let go, and the rest of us went to different places within AOL.  I’m really not sure what made the difference between those who were axed and those who were not. 

As much as I’m unhappy that we’ve come to this pass, I don’t regret for one second having taken the position of Standards Evangelist.  While it lasted, Netscape funded close to ten full-time and part-time positions whose job was to promote standards, not proprietary technology, and to spread that message as far and wide as possible.  They may well have been doing it for selfish reasons, but that hardly matters.  We were able to inform, educate, and proactively help a lot of sites get better cross-browser behavior by using standards.  In our own way, we helped make things better, and we made a difference.

So here’s to Bob Clary, Marcio Galli, Katsuhiko Momoi, Chris Nalls, Tristan Nitot, Arun Ranganathan, Doron Rosenberg, and Susie Wyshak.  We fought the good fight and created a lot of great material, including information about the redesign of DevEdge itself.

Moving forward, I have to decide what I will do: accept the position into which I was reassigned, turn down the reassignment and look for another position within AOL, or decide to take the severance package and leave AOL altogether.  This isn’t exactly an easy call, partly due to the economy, but also because the importance of standards to AOL is not, at present, clear to me.  Perhaps the message has sunk in and there will be a place for someone like me, and perhaps not.  I hope to find out which over the next week or so.  No matter what, I face some tough choices, but at least I have choices.  I can’t say the same about 50 former co-workers.

Meanwhile, DMX Zone just this morning (my time) published an interview with me, so those interested in such things can click away.  Love that Dark Jedi groove thang!  [insert lightsaber sound effects here]

• Standing At a Crossroads was published on Wednesday, July 16th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Browsers, Interviews, and Work categories.
• There have been no replies.

It’s true: Netscape is no longer a viable entity.  I’ll leave it to others to draw conclusions regarding how this move is related to the agreement AOL and Microsoft reached a while back.  Y’all can probably do a much better job of it anyway.

From what I can discern, there will be no more new versions of Netscape; the browser will go into maintenance mode, whatever that means.  More than half the staff was let go today, and Mozilla has been spun off into an independent, non-profit foundation supported by AOL, IBM, Sun, and others.  I have no idea what will happen with netscape.com itself.  DevEdge will cease producing new content, it would seem, which is a shame.  We produced some really good stuff, and had more in the pipeline.  Hopefully that forthcoming material will find another outlet.

For now, I still have a job, although my team’s been split up and sent to different organizations within AOL.  I don’t know yet how this will turn out for me, but I do know that today I’m saddened by the loss.  Yes, Mozilla will go on, but another pioneering force of the Web has just been painfully dimmed.  It’s worth a moment to reflect on where we’ve been… and where we might be headed.

• Moments of Transition was published on Tuesday, July 15th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and Work categories.
• There have been no replies.