Like 1995 all over again!

Wow – the browser wars are back with a bang! We wait ages for a new version of Internet Explorer and then two come at once (almost). There’s a nice summary on the Register this morning about the new versions of various browsers. If you’re in the mood you can download:

• Chrome (Win)
• Firefox 3.0.7 (Any)
• Safari 4 beta (Mac + Win)
• Opera 9.6 (Any)
• Internet Explorer 8 (Win)

The interesting part is that the chosen battleground at the moment is JavaScript. (I guess people care less about standards than we all thought). As the Register article shows, people are trumpeting the various JavaScript engines as being significant new features. They are interesting in abstract, but what people care about is:

• Does it help me do what I want to do?
• Does it do cool stuff

The cool stuff tends to come first – for example the Register article links to a couple of cool Google Chrome Experiments:

• A bouncing ball
• A gravity effect on the Google home page

These are clever demonstrations of JavaScript coding using the new <canvas> tag. I had never heard of canvas before this morning, but it looks like it has been around for a bit. It is part of the emerging new standards (HTML 5) for web development and these experiments work on newer browsers. They both worked fully on Safari 4 for me, the gravity effect was patchy in Flock (based on Firefox 3). Even though I knew nothing about <canvas> before, I’m interested now.

Goo-tube

This announcement has been building all weekend. Google has bought Youtube for $1.65bn (£900m). Google already has their own Google Videos service, but Youtube has been very popular. In the past, the motto has bee “Don’t Be Evil”, but has this morphed into “If you can’t beat them, buy them”?

Google swallows YouTube for $1.65bn | The Register

There are plenty of other examples of similar behaviour. Yahoo bought Flickr, Google bought Blogger and Microsoft bought Hotmail and so on. Start gathering users to your site, one of the big three could buy you out!

technorati tags:Internet_1, Bolton, Google, YouTube

Blogged with Flock

Tablets of stone

This web site was recommended by a student (thanks Kelly-Anne) and deals with some golden rules for web design. My first reaction when I read through them was that the Ten Commandments listed were spot on! This ties in partly with the topic of next week’s lecture on navigation design.

I did pause to think about the recommendation to keep your pages below 100KB. This sounds like the advice we used to use five years ago to account for modem users. Surely I thought, things have moved on. If you stop and think though, modems haven’t got any faster in those five years, 56K is still your lot. Broadband use is hovering around 50% of home users (maybe a little more) so there are still a large number of people stuck in the Internet slow-lane who don’t appreciate graphics-laden pages.

I really agree with the comment about Marquee tags! They are so “My First Web Site”. It is dismal to have to mark an assignment where four or five different marquees scroll across the screen with their own timelines. It isn’t big and it isn’t clever! They never get high marks.

Another good source of inspiration for web design is Jakob Nielsen. He’s a usability guru who publishes regular advice on web design. Some people think he advocates dull web sites, but his comments make a lot of sense. His book Designing Web Usability is a classic, and available at Amazon or in the University library.

The Internet in 2020

This is perfect! The semester is just starting, and I need an article to kick-off the Internet 1 blog. Lifted from the BBC there’s a piece on what the Internet will be like in 14 years’ time.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Internet’s future in 2020 debated

This kind of survey is useful, although you should always be wary of the quotes and experts they wheel in to comment. The founder of 3Com is unsurprisingly predicting lots of different devices connected together.

If you tie this in with the lecture material, and contrast it with the predictions in the EPIC piece there are plenty of alternative futures for the Internet. How do you think it will go?

technorati tags:Internet_1, Future, Internet, Predictions, 2020

There's always an alternative

Its a good idea to obtain more than one Web browser if you are going to write and test web pages. Different browsers can display your pages in their own way, so it is always worth using more than one. (It is even better if you have more than one operating system, but not all students can do this).

Try some or all of the following:

• Mozilla Firefox – a popular and extensible browser
• Opera – slick browser with some unique features
• Flock – integrates social browsing features such as Blogging, Flickr and Del.icio.us
• Camino – Mac OS X browser using the underlying code from Mozilla
• Safari – Apple's browser for OS X
• Konquorer – A Linux browser available on KDE

You might also want to try Portable Firefox, which you can use at the University by installing on your M Drive. You'll need to know how to connect via the Proxy Server – ask in class.

If you're still using Internet Explorer, but not Internet Explorer 6 on your Windows PC, you should upgrade immediately for security reasons. There is a beta version of the new Internet Explorer 7 available from Microsoft. Note that installing IE7 Beta replaces your current version of IE.

It is worth remembering that browser compatibility is usually are requirement for your web design assignment.

technorati tags:Browsers, Firefox, Camino, IE7, Flock, Opera, Safari