Chrome shine for Google

I wrote a review of Google Chrome Browser for Financial Express. It appeared on page-8 of the newspaper, and is also available online at - http://bit.ly/chromefe .

Check it out.

Google Chrome Tested

I have been testing Google Chrome for last 6 hours now. Here is a short review. Overall I don’t find anything overwhelmingly amazing that would make me WOW! The Omnibox is cool, but I feel that it makes a marginal enhancement in my browsing experience. The most important thing I noticed is that – Chrome is slow; it’s slower than FireFox. I have to admit that I am so used to Firebug, that I almost view the Net-element of Firebug every few minutes, I find such a functionality missing in Chrome. I like the Chrome->Developer->Debug Javascript, but it has marginal stuff that I need. Also, check this – in Chrome, click on Developer menu, and try to shift-Windows-tabs (by alt-tab), that doesn’t work. Why has Chrome disabled my Windows-alt-tab switch? Web site seem to work normally, rendering and JavaScript seems to be working fine.

I feel that Javascript execution is very very fast. I tested a page where FF normally give a Javascript-timeout (stop, continue …), Google Chrome ran just fine and delivered me the Javascript rendering in less time than expected. I will therefore need to do more Javascript testing on Chrome.

Though I am a little concerned about the vulnerability discussed here.

More later.

3 awesome resources for Cross Browser Coding

I have been doing a bunch of reading, here are three of best articles I have read on cross browser coding. They cover – a) rendering, b) events compatibility and c) cookie restrictions.

Rendering - How to get Cross Browser Compatibility Every Time.

Here is a quick summary for those of you who don't want to read the whole article:

1. Always use strict doctype and standards-compliant HTML/CSS
2. Always use a reset at the start of your css
3. Use opacity:0.99 on text elements to clean up rendering in Safari
4. Never resize images in the CSS or HTML
5. Check font rendering in every browser. Don't use Lucida
6. Size text as a % in the body, and as em's throughout
7. All layout divs that are floated should include display:inline and overflow:hidden
8. Containers should have overflow:auto and trigger hasLayout via a width or height
9. Don't use any fancy CSS3 selectors
10. Don't use transparent PNG's unless you have loaded the alpha

Events compatibility table. This article compares the event handling for IE 5.5, IE 6, IE 7, IE8b1, FF 2, FF 3b5, Saf 3.0 Win, Saf 3.1 Win, Opera 9.26, Opera 9.5b and Konqueror 3.5.7. Very detailed article. Must read for all Javascript programmers.

Cookie Restrictions - Browser cookie restrictions very nicely documented here. An excerpt follows:

• Microsoft indicated that Internet Explorer 8 increased the cookie limit per domain to 50 cookies but I’ve found that IE7 also allows 50 cookies per domain. Granted, this may have been increased with a system patch rather than having the browser’s first version ship like this, but it’s still more than the 20 that was commonly understood to be the limit.
• Firefox has a per-domain cookie limit of 50 cookies.
• Opera has a per-domain cookie limit of 30 cookies.
• Safari/WebKit is the most interesting of all as it appears to have no perceivable limitCookie header. The problem is that the header size exceeded the limit that the server could process, so an error occurred. through Safari 3.1. I tested setting up to 10,000 cookies and all of them were set and sent along in the

TaffyDB - A JavaScript DB worth trying out

I recently read about TaffyDB, tried it today. Seems like a handy tool. I would like to use it. TaffyDB is a JavaScript Database, something that can be used for offline data processing in my opinion. For example, a relevant use case is I would like to cache a large report on my browser side and present different views by querying the TaffyDB (I would not like to make server side calls).

It seems like previous attemps have been made for a JavaScript database, a few example are - JavaScript SQL Database with Permanent Storage, Simple JavaScript Database, etc.

TaffyDB is pretty simple to use. Seem feature rich - Under 10K, CRUD Interface (Create, Read, Update, Delete), Sorting, Advanced Queries etc.

Code is pretty easy to write too. Pretty cool, check it out.

Internet Explorer 8: My Top 10 list

IE8 has a bunch of really nice features. I read a few reviews (here and here) and made my ‘Top 10’ list, read on …

1. AJAX Back Navigation enables users to navigate back and forth without leaving the AJAX application and could be used navigating a page without performing a traditional full navigation. This allows websites to trigger an update to browser components like the address bar by setting the window.location.hash value, firing an event to alert components in the page and even creating an entry in the travel log.
2. DOM Storage is a simple-to-use method for storing and retrieving strings of key/value pair data. Data can be stored per tab instance for a session or persisted to the local machine. This allows pages to cache text on the machine which reduces the effect of network latencies by providing faster access to pre-cached data. Several innovative uses are possible. For example, use this in combination with the new network connectivity event to allow a page to cache data if it detects that the computer is offline.
3. Six connections per host instead of two for broadband scenarios and a scriptable property allow for more improved performance by allowing parallelization of downloads in Internet Explorer 8. In addition, this increases functionality by ensuring a request is not blocked to a host if two connections already exist. Websites can optimize their downloads based on a scriptable property.
4. WebSlices - WebSlices is a new feature for websites to connect to their users by subscribing to content directly within a webpage. WebSlices behave just like feeds where clients can subscribe to get updates and notify the user of changes. A WebSlice is a portion within a webpage that is treated like a subscribe-able item, just like a feed. To enable a WebSlice on your website, annotate your webpage with class names for the title, description, and other subscribe-able properties.
5. Offline Events - This is an easy way of detecting connectivity within the confines of JavaScript. With it we can write graceful offline Ajax applications. Firefox 3 and IE 8 appear to be the only browsers to support this feature.
6. Cross-domain Request (XDR) - XDomainRequest, is the easiest way to make anonymous requests to third-party sites that support XDR and opt in to making their data available across domains.
7. Cross-document Messaging (XDM) APIs allow communication between documents from different domains through IFrames in a way that is easy, secure and standardized.
8. Facebook Integration: Microsoft capitalized on their partnership with the popular social networking site, Facebook, to allow IE8 users the ability to get status updates from Facebook right from their browser toolbar.
9. eBay Integration: Like Facebook, this feature also uses IE8's new technology, called "WebSlices", which introduces a new way to get updates from other sites via the browser itself, without having to visit the web site.
10. Firebug for Internet Explorer - We finally have a heavily-Firebug-inspired tool inside Internet Explorer. To quote Joe Hewitt (creator of Firebug): "I couldn't be happier that Microsoft completely copied Firebug for IE8." I have to agree - a tool like this has been a long time coming and it's greatly appreciated. Only the Internet Explorer team would've ever been the ones to build this tool - there's simply too much information here that's unavailable to typical IE extensions.
11. Browser mode toggling - At first glance this feature makes the most sense for seeing if your IE 7 page will work ok in IE 8. In actuality, however, this will end up being very useful for developing a standards-compliant page (in IE 8, FF, Safari, Opera) and then toggling to see what the result is like in IE 7. This is so much better than the IE 6 to IE 7 jump where you have to keep your browser in a virtual machine in order for it to run side-by-side (according to Microsoft, at least - even though there were standalone solutions).

Read more at the Microsoft IE8 readiness site.

RDBMS has come to the browser

Ajaxian reports:

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.

I think this is a pretty interesting innovation. Suddenly we will have a lot more agile storage space on the client side. We can do some complex relational storage on the client side. I wonder if cookies will undergo a major transformation (like limit on cookie size etc.). I wonder if we will see nice Javascript APIs to access the RDBMS on the client side (or did I miss it; is it already there?). I wonder if Browsers will collocate some of these data, and we may see something like 'single instance storage' on the client side? I think all of this was possible even without the RDBMS, however a database on the client side makes us think the various possibilities that existed on the server side.

Firefox use continues to rise in Europe

Reported on The Inquirer by Paul Hales: Friday 08 December 2006, 16:16

ACCORDING TO research carried out by French firm Xiti Monitor, use of the Firefox browser continues to grow in Europe. According to Xiti's research, the browser is now used by some 23.2% of European PC web surfers - up from 19.4% in April. Slovenia loves the Fox, where over 40% of surfers use the browser. Brits, along with the Spanish and the Dutch are the least Firefox friendly Europeans as the pretty map below shows. Use of Firefox generally goes up at the weekend in Europe, suggesting that people have the browser on their home PCs and may get what they're given at work.