Mozilla have announced that Firefox 3 Beta 3 is now officially available for download
The new version of the browser seems pretty stable, although there are a few minor issues remaining; the toolbar icons still look like they need some tidying up, and most of your extensions will be no longer compatible (for the mean time). Ars Technica has a review of the new features together with some screenshots.
Could Guimp be the World’s smallest website?
Measuring in at 22 x 22 pixels in size, it’s going to be tough to beat - but please let us know if you have found smaller!
Today’s tech tool is one for PHP developers, although I’d be very interested to know if anyone has an alternative that works in ASP.NET. If you’ve ever wondered what exactly your clients are doing on your webpage, then this may be exactly what you are looking for.
ClickHeat records user clicks on your page and displays them as a visual heatmap, showing the areas where users are most likely to click. This functionality is not limited to links, it records every click anywhere on your page.
Maybe users are confusing a graphic with a button, or maybe there’s a page on your site which is more popular than others. ClickHeat can tell you.
Check out the software (free) and it’s demo on the ClickHeat website.
Thanks to the way older versions of Internet Explorer browsers render particular HTML elements, often it’s not possible to supply the same CSS stylesheet to every browser.
Thankfully, Internet Explorer supports conditional comments, and is the only browser to do so, which allows us to specify special CSS stylesheets for different versions of Internet Explorer, from version 5 upwards.
Conditional comments are structured in the same way as HTML comments, meaning browsers other than Internet Explorer will just treat them as comments, while IE has special code which looks for the conditions’ syntax within comments. They can only be placed in HTML files and are written in the format:
<!--[if expression]> HTML <![endif]-->
One thing to watch out for as a Web Developer is windowed elements. Even if the website you create looks as though it works perfectly fine in older browsers, you may have missed checking the placement of windowed elements.
What are windowed elements?
In versions 6 and below of Internet Explorer, some of the HTML components used are ‘borrowed’ from standard windows components, and as a result they are drawn differently. Microsoft decided to call these elements ‘windowed’ elements, which a cynic would say hides a bug as a ‘feature’. Happily, Internet Explorer 7 onwards does not contain any windowed elements.
Click to continue reading “Windowed and Windowless Elements”
Check out Orange’s ‘Unlimited’ website. It’s a flash-based website which apparently scrolls forever… can you find an end?
While web developers could once rely on the safety of tables for their web designs, more and more recently table layouts have been frowned upon in the design community in favour of DIV based layouts. Tables should be for tabular data, after all.
The only problem is DIV based layouts from the outset can seem much more daunting and complicated, especially for people new to web development - mainly due to each layout requiring a different coding strategy to get the columns laid out nicely, the code being split between HTML and CSS, and the requirement to test the layout in at least two browsers for compatibility issues.
Enter the Layout Gala - a handy website I recently stumbled upon - which contains 40 of the most popular layouts all made using cross-browser friendly DIV code. Now whenever you need a new look, just visit this site find the layout you want and download the skeleton HTML for stress free DIV based websites. Woohoo!
Click here to visit the Layout Gala
On a side note, if you find yourself needing a DIV layout with equal length columns, check out these articles:
- Faux Columns - A simple background image trick which should be suitable for most solutions.
- Project 7 Equal Height Columns - A simple javascript which extends the columns to the length of the largest column. It can either be fully extended on load or visibly extend in front of your eyes.
Opera may not have a very large market share when it comes to browser usage on computers, but on mobile phones Opera is considered THE browser to use.
Opera have released a video of their new Opera mobile browser - version 9.5.
Opera Mobile has always been quicker than standard mobile phone browsers due to where in the page loading process it formats the page for display. But this new video really shows off the power of the new version, and it’s passed the ACID2 test. Woo!
As you have probably heard, on Friday Microsoft placed a bid to takeover Yahoo! for $44.6 billion.
Yahoo! is the second most popular Internet search engine after Google - but there are some considerable differences in search hits between the two. Yahoo! has been struggling for some time, with falling advertising revenues and dwindling share prices, and the dominance of Google as the search engine of choice for many which has really put a strain on Yahoo!’s operations.
Microsoft claim that Google are dominating the market and a takeover of Yahoo! would encourage healthier competition. “Today this market is increasingly dominated by one player. Together, Microsoft and Yahoo! can offer a competitive choice while better fulfilling the needs of customers and partners,” said the press statement from Microsoft.
Google, on the other hand, have expressed their concern about such a takeover bid. “Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies — and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets” says David Drummond, Senior Vice President, on their blog.
Microsoft’s plan could potentially backfire as Yahoo! now begin to quickly seek out other ways to stay independent and could potentially push it closer towards rival Google.
One thing’s for sure - the future of Yahoo! is about to take a turn in some kind of new direction. I personally just hope it’s neither Microsoft or Google that end up holding the reigns.
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