Topic: Not to be an open source tool....

[Shift Key]

Do you design for standards or do you design for IE? Chrome is like Safari in that it's based on Webkit, and Safari is the most standards-compliant browser out there but can be tripped up by some non-standard stuff that will work in IE or Firefox.

It's such a shame that Webkit-based (or KHTML-based if you want to be historically correct) are in the minority. Otherwise this would be a brilliant idea.

Standards compliance a pissing contest done by people who have too much time on their hands. For those of us in The Real World (tm), we have to cater to what the users are running. Standards are fine for setting goals when a company develops a new browser (IE8B2 passes Acid2, but IE6 is still one of the major browsers and it can't do transparent PNGs without workarounds) but once its out in the wild, we have to put up with its quirks.

Being able to say that "Browser X is more standards compliant than Browser Y" is dumb because the majority of people don't care. They just want their favourite sites to work in their preferred browser. So its popularity that dictates where my time is spent.

Having just ranted a bit about the browser wars, I'll ask a bit about what interests me currently in the browser space - integration.

Mozilla are prototyping an framework called Ubiquity to enable this. Its in a pre-alpha stage, but there's some reading here and an introduction use-case about it here from one of the Mozilla devs. Its an implementation enabling developers and users to easily build their own plugins to manipulate web content in the browser, and share it between diferent sites.

IE8 is bringing out Web Slices, which uses microformats similar to RSS on retrieve content from a web server. The format and the data is up to the developer, but it will initially appear on the website like a widget. It is also introducing Web Accelerators to build context-sensitive addons to reference other sources (translators, mapping tools, mailing, blogging) and enable better integration in the browser. I'm not going to go into great detail about this because I haven't spent much time on it. There's more reading here.

My question to insano (and other Safari users/devs out there) is "What is Safari doing in this space?"

[NWR_insanolord]

I don't use Safari. No matter how much I love Apple, it doesn't change the fact that you can't judge a browser by how it performs in an ideal setting, you judge it by how it performs in the real world. That and the fact that I am absolutely in love with my extensions is why I use Firefox.

I had never heard of Web Slices until you mentioned them as IE is no longer in development for the Mac and I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole if it were. While it sounds interesting it's still a proprietary Microsoft technology and history has taught me to be wary of such things.

[Shift Key]

While it sounds interesting it's still a proprietary Microsoft technology and history has taught me to be wary of such things.

Web Slices is an superset of the hAtom microformat. It can be implemented by other browsers if they feel the urge. Nice troll though.

[NWR_insanolord]

I wasn't trolling, I just didn't read up on it. I think it's a reasonable assumption to believe something Microsoft is doing is proprietary and an attempt to control the market until proven otherwise. Love Microsoft or hate them, you've got to admit that's standard operating procedure for them.

[redgiemental]

Just so you know there is a shortcut for tabs on te Mac version of Safari. Its Command (Apple) key + T.

Flash is also far from the best video codec.

I tried out the Google Chrome browser. I was impressed by the speed. It looked a little goofy and I didn't try it for too long before booting back into Mac but that wasn't really an issue with the browser itself.

Edit: VMWare is one excellent way of having a virtual Windows PC on Mac. There is also Parallels but thats really intended to have both constantly running whereas VMWare is more a use when you need it proposition.

[NWR_insanolord]

Parallels works fine for me just using it when I need it.

[redgiemental]

Good good I don't have mch ram on my little macbook lol.