Google's plan to kick Microsoft's arse in a different way

“Google yesterday dropped a bomb at Redmond.“

“Bomb!!! are you kidding or it’s just another bad joke from you?“

“Wait wait it’s not, instead it’s true that Google did drop a bomb but it’s not similar to normal bomb that you and me have seen in the movies, it’s a different one… yes it’s a different one and it’s called Chrome Frame. You might be wondering what’s this, no worry just have a little more patience you will get to know what it is.“

Nuff’ said… let’s explain what it is all about, Chrome Frame is Google’s effort to kick Internet Explorer in it’s arse, yes in it’s arse, in fact in Microsoft’s arse, this is a simple plugin( yes simple from User’s point of view) for Internet Explorer(6, 7 and 8), which does a “cool thing“, it replaces IE’s decade old, shitty rendering engine a.k.a Trident with Google Chrome’s high performance rendering engines ( Webkit for HTML-CSS and V8 for JavaScript), so once you have installed this plugin you can have Chrome’s super fast rendering engine inside IE. Isn’t this a real cool thing?? By the way it’s still in beta and the awesome thing is that it’s OpenSource. This is what our Alex Russel ( Creator of DOJO JavaScript Library ) has been doing since he joined Google, great job done.

We all know that developing rich web applications these days is a pain if we need to support Internet Explorer but the crude fact is that we can’t ignore IE because of its market share, which is still more than 60%. And Microsoft is somewhat reluctant or don’t know what, in pushing new developments for IE, so it has become stagnant for some years and lagging far behind in features and performance than other modern browsers. Microsoft did try to fix this in their effort of developing IE8 which is a better browser than both of it’s ancestors, but it failed to gain enough momentum. As Microsoft also extended support for IE 6 till 2014 (Win XP support ends in that year), so there was a real or quick need of a solution which can help developers and users to reap the real benefit of modern rich web applications. So here comes the Google Chrome Frame, which is supposed to fill this gap, until Microsoft fixes it’s browsers or decides to use Webkit and V8 as it’s rendering engine . Recent surveys regarding IE6 market share reveal that almost 70% IE users are not able to upgrade their browsers due to some other reasons for example : old OS, corporate policy, govt policy etc, so this is a nice alternative for them (though Chrome Frame requires Win XP, but it’s still in beta so lets see) and as far as I guess this plugin was intended for big Corporate Houses who still use IE 6  because they have some in-house applications which only works in IE 6 or may b uses IE’s ActiveX controls, so this is a answer for them, now if Google can convince those business organizations about this then we might soon have Chrome Frame installed in most of them.

The Chrome Frame blog and developer’s guide has detailed the installation process and the usage, please check out the below link for more information regarding this:

http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/developers_guide.html

Finally as a Web Developer/Frontend Engineer I’d love to see Chrome Frame in all IE6/7 browsers, because this will surely make my life less painful and I’ll focus more on developing cool applications than spending ‘countless hours’ to fix IE bugs. This is a serious attempt from Google to fix the mess, so now let’s see how much response it gains, by the way I do hope for the best, rest is up to the users and decision makers.

Cheers!!! that’s why I love you so much Gooooooooogle.

Google’s plan to kick Microsoft’s arse in a different way

“Google yesterday dropped a bomb at Redmond.“

“Bomb!!! are you kidding or it’s just another bad joke from you?“

“Wait wait it’s not, instead it’s true that Google did drop a bomb but it’s not similar to normal bomb that you and me have seen in the movies, it’s a different one… yes it’s a different one and it’s called Chrome Frame. You might be wondering what’s this, no worry just have a little more patience you will get to know what it is.“

Nuff’ said… let’s explain what it is all about, Chrome Frame is Google’s effort to kick Internet Explorer in it’s arse, yes in it’s arse, in fact in Microsoft’s arse, this is a simple plugin( yes simple from User’s point of view) for Internet Explorer(6, 7 and 8), which does a “cool thing“, it replaces IE’s decade old, shitty rendering engine a.k.a Trident with Google Chrome’s high performance rendering engines ( Webkit for HTML-CSS and V8 for JavaScript), so once you have installed this plugin you can have Chrome’s super fast rendering engine inside IE. Isn’t this a real cool thing?? By the way it’s still in beta and the awesome thing is that it’s OpenSource. This is what our Alex Russel ( Creator of DOJO JavaScript Library ) has been doing since he joined Google, great job done.

We all know that developing rich web applications these days is a pain if we need to support Internet Explorer but the crude fact is that we can’t ignore IE because of its market share, which is still more than 60%. And Microsoft is somewhat reluctant or don’t know what, in pushing new developments for IE, so it has become stagnant for some years and lagging far behind in features and performance than other modern browsers. Microsoft did try to fix this in their effort of developing IE8 which is a better browser than both of it’s ancestors, but it failed to gain enough momentum. As Microsoft also extended support for IE 6 till 2014 (Win XP support ends in that year), so there was a real or quick need of a solution which can help developers and users to reap the real benefit of modern rich web applications. So here comes the Google Chrome Frame, which is supposed to fill this gap, until Microsoft fixes it’s browsers or decides to use Webkit and V8 as it’s rendering engine . Recent surveys regarding IE6 market share reveal that almost 70% IE users are not able to upgrade their browsers due to some other reasons for example : old OS, corporate policy, govt policy etc, so this is a nice alternative for them (though Chrome Frame requires Win XP, but it’s still in beta so lets see) and as far as I guess this plugin was intended for big Corporate Houses who still use IE 6  because they have some in-house applications which only works in IE 6 or may b uses IE’s ActiveX controls, so this is a answer for them, now if Google can convince those business organizations about this then we might soon have Chrome Frame installed in most of them.

The Chrome Frame blog and developer’s guide has detailed the installation process and the usage, please check out the below link for more information regarding this:

http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/developers_guide.html

Finally as a Web Developer/Frontend Engineer I’d love to see Chrome Frame in all IE6/7 browsers, because this will surely make my life less painful and I’ll focus more on developing cool applications than spending ‘countless hours’ to fix IE bugs. This is a serious attempt from Google to fix the mess, so now let’s see how much response it gains, by the way I do hope for the best, rest is up to the users and decision makers.

Cheers!!! that’s why I love you so much Gooooooooogle.

Internet Explorer "Invalid argument" error

Recently, I was completely bowled out by Internet Explorer’s “Invalid argument” error, I did a google but couldn’t find any, so I started debugging my code, after a couple of hours of hair-pulling I did find the cause, and it was an accidental implementation of a PNG fix for IE 6. Let me explain this a bit, we have a “png fix” class in one of our CSS files where we have used some IE ‘expression hack’ to apply a fix for transparent PNG images in IE6 and somebody by mistake applied that class to an image which is a GIF file, and this was causing the error.

I thought to write about it, in case somebody has the same problem, he/she might find it helpful

Internet Explorer “Invalid argument” error

Recently, I was completely bowled out by Internet Explorer’s “Invalid argument” error, I did a google but couldn’t find any, so I started debugging my code, after a couple of hours of hair-pulling I did find the cause, and it was an accidental implementation of a PNG fix for IE 6. Let me explain this a bit, we have a “png fix” class in one of our CSS files where we have used some IE ‘expression hack’ to apply a fix for transparent PNG images in IE6 and somebody by mistake applied that class to an image which is a GIF file, and this was causing the error.

I thought to write about it, in case somebody has the same problem, he/she might find it helpful

John Resig – ECMAScript 5 Objects and Properties

ECMAScript 5 is on its way. Rising from the ashes of ECMAScript 4, which got scaled way back and became ECMAScript 3.1, which was then re-named ECMAScript 5

http://ejohn.org/blog/ecmascript-5-objects-and-properties/

ECMAScript is finally there, read the whole post by John Resig (Creator of  jQuery), and see the changes it brings to the JavaScript development, and the good news is that all major browser vendors agreed to implement this sooner than later. It has a detail description of how we will be accessing objects and it’s properties with some simple example code, to me this has opened a completely new era for JavaScript programming, though this specification brings real power to JavaScript which also comes with the cost of increased complexity, but as you know in any powerful language complexity is always there, it’s up to the developer how he/she can reduce the complexity but uses the full power of the language. Lastly, I just can’t wait to get my hands dirty with ECMAScript 5 .

Building a Better JavaScript Profiler with WebKit

Francisco Tolmasky has implemented cool hack/patch to webkit to solve the JavaScript Profilers displying “?” as the name of any anonymous functions, follow the link at the bottom of the post for the full story…

Here is the little excerpt from that article:

I had the pleasure of showing off some the cool new features we’ve been adding to the WebKit inspector at JSConf last week. It’s no secret that debugging basically sucks in JavaScript, and until recently, it was a little bit worse in Objective-J. Up until now we’ve focused mainly on adding stop gap measures to our own code, but recently we’ve decided to shift gears and attack the problem head on in the browsers themselves. This is why these past couple of weeks I’ve set aside the JavaScript code and instead focused on working with the great guys on the WebKit team on providing a solid debugging experience both in Objective-J and JavaScript in general. We first decided to focus on profiling, since this is an area of considerable interest for a framework…

Read the detailed article here

The Mystery Of CSS Sprites: Techniques, Tools And Tutorials | CSS | Smashing Magazine

The Mystery Of CSS Sprites: Techniques, Tools And Tutorials | CSS | Smashing Magazine.

CSS Sprites are not new. In fact, they are a rather well-established technique and have managed to become common practice in Web development. Of course, CSS sprites are not always necessary, but in some situation they can bring significant advantages and improvements — particularly if you want to reduce your server load. And if you haven’t heard of CSS sprites before, now is probably a good time to learn what they are, how they work and what tools can help you create and use the infamous technique in your projects.

Read the full article at Smashing Magazine, it contains a ton of links regarding CSS-Sprites, check them out, after that you should have a fair understanding of what it is, and you will be able to optimize your site, which will load faster and also saves a lot of bandwidth, by the way this will also give users a nice experience. Keep reading….

The Mystery Of CSS Sprites: Techniques, Tools And Tutorials | CSS | Smashing Magazine

The Mystery Of CSS Sprites: Techniques, Tools And Tutorials | CSS | Smashing Magazine.

CSS Sprites are not new. In fact, they are a rather well-established technique and have managed to become common practice in Web development. Of course, CSS sprites are not always necessary, but in some situation they can bring significant advantages and improvements — particularly if you want to reduce your server load. And if you haven’t heard of CSS sprites before, now is probably a good time to learn what they are, how they work and what tools can help you create and use the infamous technique in your projects.

Read the full article at Smashing Magazine, it contains a ton of links regarding CSS-Sprites, check them out, after that you should have a fair understanding of what it is, and you will be able to optimize your site, which will load faster and also saves a lot of bandwidth, by the way this will also give users a nice experience. Keep reading….

Dean Edwards got his domain back

Finally after a lot whining and wrangling Dean Edwards (The JavaScript guru) got his domain (http://dean.edwards.name) back, which was hijacked earlier this month, though it was an unintentional mistake on Dean’s side because the domain registration reminder email was blocked by his spam filter and ended up being in spam, anyway after loosing the domain Dean hosted his site again in another domain temporarily and was in contact with the new owner who quickly bought the domain once it’s expired, and that squatter was actually hosting Dean’s articles which he published for the last 5 years, anyway Dean finally managed a deal with that person probably and I am very happy that he has got back his domain, I wish him all the best and good luck.

Keep up the good work Dean.

By the way you can check Dean’s post about it here http://dean.edwards.name/weblog/2009/04/back-in-the-game/ where he announced that he has got his domain back and finally back in the game

IE textarea background image problem

Internet Explorer has a problem in setting background image to textarea, the scrolling mechanism as implemented by the browser is buggy while all other browsers handle it properly, IE fails naturally . The problem is if you set a background image to textarea and when you scroll the textarea the background image also scrolls, this behavior is incorrect because as far as I can recall an element background should only scroll with regards to the viewport. The easiest way to reproduce this bug is to use a vertical “sprite” image as the textarea background and set background-repeat to “no-repeat“, background-attachment to “scroll“, also apply position values to display part of image and try to enter multiline text in the box you can see the bug in IE. The only fix is that to set the background-attachment value to “fixed” which eventually solves the problem. This problem may be present in input boxes also in IE although not verified.

Note: But if the textarea is inside a container which itself has position “fixed” and textarea background-attachment has also set to “fixed” then you will not see any background image, the reason for this may be that IE is trying to set the background image according to viewport because of the background-attachment value. I encoutnered this problem few times but so far have not found any solution.

Further reading:

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/colors.html#propdef-background-attachment

Note that there is only one viewport per view. If an element has a scrolling mechanism (see ‘overflow’), a ‘fixed’ background doesn’t move with the element, and a ’scroll’ background doesn’t move with the scrolling mechanism.