~bma / journal / tags / web

Google are due to release a new browser, called Chrome, tomorrow. So, here are my initial (i.e., pre-release) thoughts on it, based solely on what they’ve said about it so far.

• Initial release will Windows-only; Mac OS X and GNU/Linux versions coming Real Soon Now. Nice to see that even Google, with their thousands and thousands of GNU/Linux machines, treat anybody not using Windows as second-class citizens. Hardly unexpected by now, but still irritating.
• I’m glad to see that they’ll be releasing it as free software; hopefully, they’ve the sense to use the GPL or something, rather than a new licence of their own design.
• I’m not convinced by the tabs-as-separate-processes thing; is there really an advantage over tabs-as-separate threads, that outweighs the additional overhead of separate processes? I admit that I don’t know enough about memory management to seriously evaluate this one, though.
• They make a big deal about webapps, but say nothing of the client side; will there be anything along the lines of Firefox’s extensions API? Gem suggests supporting Firefox extensions directly, which may be difficult without XUL support; an equivalent API is a must, though.

Beyond that: we’ll see?

Update: um, today, apparently. About to try it out under WINE.

From http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7593106.stm:

"The browser landscape is highly competitive, but people will choose Internet Explorer 8 for the way it puts the services they want right at their fingertips, respects their personal choices about how they want to browse and, more than any other browsing technology, puts them in control of their personal data online," he said in a statement.

—Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Ah, good old Microsoft: never one to let reality get in their way; of all the browsers that those statements could apply, MSIE would be the least likely.

It’s not often you see something that manages to perpetuate stupid beliefs about gender at the same time as demonstrating yet another way to invade someone’s privacy with Javascript, but this article manages it. Apparently, it looks at your browser history and guesses whether you’re male or female based on the sites you’ve visited. Now, I’m not convinced that there’s a significant gender bias for most sites, and looking at the results it looks like a sizable proportion of them were wrong ("oh noes ur site thinkz im a gurl!!!!111"). It bugs me that people even bother, though.

What’s more concerning, as Simon points out, is that apparently any site that can use javascript (i.e., any site you don’t disable it for) can find out what sites you’ve been to just by creating a link and checking whether the CSS style is :visited. I think I’m going to have to install NoScript again, despite having to use Javascript for work…

Recently I’ve been thinking about ease of use of interfaces. As you may know, I’ve a Flickr account where I post my photographs; I also have a deviantART account for the same purpose.

Generally, when I take pictures, I post any that are reasonably good to Flickr without even thinking about it. I can use the web form and upload five at a time, or I can mail them in; I have my own script for mailing them that I may post at some point.

Uploading to deviantART requires me to use the web form and upload one at a time, and go through a lot of rigmarole that’s not necessary with Flickr – for example, Flickr lets you set a default CC licence for your pictures; deviantART does allow you to specify one, but you must do it individually for each picture; it’s not possible to set a default.

I didn’t really consciously think about it; I just uploaded them to Flickr because it’s easy.

It’s also easy to do things with them; Flickr, like any good Web 2.0 site, has an API that I’ve hardly even begun to look at, but it means I can follow my friends’ activity from the comfort of my mail client, and any new photos get shown on my Facebook profile. deviantART has RSS feeds, but most of them are so well-hidden as to be completely useless.

Something to think about for my final-year project, or any other web stuff I happen to write in the future – multiple access methods for data, both incoming and outgoing.

Stuart Langridge writes about the possibility of reigniting the browser wars, and why it would be a bad thing:

When browser manufacturers are told "go ahead and innovate – we want to see progress", it’s jolly difficult for them to not think "hey, I know, why don’t we take this opportunity to provide something that we can do and other browsers can’t? Then, when people start using it, we’ve locked all their users into our browser!" There are corporate executives the world over furiously masturbating themselves into unconsciousness at the very thought of that technique being open to them again.

the browser’s navigation functions and keyboard shortcuts have been disabled for security reasons and because the internet banking service has been designed to be more accessible to all customers, including those with disabilities.

Apparently, because some people with disabilities may not be able to use the back/forward buttons, nobody can.

Bad bank! No biscuit!

(The point about security is fair enough, I suppose.)

Dan,

You mean there’s actually a significant number of people who use anything older than IE6? It’s come with pretty much every new computer sold for 5-6 years. I’d be perfectly happy with a 7-year-old computer, but as is often pointed out, I’m not a normal person, and I wouldn’t be using the OS it shipped with (or any OS that was released in 2001, for that matter; Debian Woody in 2004 was bad enough).

Personally, if I wasn’t allowed to reject anyone using IE0.1-6.9…, I’d dump them into a simpler version of the page (still similar-looking, but not necessarily identical). And it’s not like Netscape 4 would notice correct HTML if you beat jwz around the head with it.

…thought that putting the first half a sentence of a blog post in an RSS feed, rather than the entirety of it, would be a good idea? I’m sorry, but I almost certainly don’t care enough about you and what you have to say to ever read the rest of it, for the same reasons that I rarely bother with web forums, MySpace/Facebook/etc., and any other website: email comes to me. Usenet news comes to me, when I have a working server. RSS comes to me, via email. I simply can’t be arsed to go looking for things, other than to collect the RSS link or mailing list subscription address. Not only that, but I probably won’t remember to do it.

I’m most likely going to end up writing a script to screen-scrape The Register, MySpace blogs, and other braindamage.

Problems with Social Networking sites:

• They reduce the complexity of most relationships to a binary state: “friend” or “not friend”. There’s no way of differentiating between, say, “really good friend”, “quite good friend”, “acquaintance”, “some guy I used to live with”, etc.
  • I commented to Skippy recently that XFN would be an ideal schema to use.
• Likewise, Twitter is the first site of this type that I’ve come across where it doesn’t automatically assume that all relationships are equal - if someone marks you as a “friend”, they show up as a “follower” of yours, but not necessarily also a friend.
  • To be fair, Twitter has a very simple friendship model - if someone is your friend, you get notified when they update their status, and nothing more. Possibly the terminology leaves something to be desired.
  • This is connected to the first point, in that if someone lists me as a friend, I should be able to list them as just an acquaintance–or not at all– and so on.
• They add little to a relationship. What benefit do I get from signing up to MyBookSpaceFace? I get to see who my friends are? Hmm….
• They make it far too easy for stupid people to have a web presence. It makes my brain hurt; these people make Skippy look literate, and generally don’t have the excuse of dyslexia. So now we’re plagued with myriad oh-so-similar pages about how much the person in question loves My Chemical Romance, or some such tripe.
• They require me to visit some website on a regular basis to make use of the service. Anyone who knows me knows that “Things That Need To Be Done Regularly Or Else” are not my strong point. This is why, for example, I prefer mailing lists to web forums: email comes to me when required.
  • In a similar vein, email has the advantage of being easy to get in the format I want it in. I can read it in mutt, in Thunderbird/IceDove, at https://mail.bmalee.eu/ from the University open access machines, on my phone whilst sitting on a bench in Pelynt whilst waiting for the bus, etc., and it’s under my control. With MyBookSpaceFace, I’m limited to the format which the developers choose to provide. If that changes for the worse, there’s not much I can do about it.

Fine, so I’m a miserable sod. But for the most part I’ll stick to email, IRC and Jabber, thanks.

For a while now, I’ve tried to use Atom rather than RSS, simply because it’s a better format (as I understand it, RSS isn’t actually XML, it just looks like it; Atom is XML). When browsing through Mark Pilgrim’s blog archive, I found more evidence to support that theory:

RSS 0.90 is incompatible with Netscape’s RSS 0.91, Netscape’s RSS 0.91 is incompatible with Userland’s RSS 0.91, Netscape’s RSS 0.91 is incompatible with RSS 1.0, Userland’s RSS 0.91 is incompatible with RSS 0.92, RSS 0.92 is incompatible with RSS 0.93, RSS 0.93 is incompatible with RSS 0.94, RSS 0.94 is incompatible with RSS 2.0, and RSS 2.0 is incompatible with itself.