Archive for the ‘Browsers’ Category
The Pitfall of Adding Keyboard Shortcuts to Web Apps
I’ve recently discovered a few keyboard shortcuts in Google Docs, Google’s office suite of applications. But unfortunately, I’ve stumbled onto them by accident while using a shortcut on my OS X operating system. When I tried to hide the browser window using the “Command + H” key combination, something unexpected happened. The “Find and Replace” window popped up inside the app:
This is problematic because I still want to use my OS X command, but now it’s been overridden by Google. I think web application developers should be careful to check for at least the main window manipulation controls in the popular operating systems like Windows and OS X to make sure their keyboard shortcuts don’t block them.
CSS Tip: Remove the Mac OS X Glowing Blue Outline for Custom Styled Input Fields
One of the great things about the Web is that it’s cross platform. You can use your favorite system to browse the Web, be it Windows, Mac OS X or Linux. Some of these systems, namely Mac OS X, sometimes try a little too hard to control the user experience, and so you’ll find that things like buttons, drop down boxes and input fields look fairly different to those on other systems — even more so with the blue glow effect you get around input fields. This glow effect can cause problems if your input field is using custom images and CSS formatting.
Using the Scrollbar to Display Information
This is really cool. Greg from Raizlabs has pointed out that Google Chrome uses the scrollbar to show search results frequency. I haven’t noticed this before and it has really impressed me because it’s a very clever feature. Here’s what it looks like when you do a search on a page:
You can see a bunch of yellow stripes in the scrollbar on the right. This shows where the term I searched for appears on the page. Would definitely love to see this implemented in other ways, for example on search engine pages as Greg suggests, as well as in other applications.
Drop IE6 Support — Give People a Reason to Upgrade
Why do people still use IE6? This is a browser that’s been released in August 2001 — that’s over 7 years ago. It’s old, it’s got hundreds of compatibility issues, it’s not particularly secure and neither does it have many features we come to rely on today in modern browsers. It doesn’t even have tabs. But statistics show, that a sizable chunk of the internet is still surfing on IE6. There are a few reasons why…
Thoughts on Chrome
You’ve probably heard the buzz — Google is releasing it’s own web browser. It’s called Chrome, and if you haven’t seen it already, you can read their introduction comic here. It’s definitely worth a read as it illustrates beautifully the different problems Google identified in today’s web browsers, and what their proposed solutions are.
Here are my first impressions and thoughts on the several key usability and user experience features they’ve outlined.
CSS Trick: Improve the Quality of Bold Text in Safari with text-shadow
OS X, the Mac operating system, has a pretty good font rendering engine — it adheres to the intended font proportions closely to create an image of the font on the screen that accurately depicts what you would see printed out on paper.
One complaint that I’ve read about often is that sometimes it makes the fonts a little too blurry or too fat — especially when they are bold. This is made worse when the font is colored in a light color and placed on a dark background.