Archive for the ‘Browsers’ Category
Web Browsers Need a Social Layer
Here’s an idea. Today, we’ve got a bunch of various means of communication we can use to share our thoughts on the websites we visit. These communication channels range from something like the comments area on blogs (just like the one at the bottom of this page) to message boards which many companies use for support or discussions regarding product features and live sometimes live chatrooms.
To be honest, there aren’t that many more channels, and most of the time websites don’t feature any of them at all. How many times have you browsed through an online store which had no discussion forums or no product review pages? Without any sort of customer feedback it’s very difficult to judge the quality and validity of what you’re about to purchase. Sometimes even blogs don’t have comment sections, and so to discuss the article you have to go elsewhere (for example, a lot of discussions these days take place on social news website threads rather than on the source articles themselves, even if they have comment sections)
I propose a different idea. How about a social layer on top of every site, implemented by the browser? Imagine if your browser had this social button that when pressed opened this new layer on top of the page you’re browsing that let you leave messages or even chat live with other people currently browsing the same page? Here’s what the button could look like (number of current messages displayed by the side of it):
Safari 4 Beta Review
Safari 4 beta has been public for just over a month, and now that I’ve had the chance to try it out for some time I’m going to share few thoughts on the things I like/dislike about it, and whether I think it’s better than Firefox. Note: my choice of OS is OS X on the Mac, so the following is a review of Safari on that platform.
The tabs
There’s been a lot of talk about the new tabs in Safari 4. The new tabs have moved to the top of the browser, taking place where the title bar would have been (the title bar being no more). Here’s what they look like:
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.