Tech Kernel

Firefox 3 Arives

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:52:00 +0000

The next round of the browser wars started yesterday with the release of Firefox 3.0. This version includes many user interface improvements such as a much more powerful address bar to one click bookmarking of sites. Behind the scenes its faster and uses less memory than Firefox 2. This version pushes web standards further and completely passes the Acid 2 browser test.

Mozilla wanted to set the record for most downloads in a day and may have got more than they bargained for when their servers were overloaded and went down for two hours yesterday.

I'm blogging this from within Firefox 3 and my initial reactions are very positive. It's a great choice to make as the primary browser for virtually anyone.

Blu-Ray wins the format war

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:38:00 +0000

For years the two competing formats of Blu-Ray and HD DVD have battled over the market to replace DVD's. Both offer high-definition resolutions so movies look fabulous on that new high def TV. Unfortunately the consumers have been the looser in this war and they have stayed away from purchasing anything until a clear winner emerged.

Within the last month, however, a number of announcements dramatically and decisively shifted the balance in favor of Blu-Ray. For a long time the studios were split with some offering only HD DVD movies, some offering only Blu-Ray movies and some offering both. But with Warner's departure of the HD DVD camp, Universal letting their HD DVD exclusivity contract expire, only Paramount remains in the HD DVD camp and even then there are many rumours of Paramount's departure. To top it off, Netflix announced today that they are dropping HD DVD. Clearly the writing is on the wall and Blu-Ray's win is ensured. Consumers can now start purchasing hi-def drives without fear and we can see the adoption rate increase. The real question is whether this is really all too late and whether consumers will skip hi def drives entirely and go straight to downloadable movies. Only time will tell.

A Year of Browsing Stats

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 18:48:00 +0000

I always like looking at stats to see where we've been and where we are going and the beginning of a new year is a great time to do that. Since I work in web development, I've pulled a bunch of stats for the last year from Market Share and The Counter. These represent numbers seen at a wide variety of web sites across the world in 2007.

Web Browsers
First the browser stats. As you can see from the data below 2007 was all about the transition from Internet Explorer 6 to 7 for most PC users. The rate rose quickly at first and then leveled off and then as Microsoft added it to the critical upgrade list the rate of growth has increased again. 2008 should see IE6 virtually disappear as a mainstream browser.

At the same time both Firefox and Safari continued their slow climb in market share with 2.6% and 1.4% increases respectively. These gains came at the cost of Microsoft, which lost 3.6% for all versions of Internet Explorer during the year.

For web development one of the most exciting trends is the dramatic rise of web standards compliant browsers. This very loosely defined term means the browsers follow a generally accepted HTML and CSS standards that allow developers to develop sites in a standard way without a lot of hacks and browser specific CSS. I include Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and late models of Netscape in that category. While IE7's support is not perfect it is dramatically better than IE6 and the adoption of IE7 has accounted for most of the growth in the standard compliant browsers category.

Browser	Dec '06	Dec '07	Change
Internet Explorer (all versions)	79.6%	76.0%	-3.6%
Internet Explorer 7.0	18.3%	40.6%	+22.3%
Internet Explorer 6.0	60.7%	35.2%	-25.5%
Internet Explorer 5.0 & 5.5	0.8%	0.2%	-0.6%
Firefox (all versions)	14.2%	16.8%	+2.6%
Safari (all versions)	4.2%	5.6%	+1.4%
Netscape (all versions)	0.9%	0.7%	-0.2%
Opera (all versions)	0.9%	0.6%	-0.3%
Standards Compliant Browsers	38.4%	64.3%	+25.9%

Operating Systems
Operating Systems are always a mater of intense, and often near religious, debate and the numbers are interesting to see. Old versions of Windows continue their slow decline into obscurity. And despite all of the talk of Vista users "downgrading" to XP, we've see Windows Vista grow to over 10% of the web audience since its release in January. That growth came at the expense of Windows XP, however, and Windows as a whole dropped 2.1% over the the year as more people bought Macintoshes.

Apple's OS X had a good year, increasing their market share 1.6% over the year and they are now up to 7.3%. What is particularly interesting is that most of that growth happened in the late in the year. Whether this trend continues into early 2008 or tappers off until the next Christmas buying season will be interesting to see.

Linux still struggles to make much impact on the desktop and only had a 0.2% increase to 0.6% for the year.

While the numbers are still very low at 0.1% its interesting to see the iPhone has grown from nothing to the 4th most popular operating system since the end of June, surpassing all other smart cell operating systems for web browsing.

Operating System	Dec '06	Dec '07	Change
Windows (all versions)	93.8%	91.7%	-2.1%
Windows Vista	0.2%	10.5%	+10.3%
Windows XP	85.3%	76.9%	-8.4%
Windows 2000	5.0%	2.7%	-2.3%
Windows NT	0.7%	0.6%	-0.1%
Windows 95/98/ME	2.7%	1.1%	-1.6%
Mac OS X (all versions)	5.7%	7.3%	+1.6%
Linux (all versions)	0.4%	0.6%	+0.2%
iPhone	-	0.1%	+0.1%

Screen Resolution
It's virtually impossible to buy a new computer today that doesn't have a resolution of at least 1024x768 and that is born out in the numbers for the year. Now almost 91% of people have that resolution or higher and I expect that virtually all web sites will be designed for 1024 in 2008.

Resolution	Dec '06	Dec '07	Change
800x600 or better	99.8%	99.9%	+0.1%
1024x768 or better	85.6%	90.8%	+5.2%

Netscape is dead

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 21:42:00 +0000

AOL announced today that they will be dropping support for the Netscape browser on Feb 1, 2008. Netscape used to be main competitor to Internet Explorer and the two browsers fought for market dominance for many years. Netscape finally lost that battle and has been fading into obscurity for many years with current market share figures for Netscape at a minuscule 0.6%. With this announcement AOL has finally pulled the plug on the browser and is recommending remaining Netscape users to adopt Firefox. The Netscape.com portal web site will continue to operate.

IE8 on Acid

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 22:09:00 +0000

Microsoft announced that an internal build of Internet Explorer 8 passed the Acid2 test. The Acid2 test was created by the Web Standards Project as a standard test that makers of web browsers could use to test if their browsers had achieved a high degree of standards compliance.

Until that time there was some variance on what "standards compliant" browsers like Firefox, Opera, and Safari would display for a given page. Worst of all Internet Explorer 6 had many standards compliance issues, but it was hard to define an authoritative list of what they should fix in the next release. The Acid2 test provided a target for everyone to use and easily test.

Internet Explorer 7 came much closer, but still failed the test. Opera and Safari soon released versions that passed the test and the upcoming Firefox 3 will also pass the test. With today's news on Internet Explorer 8, all major browsers will pass the test. This means we should be entering a world where pages look the same on all browsers (at least whenever IE8 is released and widely adopted) and that is a great thing for web developers and the Internet.

Web 2.0 - Bah Humbug!

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 14:01:00 +0000

Jakob Nielsen just released and article entitled Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous that shows all is not perfect in the world of Web 2.0. There are downsides to rushing to implement Web 2.0 features in your site without thinking it through.

1024 is the new 800

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 22:53:00 +0000

For a long time the common wisdom has been that web sites should be designed to fit on a screen with a resolution of 800x600. Most new computers have higher resolutions and as of November the places we check for global Internet statistics show that 90.3% of users have a screen resolution of 1024x768 or higher.

While we have been doing some sites designed for 1024 already, 90% is the threshold where I feel you can always design for that size. Those with smaller screens are still able to use these sites. They may just need to scroll horizontally a little bit.

These are global numbers. You may find the numbers are higher or lower for your particular industry. As always the best option is to utilize a site analytic program on your own site to see what people are using.

Email Standards Project

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 21:58:00 +0000

Anyone who has developed HTML emails of any complexity will tell you its an incredibly painful process. The email may look completely different depending on whether the recipient views the email in Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007, Lotus Notes, or any of the dozens of other programs and email websites. While web development is moving swiftly to web standards that work the same on all browsers, it's the wild west when it comes to emails. As a result we are forced to go back to 'old school' table-based HTML with font tags just to get any kind of consistency in how they look. With that in mind the folks over at the Web Standards Project are starting up the Email Standards Project to try and bring the same level of standards to HTML emails that we see on the web. Here's hoping that they are wildly successful.

The Rise of the Social Media Newsroom

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 21:19:00 +0000

In today's Internet based society if the press, or anyone else for that matter, comes across your company the first thing they do is pull up your website. Unfortunately, many websites have vital information scattered everywhere. Most people, and especially the media, are always in a hurry and if they can't find what they want quickly, they'll leave your site and you will have lost an opportunity to get out your message.

Vince Bank from our media department brought up the concept of a Social Media Newsroom which has been a big hit at Optiem. It's a page on your site that provides all of the information the media wants in one place. I could try to explain it more, but the best way to understand it is to look at a Social Media Newsroom prototype we built. It's a simple, but powerful idea that is already catching on with our clients. It won't be long before I expect to see media newsrooms on almost all corporate web sites.

It's definitely a Web 2.0 concept and uses other Web 2.0 technologies such as focus clouds, RSS, AJAX, and microformats.

The Rise of the Real Mobile Internet

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 19:19:00 +0000

Up until recently the world of mobile Internet access has been horrible. You generally had to use primitive browsers on cell phones that don't render pages anything like they appear on your computer. Seemingly each phone displayed pages differently making mobile development a very painful process. Most web developers avoided making mobile versions of their sites and most cell phone users failed to see any reason to pay an extra $30-40 a month for a data plan to suffer through this experience.

The verdict is in. People don't want this crippled Internet. They want the "real" Internet. They want pages that look the same as they do on their computer.

A number of recent devices are helping to make this possible. One of the biggest selling points of Apple's iPhone with includes a full version of their Safari browser. At the same time Opera is offering Opera Mobile and Opera Mini to give a full browsing experience to many cell phones.

Then earlier this month Apple released its iPod Touch. Basically an iPhone without the phone, it retains the iPhone's ability to surf the web on a full version of Safari over any available Wi-fi connection opening the door to many other mobile entertainment devices having full Internet access.

This trend is only going to gain strength as more and more devices add these capabilities and people are drawn to what we see. Just as TiVo users can't conceive of going back to a world without time-shifted TV, you won't be able to conceive of not being able to access anything on the Internet from anywhere in the world. This is the real mobile Internet that is just beginning to take off.

Silverlight Released

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 15:07:00 +0000

Microsoft released Silverlight on Sept. 4th. This "Flash-killer" from Microsoft has gotten a lot of press. Most of it has been focused on how it competes with Flash for the animation and graphical affects for which Flash is normally used on the web. In many ways I see this side of Silverlight being the least interesting and least chance of success for the tool. Flash owns this market and creative people gravitate to Adobe, not Microsoft, for creative tools. With every computer coming with Flash and Silverlight requiring and installation, I can't see Microsoft getting much traction for a long time to come.

I think this focus, however, misses the greatest potential of the technology, the .Net Framework that underlies the tool. While Adobe has tried hard to woo developers to its camp with increasingly advanced Flash development tools, they haven't had much traction. At the same time Microsoft has a huge percentage of the developer market with its .Net framework. Silverlight includes a major subset of the .Net framework, making Silverlight development an easy transition to .Net programmers. This along with the cross-browser/cross-platform nature of Silverlight (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari/Windows, Mac, and Linux) open the door to really powerful and sophisticated applications on the web. Everything from web based word processors and spreadsheets to sofficisticated airline booking systems and event registration systems could be built on such a framework with much more intuitive interfaces than are possible with even the latest AJAX tools.

There are still many challenges ahead for Silverlight including getting enough users to install it and the SEO and bookmarking issues that already affect Flash, but it holds some strong possibilities and is worth following.

Next Visual Studio includes powerful new query capability

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 21:29:00 +0000

The next version of Visual Studio, currently called “Orcas”, includes a new technology called Language Integrated Query (LINQ). This technology lets you query objects in your code, controls on a page, or XML documents just as you would query a database. You can even do queries across between different types of objects in a single statement. If it works as well as promised, it would completely change the mindset on how to solve problems. No longer would we have to put on our SQL query mindset to get database information and our object oriented classes mindset for getting information from objects in our code.

MSDN Magazine has two recent articles on it. http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/06/VBLINQ/default.aspx shows how LINQ works using Visual Basic.Net. http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/06/CSharp30/default.aspx is a C# article diving into how Microsoft evolved the query language to what it is now.

How Not to Manage your Corporate Reputation: Apple MacBook Pro Crashes

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 15:41:00 +0000

My wife recently bought one of the very cool Apple MacBook Pro's. She had a Macintosh before, but this was her first laptop and she was ecstatic with the computer and the ability to work outside on the deck. It wasn't long, however, before things started turning sour. She started seeing crashes when she was surfing wirelessly. They weren't just 'restart Firefox' crashes. They were nasty 'the cursor won't even move and you have to power down the whole laptop and loose everything' crashes.

My wife called AppleCare and they had her try a number of things that didn't resolve the problem. In the meantime we started doing Internet searches and going through Apple's discussion forums. We looked at many discussions and found a thread that exactly described our problem. It was filled with many angry people with the same problem. While a fix isn't yet out, it looks like the problem has been isolated to a driver problem with the integrated wireless in the new Santa Rosa generation MacBook Pros. The problem occurs when using the laptop with third party wireless routers when wireless encryption is turned on (generally WPA). Ironically, the same laptops work perfectly when running Windows in Boot Camp. Apparently the fix is in testing and should be released shortly.

While it isn't good that the problem completely crashes the laptop, I understand the difficultly in catching and resolving driver issues when the hardware keeps changing and the problem only appears when working with third party routers. I do think, however, that this is a case study in how not to manage your corporate reputation.

Here was a thread on Apple's own discussion board. It has 708 replies and had been viewed 24,700 times! At the same time, no one at Apple made a single reply to the discussion. The posters' frustration was palpable and growing by the day. Apple's support was replacing computers, but since the problem is a software driver, people were sometimes on their third laptop and still having the same problem. Some posters openly talked about being disillusioned with Apple and returning to Windows Vista laptops which they described as crashing much less frequently. Beyond these very public discussion forums, the problem moved out into the blogosphere. One blogger posted each step of trying to resolve the problem in his blog with it ending up with him returning the Mac and getting a Lenovo Windows laptop. The story has also reached Digg. All of this leaves a stain on Apple's reputation as being the the more stable alternative to Windows. All of this content will be floating through the Internet for years to come for people to find. Already posters said they were about to buy a MacBook Pro and didn't because they found this thread. All of this happened without a word from Apple.

In today's Internet this content is constantly indexed and bloggers bring these issues to light. A policy of ignoring the problem publicly does much more harm than good for the company.

Imagine if Apple had employees reading through the discussion boards and external blogs for serious problems. They could have reported the issue with the engineering department to make sure they were aware of it and get a status update. They could have then posted in the forums or other areas where it is being discussed. Just a message saying 'We are getting reports on the problem and checking into it', followed later by a post saying 'It's a driver issue. We are working on a fix and should have it out soon' would have made a huge difference. It has been the silence of Apple that has been driving people away. As new people reported this problem on the Internet, others who followed the thread would tell them 'Hang on. A batch is coming.' Apple would also have to deal with fewer returned laptops as people would wait for the patch. The whole tone of the discussion would change a much more positive one. In the future as people come across this content, they would also see Apple's quick and positive response.

As is the case so often, it's not whether you have a problem. It's how you handle the problem that makes all of the difference.

Google introduces Custom Search Business Edition

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 15:19:00 +0000

Google had been offering their Custom Search Engine that enables you to fully incorporate Google into your site, but if you were a for-profit organization you would see advertising which is unacceptable for must companies.

Google has now just released their Custom Search Business Edition. As a business you can now pay $100/yr for up to 500 pages or $500/yr for up to 50,000 pages to use the search and have no ads.

There are other hosting solutions like PicoSearch that fall in the middle of the range and provide a little more control of the spidering and administration, but on the low end it can be a good solutions for companies with small sites to add a powerful search engine to their sites.

iPhone Launch Day

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 12:47:00 +0000

You would have to be under a seriously large rock to miss all of the buzz and hype about the iPhone which will be released today at 6 pm. The initial reviews are in and are pretty positive. It looks like it will sell like gangbusters, despite some of its downsides (price, slow data access, lack of integration into Exchange or Blackberry networks, etc.).

In Jobsian fashion I will make the statement that this will change everything (at least in the cell phone industry). Unless the phone completely tanks every cell phone manufacturer and carrier will be madly trying to come up with their 'iPhone-killer' phones to rival the iPhone/AT&T combo. Some will have physical keyboards for faster typing, cheaper, and faster, but all of them will be including full browsers instead of the clunky, unusable browsers in almost all phones today. The iPhone effects of the cell phone industry will be felt for many years to come.

Beyond the slick, cool design and interface and a music player that people actually want, it is really the integration of the internet into every aspect of the phone that really changes everything. First is a full browser that pretty much works like a real browser. Normally cell phone browsers are tacked onto the phone and virtually unusable. They bear very little resemblance to the browsers we use on our computers. As a web developer I absolutely hate these browsers as there are seemingly hundreds of them all with major quicks and issues. Dealing with the differences between Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari is trivial compared with the multitude of web phone browsers. A full browser restores sanity to the experience for users and developers.

Furthermore, Apple's 'widgets' to make it easy to get to the Internet information you actually want and use all of the time, like weather, stock quotes, maps, and email rather than having to dig through dozens of menus. I anticipate that both Apple and other cell phone manufacturers will push Internet integration deeper and deeper into their phones.

So what should businesses do about it? Your IT department will need to decide how much to support the iPhone, just as they must decide on how much to support Blackberries, Treos, and the like. Also make sure that you are testing your websites in Safari as well as Internet Explorer and Firefox so the display properly on the iPhone. Then keep an eye on the effects on the industry and how it affects your mobile website strategy.

And lastly go see one in an Apple store and try it out to see what all the hype is about.

Microsoft Surface - The future of computing?

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 18:22:00 +0000

Microsoft showed off their new touchscreen, tabletop computer yesterday which they call the Surface. There isn't anything you would normally call a user interface. No windows or menus are anywhere to be seen. Everything revolves around using your fingers to draw, move, and resize everything on the screen.

Microsoft isn't alone, Jeff Han demonstrated a similar system called TED in February of last year. Bigger yet, Apple is about to release its iPhone in June which is completely driven from the touch screen with many of same abilities.

So should we prepare to ditch our desktops and laptops with their copies of Windows or Mac OS X? I don't think so. We'll still need these sophisticated devises for a long time to come. Nevertheless, I do think we are starting to see the breakdown of the monolithic computer desktop and laptop. We already had seen it start with smart phones, TiVo's, and game consoles. Now we are seeing it with user interfaces. Computers will blend into our surroundings as they are placed everywhere and with these new "no interface" interfaces they'll become dramatically easier to use. The possibilities are endless.