CoffeeConsole: A Chrome Extension
06 Apr 2012
Harry Brundage, a co-worker of mine at Shopify, does a lot of CoffeeScript development and said he would love to be able to do CoffeeScript right from the console in Chrome's Web Inspector. I asked Paul Irish, a "dev relations guy" at Google, to point me in the right direction on building just such a thing. The result of today's pet project is CoffeeConsole, a Chrome extension that adds a new p...
In Firefox, In Google Reader
20 Oct 2009
A really quick screencast today. I twittered about how frustrating it was to have to take 5 clicks to subscribe to a feed into Google Reader within Firefox. I finally decided to take a few moments to fix the issue and get it down to one click (well, technically two, but who's counting). Of course, this is by no means the only way to do it. Plenty of people on Twitter recommended plugins and bo...
The Elephant in the Room
21 May 2009
Almost a month ago, I wrote about supporting older browsers — how and whether we should even support them. We draw a line in the sand that says, "You popular browsers, stand over here. Everybody else, just be happy you got content." More specifically, a base style sheet would declare some default font styles but no float or other layout tricks. Just linear content. Thi...
The Importance of Being HTML5
23 Jan 2008
You'll have to excuse my reference to Oscar Wilde but I just learned something very interesting. But before I get into that, some background on HTML5. HTML5 reached Working Draft status at the W3C yesterday (although is dated today). Originally spec'd by the WHATWG, HTML5 is intended to replace HTML4, XHTML1 and DOM2 HTML specifications. There's plenty of new functionality being offered up, from ...
IE8 to include version targeting
22 Jan 2008
I so called it. Back in December, I gave my predictions and on the list was version targeting using the meta element. I even said it'd be using http-equiv. Aaron Gustafson has an article on A List Apart entitled Beyond DOCTYPE that talks about a Internet Explorer's new approach to targeting rendering engines. Like a charset declaration, the X-UA-Compatible declaration can be declared using a me...
IE8 Expectations
20 Dec 2007
Microsoft recently announced that the latest dev builds of Internet Explorer 8 pass the Acid2 test. The Acid 2 test is designed to test various scenarios of CSS compliance. What is significant about this is seeing a level of support that possibly matches or exceeds other browsers. Exceeds? Okay, it's hard to look at one little test and think that IE is going to surpass all the browsers. And in ma...
Why Safari for Windows?
12 Jun 2007
A common question that seems to be heard now that Apple has released Safari for Windows is "Why?" And while I don't know the real reasons, I have my opinion on the matter. For Web Site Developers When asked why Safari is being released for Windows, a few people have said that it is intended for developers to be able to check their sites without having to own a Mac. It'll definitely be...
Firefox 2 is out
24 Oct 2006
Hot on the heels of the IE7 release is Firefox 2. One could technically say that FF is catching up with IE with improved phishing and search integration. And the design of the new Firefox site is very wispy. Again, much like the IE branding. And much of the new functionality in Firefox 2 was functionality that was available via plug-ins already. Any further enhancements to the CSS or DOM support a...
Internet Explorer 7 for XP Released
18 Oct 2006
It's official folks: IE7 for XP has been released. You can also read more about it on the IEBlog. Despite still being behind in overall CSS support compared to other browsers, I think this is a huge gain for us in the trenches. The quicker the rollout, the sooner we can leave a number of frustrations behind. Yes, there will still be continued frustration from bugs that haven't been fixed, bugs ...
Firefox 2 Beta is out
04 Sep 2006
The Internet Explorer betas have been getting a fair bit of attention and I felt a little remiss if I didn't mention that the Firefox 2 Beta is now available. I suppose many of us aren't very excited by it because it doesn't give us much new to work with. Sure, it has enhanced RSS handling which will be nice; I like how Safari and the current IE7 beta handle it. It has some cool JavaScript enhanc...
IE7 Beta 2 Preview: Send in your bug reports
01 Feb 2006
Originally, I was on the fence about installing the latest beta but now that I have, I'm glad I did. I've already uncovered one rendering bug and there will no doubt be many more. At this point, I'm recommending that everybody install it and report anything that does not render correctly. The only way it'll get fixed is if they know about it. Here is what I've uncovered so far: padding no longer...
IE7 and the use of CSS Hacks
19 Oct 2005
When I first read of Microsoft's call to remove CSS hacks, I wasn't too concerned. As Eric Meyer mentions, if they've fixed the rendering bugs and they've fixed the CSS parsing bugs then the hacks will continue to work on their own. The point that a lot of people seem to have missed, and what really seemed to be the point of the IEBlog post, is that gray area where Internet Explorer will render s...
Stopping Animated GIFs from Animating in Firefox
27 Sep 2005
In Internet Explorer, you've always been able to stop animated GIFs from animating by hitting stop. In Firefox, though, the stop button is no longer available once a page loads. Hitting ESC will stop those annoying graphics from animating. Now, is it just me or did they just add this in as of 1.0.7? Can anyone confirm this? ...