Sorry Firefox, but I’m seeing Chrome now
As a developer, when I'm writing/debugging websites, I still love Firefox for it's rich plugins like Firebug and the Web Developer toolbar, but when I'm browsing the web I'm head over heals in love with Chrome. Google is set to push the limits of the web with their latest browser and will be a driving force in browser innovation. Chrome opens impressively fast in Windows 7, and definitely seems faster when browsing sites than the latest versions of other popular browsers, including my now second favorite browser Firefox.
It's a lot of hard work to switch your default browser, since most of us are creatures of habit and have a general fear of the unknown. But let me be the first to tell you, if you're not using Chrome, it could be better and will only continue to get better. Outside of web development I don't use a lot of plugins, but the one's I do use I couldn't live without. Finally with Chrome 4, Google has launched extensions, at least on Windows. The extension community has been very busy, there are almost 3000 extensions available already. A few I would recommend checking out:
- Google Wave notifier, for keeping tabs on your Wave account. Wave's great, but let's be honest, nobody's using it yet.
- Google mail checker plus, nice quick access to your Gmail or even your Google Apps domain email/ It has notification of new emails, the ability to preview, delete, mark as read and plenty of other features.
- Chromelicious, the best delicious bookmark extension on Chrome, pretty close to the functionality you get with the Yahoo plugin for Firefox.
- ChromedBird, a fantastic twitter client for Chrome
- Facebook, a pretty decent Facebook client for Chrome, although I can't seem to find a way to get the Most Recent feed instead of the Top News feed, other than that it supports Chat and Notifications and is best for dipping into Facebook quickly without getting spotted.
- Google Voice, access to your Google Voice account, quick SMS and Calling interface and access to your Inbox. I send SMS messages all day long through this extension.
There are plenty of other great extensions, but these are the one's I use everyday and make the latest version of Chrome that much better.
So the quick list on why I like Chrome better than Firefox, these are purely personal tastes, but maybe you'll find some of these enticing and ditch your Microsoft browser... By the way if you're using a Microsoft browser by choice, you don't know what you're missing.
- Tabs on the top, tabs on the top are awesome, it just looks and feels slick. More of an application feel than a clunky tabbed browser.
- Tab to new window and back to tab, I know Firefox does this too, but nobody does it as seamlessly as Google, it just works and it's so smooth.
- Did I mention it's fast, it starts fast, it works fast and it almost never crashes, it's several times faster than Firefox at just launching.
- It manages memory better than Firefox, I know it's not Firefox's fault. It's all the plugins I have installed, it seems that Google's extensions and process management keep this leaking of memory under control. I know things will get better in Firefox 4, but by then Chrome 5 will be out.
- Latest web standards supported, such as HTML5 and Canvas, other non-Microsoft browsers have implemented HTML 5 features such as Canvas, but Google will continue to adopt and promote new standards, I know Firefox supports some of these standards too, but Google just seems to be quicker at implementing them.
- Sites typically look like they were intended to look, one of the benefits of using a standards compliant browser.
- Extensions can be installed without restarting my browser, I mean come on Firefox, this is obnoxious.
- Updates to new versions are quick and easy.
These are just a few of the things I like, not to mention it's much more secure and stable than other browsers I've used, and as a web developer I use at least the most popular 5 on a regular basis. I see Google trying out new protocols, such as spdy, and new methods of making the web a faster and more secure place for more and more applications that push the limit of what has been possible in the past. With each advancement in Chrome we'll see more and more desktop applications replaced by web applications, so unless you want to get left behind I'd recommend giving Chrome a try, especially if you're using one of those Microsoft browsers.
Google Abandoning IE6 Users in 2010
As a Google Apps admin I received the following email this past Friday, announcing that IE 6 will no longer be supported by the end of 2010. This is fantastic news, hopefully others will follow suit and convince those users hanging on to this god awful browser to move on to better things. If you are still on IE6 you should upgrade to Chrome, it's a top notch and very fast browser, you'll never look back.
Dear Google Apps admin,
In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.
We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.
Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.
Starting next week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.
In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.
Thank you for your continued support!
Sincerely,
The Google Apps team
Getting around Pandora’s 40-hour monthly limit
In the past 6 months or so Pandora has implemented listening restrictions on their free service. It's really quite simple to get around this limitation, you just need more than one Pandora account. You might be thinking, well what about my radio stations?? Pandora allows you to share your stations with your friends, just share your stations with yourself. If you don't already have more than one email address, go out to gmail and register a second address, or even a 3rd or 4th. GMail let's you forward all email to a single account, so as an example, I would just set up webguypandora1@gmail.com, webguypandora2@gmail.com, etc. and forward them each back to webguy@greatwebguy.com. Whenever you hit that 40 hour limit, just simply logout and log back in with a different account. You're other option would be to just pay the $36/year subscription 
Writing JavaScript specific CSS
I wrote an article recently recommending Using jQuery to write JavaScript specific CSS, I've since change my mind on this approach. The approach I've moved to is similar, but doesn't rely on a framework and allows more flexibility like moving all of my JavaScript includes to the bottom of the page for better performance.
In your html template or page add a nojs class to your html node and a script tag in the head section below your title changing the className to js:
<html class="nojs"> <head> <title>My Title</title> <script>document.documentElement.className = "js";</script>
Now you can write CSS like this:
.nojs a.myclass {color:red}
.js a.myclass {color:black}
a.myclass2 {color:blue}In this very simple example all of your non-javascript users would see links with a class of myclass as red and all javascript enabled users would see the links with the color black. Both javascript and non-javascript users would see the links with the class myclass2 as blue.
This very simple example opens hundreds of possibilities for the way you style your site. You could actually display and hide content based on whether javascript is enabled or not, including buttons and links or any element on the page. You could include text for Search Engines and Screen Readers that your regular users might not need to see because the nature of the content could be for SEO or descriptive purposes for non-javascript users. You could also use it to enhance your suckerfish CSS menus with a hoverIntent when javascript is enabled making your menus a little more user friendly.
This is an improvement on the previous method I used because it doesn't depend on a JavaScript framework, it allows you to put off loading all of your JavaScript until the bottom of the page, improving performance, and allows you to utilize CSS to hide, disable, or fade in elements of the page that you don't want to be displayed until the document has been loaded and is ready to perform all that RIA functionality you've added to your app.
Enable JavaScript specific CSS with one line of jQuery
jQuery is by far my favorite JavaScript framework in terms of simplicity and just pure DOM power. I picked up a little trick at a conference quite a few months back and improved upon it and thought it could benefit anyone that believes in the mantra of progressive enhancement. Here's the line of code that will change the way you develop your applications.
$("html").removeClass("nojs").addClass("js");
Obviously jQuery is a requirement here. The other thing you'll need to do is add a class of nojs to the html node of all of your documents/templates.
<html class="nojs">
Now you're ready to change the way you write your CSS. I'm aware that Yahoo/YSlow recommend that you stick your JavaScript at the bottom of the page, but this little trick won't work as well unless jQuery and the snippet above are in the head of the html document. Now what this buys you is the ability to style your document with separate elements for javascript enabled users, non-javascript users and common elements that both will need. You'll be able to hide/show substitute elements in the page that are dynamic in nature so that you can successfully implement a site using progressive enhancement, meaning that users with javascript disabled will still be able to use your site but without all the bells and whistles. This also prevents the flicker that you see on page load when you modify elements via DOM manipulation using JavaScript.
Now you can write CSS like this:
.nojs a.myclass {color:red}
.js a.myclass {color:black}
a.myclass2 {color:blue}
In this very simple example all of your non-javascript users would see links with a class of myclass as red and all javascript enabled users would see the links with the color black. Both javascript and non-javascript users would see the links with the class myclass2 as blue.
This very simple example opens hundreds of possibilities for the way you style your site. You could actually display and hide content based on whether javascript is enabled or not, including buttons and links or any element on the page. You could include text for Search Engines and Screen Readers that your regular users might not need to see because the nature of the content could be for SEO or descriptive purposes for non-javascript users. You could also use it to enhance your suckerfish CSS menus with a hoverIntent when javascript is enabled making your menus a little more user friendly.
I realize this technique could be implemented with just about any JavaScript framework, jQuery just happens to be my framework of choice and this technique has definitely given us much capability to target javascript/non-javascript users and unobtrusively progressively enhance our website.
Please see my latest article on implementing this without a JavaScript framework.