After a long silence, the Microsoft IE team finally announce some long awaited news on IE8, it’s going to be called Internet Explorer 8. After months of silence I’m glad they cleared that one up! No news on features, bugfixes, etc. Ex-Microsoft employee Al Billings (who was responsible for a lot of the IE7 blogging) puts it well.
UK East Coast rail operator GNER has launched a new website which features an improved booking engine. Prior to this all UK rail operators used a branded version of thetrainline which is looking a bit dated these days. This new site raises the bar as to what to expect from a rail booking engine. Read the rest of this entry »
Things have been quiet here for a while. I’ve been too busy to follow progress on the browser fronts, Firefox 3 will be out next year sometime and Microsoft are being very quiet about plans for IE8. From what I can see, Firefox usage continues to grow as does that of other browsers such as Safari and Opera.
On the 10th July a patch was checked in for bug 384384 which is a bug that needs both Firefox and IE to be exploited. The command injection vulnerability affected users of Internet Explorer who browsed to a malicious page assuming that they had Firefox installed but not running. Opinions vary as to whether this was a Windows vulnerability or a Firefox one. In my opinion both had some degree of responsibility for this.
According to Apple’s Safari website - “The world’s best browser. Now on Windows, too”. Perhaps they could have said “The world’s best browser. Now on the world’s worst operating system” 
Currently, it’s a Safari 3 public beta that is available for Mac and Windows. The user interface will not look native to Windows but is more of a pseudo Mac look similar to iTunes for Windows.
What will be interesting is whether they will create special Windows versions of keychain (password manager) and the spell checker, both are part of OS X natively and are used by Safari and most other native Mac apps.
I’m not sure what Apple are hoping to achieve by this, it will be indeed a great benefit to web designers who want to test in Safari and also those that prefer Safari and have to boot in to Windows occaisionally. However, I know of quite a few companies that will at least invest in a token Mac or two for Safari testing and now with a Windows version they may not bother.
It’ll be interesting whether there’ll be any major differences in rendering between the Windows and Mac version. Presumably they’ll use the same Apple Webkit core.
Read the rest of this entry »
Camino 1.5 has been released. This Gecko based browser is native to Mac OS X and therefore has a user interface more pleasing for Mac users than Firefox.
Dell are running an ‘Idea Storm‘ website to gather peoples opinions on what they’d like to see on their PCs. So far feedback from this site was one of the driving factors in reintroducing Windows XP as an option in addition to Vista.
Should Dell ship Firefox? Let them know your opinion.
In the Netherlands take up of Firefox is one of the lowest in Europe. The European average is 24%, the UK it’s 18% and in Finland it’s an amazing 41.3%. But in the Netherlands it’s just 13.3%.
Although I run Mac OS X as a primary platform I still have to keep up to date with Windows and so that meant I had to buy Vista when it first came out.
A lot of jokes as well as serious criticism has been made about Microsoft’s user access control (UAC) in Vista. The main problem with UAC is caused by applications that are poorly written and expect to run with administrator rights. This has been caused by shoddy development over the years where many people had written software with the assumption it would be run as the administrator user or sometimes the software was old and written for the Windows 9x series that had no access control. Read the rest of this entry »