As small as 90KB, Opera Mini Beta 4

It’s amazing how a 90KB software could do so much using as little as possible of your processing cycles and storage spaces on your mobile. All possible by the power of Server-Side HTML rendering and optimization used in Opera Mini, with Beta 4 it’s gone all wild and now it supports Intelligent Zooming too!

A piece of software you’d never regret downloading using your mobile data bandwidth, guess what, 90Fills using your Wap Connection and 180Fills using your 3G Connection on Etisalat’s SIM card. How much was the price for the full version of Desktop Opera back in the days? Remember? And now, the best of the best in the Mini class is out and for free.

It’s in Beta, you’d receive many java.io.IOException erros, well, it’s still beta, but to my amazement, background images and images that are smaller than 5KBs do not get optimized thus giving you a cooler experience. All in all, in general, a mini version of what’s gonna’ be available on the full version of the Opera9 Mobile. Can’t wait for that.

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Webkit is everywhere

First in S60 browsers, then come iPhone, and now even Windows. The past couple of days marked zillions of posts in the blogosphere and tech News portals on Windows version of Safari browser.

How big of a story is it?

• Check out Windows Safari on Technorati.
• Or check out how much have been written on it in Google Blog Search.
• On del.icio.us

Some have called it yet another browser to test on, some said it’s just a Safari port to get Windows users familiar with iPhone’s browser. While the reasonings and current feedback is all too general.

I’m using it right now and it’s really faster than FF and IE7, not faster than Opera though. Will keep me busy testing it and see if it really works like the Mac version of it.

This Safari release is really a shock and was totally surprising, never expected that was coming at all!

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Opera 8.6 and Minimo show down

UIQ enabled mobiles come with built-in Opera Mobile v.6, a lot of changes and updates have been made since then but only for S60 series of Nokia and Windows Mobile. So here we’ll play a little bit and test the latest available Opera and will see if Minimo is really the Mobile “Firefox”.

Opera 8.6 Mobile

The start screen is a simple screen with a number of links and a Yahoo search box. Although Opera usually supports Google on this version the search partner is Yahoo!.

Opera supports tab browsing, it supported it even in version six, the version that comes built-in with Sony Ericsson P990i and M600i. Supports a great deal of JavaScript and AJaX. Understands the mobile profiles and CSS media attribute. Highly mobile friendly.

Just like the WM Internet Explorer, it supports three kind of views:

1. Single Column
2. Desktop View
3. ScreenFit

It works fine with Mobile Optimized web pages and displays them right.

Minimo, the Mobile Firefox?

Just because it is hosted at Mozilla and uses the Mozilla engine doesn’t mean that this browser is really good, however, it is impressive. Tabbed, Toolbar-enabled rather than menu based interface. It’s so slow though.

It is really bad with background images, it displays them with wrong colors, it is basically a disastrous process of browsing pages with many graphics and stylings.

Worst of all, it does not understand the “media” attribute of CSS link reference, thus, it treats bot Screen and Handheld as the same profile and renders the same way.

Both of the browsers were made for Windows Mobile, Opera is really advanced and matured and it is obvious, it is incredibly Fast, faster than the Opera built-in in Sony Ericsson’s UIQ based mobiles. Minimo comes out really slow, it takes 2,3 minutes to load given an average Windows Mobile. After loading, accessing the UI is really slow as opening a new tab would take relatively long.

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Webkit’s April Fool

Now this is interesting, Safari’s blog posted about changing their rendering engine to Windows Explorer’s rendering engine-”Trident”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_(layout_engine). How ironic ey?

You may wonder how we can use Trident in Mac OS X browsers like Safari. Fortunately, on Intel-based Macs, there is a solution: running IE under Parallels, and using Mozilla’s XPCOM to bridge the gap. This means we will discontinue the WebKit Objective-C API in favor of a COM API.

Running paralel to load IE and then using Mozilla’s XPCOM to bridge, now that’s slick!

Would you believe that?

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IE7 switch, the follow up

Two months ago I replaced my Firefox 2.0 with IE7. I wrote about the switch three weeks later, so I’m used to it now, used most of the features, learned the UI and shortcuts. So what was the benefits of switching? The downside, and the funny annoying stuff.

The new MS UI convention

One of the catchiest stuff in IE7 is the interface style, that is the windowing system style which has moved from classic windows(3.1, 9x,2000, and XP) to the new style(Vista), that has been used on the new Office family applications as well. The idea of tabbing and grouping functions and GUI/toolbars. IE7 is no exception, so menu bar is removed and only appears if you want it to, if you press ALT key the menu appears highlighting the File item.

Having most of the page activities grouped under a menu item on a separate toolbar with the label page that holds: saving pages, faving them, viewing source, zooming, textsize mod, etc… On the same bar there is the tools, help, print icon, RSS indication and home menu which is completly customizable. And this bar is on the same row that window-tabs aside.

T to the A to the B to the S

Opera, Safari and Firefox2 all have their close buttons on every tab. In IE7 the close(x-button) appears only on the tab that has focus so you can’t point-click-close a tab with one click. On the other hand, you can access what is called Quick Tabs which is a screen with a grid of all the open tabs with their screenshots, and every screenshot has a close button on the right-top corner.

Links bar and Favorites icons

I can’t open a browser window and start dialing URLs that I visit on daily basis, so I place them on a bar with full of links with big icons, thank god for the favicons that can save you reading and point click the icon that you want. Below is a screenshot of my browser while writing this.

Since I am a del.icio.us user, I wouldn’t need the Favorites stars, at least for now, so I was looking up a way to remove them from the UI, didn’t get there yet, taking the space that I don’t want to give up.

Performance, interaction and x-browser compatibility testing

I’m running on a 1GB ram + 2GHZ single Core, an IBM Thinkpad t-43. It is a little slower to start IE7 than starting FF2. Comparing to options you could get on FF2 such as spellcheck on texareas, and the wide range of extensions, IE7 comes short although some add-ons are available.

IE7 lets you know if you have Flash active-x objects on the page and informs you that you have to shift the focus to the active-x object before using it, I take that as a safe and clean way of informing users what they’re doing protecting them from sudden and unexpected clicks.

While I’ve taken IE7 for granted and been using it for testing my current designs and mark up I’m still not convinced that I could use it as my primary testing browser, FF2 still wins my heart on that.

One last thing I noticed while using IE7 is the fact that it is really slow on pages that send/receive many HTTPRequests, an example is a Netvibes page filled with RSS feeds that get updated on short intervals. FF did a better job on such pages and it was always light even while updating all my panels at the same time. Just a trade off that I can live with.

On another note I’m getting a little love back for Opera. I’ve been using the Opera Mini on my mobile, it’s flirting with me.

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Standalone IE6

Couple of months ago I wanted to run a standalone IE7 beta1,2 but the last few days I was in the search for a way to use a standalone IE6 after I upgraded to IE7. Many developers have come accross this, for sure. Brilliant solutions are out there for standalone IE installations, but there’s one that comes with less hassle than the rest. It’s Yousif Al Saif’s multipe IE installer that installs IE3 thru IE6. I never even blinked an eye for users who used versions of IE lower than IE5.5 but now all I need is IE6.

Try out multipe IE installer by Yousif Al Saif and have all the versions of IE while enjoying the use of IE7. I’d recommend IE7 and IE6, since I’m going to discontinue support for IE5.5 users on my work.

On another note, I found this Wikipedia entry on IE, very informative with a timeline and a flashback to the early days. Nice to read.

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IE7 replacing my FF

When I first started using FF was when I needed to have a better browser for standard-based design testing and implementation. It soon became my default browser and over time after installing a bunch of extensions I was not able to go back to IE, IE came short to go back to. Opera was always my second choice if not IE, even that was ditched. I shifted back to using IE, well, IE7.

FF covered a need

Back when I shifted to FF, I was searching for a method to x-browser test and do that fast. The method I chose was to find the best implementor of valid CSS and XHTML rendering which FF provided, so testing on FF meant having to adjust and provide some little hacks for IE and Safari in the polishing phase.

IE’s good now

Even though this took me a bit to decide, you know how IE could get scary and ditch you, but, well, it’s(it’d be) the most used browser. Numbers and figures matter more and now that it’s close to FF rendering and does give a little value to your clean markup it’s okay to use it for x-browsing testing as well. I’d still have FF for my testing base, but as a user I’m back to IE, and I’d be using IE7, it just makes sense, I have all that I needed on FF on IE7, all the extensions/add-ons are available on IE7–del.icio.us buttons, netvibes buttons, links and bookmarklets, dev-toolbar and tabs, nothing comes short while it’s handy. Not forget the font smoothing, i’m digin’ it!

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target=”_tab”

Name a graphical browser that doesn’t support tabbed browsing. Must be an old fashion browser. While your at your browser, you could click on a link and the destination page will open according to the target set for the link clicked.

The current available targets are:

• _blank
• _self
• _top
• _parent

While specifying any frame name would open the link in the targeted frame. Okay, that’s all old info. Now, with all the tabs that we open on our browsers everyday, don’t we need a new target propery-value for the A tag? Don’t we need the _tab target?

Tabs have become a kind of standard feature in most of the browsers, so don’t we need JS triggers for tabs as well? that is something like tab(URL, toggleBackgroundForgroundOption) in JS as well? So what we basically need is 4 things. HTML update, JS update, Browsers update, and web-developers implementation.

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I18Nized domain names n IE7

I usually post this kind of information in the inloop section but this is a big one. IE7 Beta 2 came with Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) support. IE7 Beta 3 just gets it better.

Remember when we talked about i18n and true localization and discussed the findability problem caused by non-localized domain names ? Recall that? Well, it’s on the way. IE7 now even supports mixing scripts, allowing to have ASCII and other characters in the domain name. Does that include the whole URL? I’ll leave that question at IE Blog.

Update: IEBlog answered: @dotone: The IDN standard only applies to domain names. For the rest of the URL, IE by default uses UTF-8 for the path, and either UTF-8 or codepaged text for the query string.

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New version: Happy users & Sad Designers

Microsoft announced the availability of IE7 Beta 2 to public on Jan 31 2006. What does that mean for end-users? What am I as a designer going to get? I listed some of the issues I’d face and some goodies I’ll enjoy using in IE7. Here they are.

An addition to the long list

This major version update of IE is a dramatic one. It’s not a face-lift! It’s a make-over. I mean this makes it an extra browser in the list of browsers out there in use; IE6 comes from a different race and to convert the user base until the release of Vista Final and until the adaption of Vista we’re having 2 IEs; a 6 and a 7.

For a designer, it means another browser to test against, another time-hungry task added to the list. Don’t forget that new work arounds and hacks would be developed soon. So in addition to the hacks used for IE6 some new work-around hacks will show up soon.

So if you test against FF, IE6, and Opera then you’re ending up with IE7 at the end of the list. Even if you have an ideal solution for x-browser testing –IE7 is awaiting you.

Features, Options, and more Sugar

Many goodies were added, my favorite in IE7 b2 is Tabbing and RSS reading. Other than that it’s just a MS version of FF in my eyes –interface-wise.

Well as an end-user who lives on surfing I’d be glad to use IE7, really since it is the default browser in Win and it is really charming to have IE back and fighting back. The reasons that a Win user would like to use IE in favor of other browsers is perhaps the integration with the Windows Explorer in terms of File Management and View and the Address bar integra.

The point, while all the goodies would make sense for users the most it’s going to be a pain for x-browser designers until it is streamlined and the userbase of the IE6 convert to IE7 sometime next year? May be? But hey, it ain’t that bad Mac-IE is out of the game so we’re even I guess

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