Peter J S

IE 7 / FF2

So yesterday I finally decided to upgrade IE 6 to IE 7 RC1. Not 100% sure if I like the layout of IE just yet, i’ve been so used to Firefox, but I thought I would give it a try. When you are doing a lot of web development, it’s handy to have the lastest browser versions installed so you can test early, but problem is that the older version gets overwritten, which is a pain when you need to test in IE 6, I may have a look at a standalone IE 6 later, I will need it.

I haven’t upgraded Firefox yet, am still running on the latest 1.5 release. Does Firefox have someway to use 1.5 and 2.0?

Had a look at pixelDepth.net in IE 7, I thought there were going to be big CSS issues due to specific IE hacks I had implemented, but it only seems to be minor things that I should be able to fix up quite quickly, so that’s good. Not sure what it will look like in FF2 though, should be ok I would think, since it’s pretty much standard CSS.

I was creating a PB code yesterday that starts with an open div in the header that is set to display: none, and then you close it in the footer, this is done so it hides the main table from view, and looks better than running a script in the footer as it looks like the hack is actually part of the forum, the user doesn’t get to see the flicker (see the table and then it’s gone). Talking about this, it was James (webworldx) that invented this method for ProBoards when me and him were working on RPG Phoenix (v2 I think?), all it was at the time was 3 divs, one to insert HTML into that would display the hack, and 2 divs that were left open, one closed in the footer. Why 2? At the time ProBoards used to close open tags like divs because of a lot of problems with people using HTML that would prevent the forum from displaying, 2 open divs solved this for us, 1 would get closed, the other would still remain open for us to close in the footer to pull of the effect, very simple really, just that no one had thought about doing that at the time, actually, some people still don’t know how to do it or even know that it can be done.
But anyway…IE 7 didn’t like it (IE 6 did), because there is a tiny focus script under the form that sets focus to the subject field, when you hide the contents inside this open div, Javascript can’t set focus. This was a bugger, I didn’t really want to run a script in the footer…hmmmm, so I had to think what I could do, Firefox was fine, so I decided to look at the newer way to access the document as soon as the DOM had loaded, window.onload has to wait for images to finish loading before you can fire your event, Dean Edwards came up of a way to use the DOMContent event for Firefox, and IE specifc statements with a JS file having the defer attribute. That works fine, but I didn’t really want to use a JS file just for this, so I looked at Dean Edwards blog again, and there was a newer script for IE, so that basically solved the problem.

Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.6

Well that was fast.

1.5.0.5 hasn’t long been out, and now they are releasing an update.

• Fixed an issue with playing Windows Media content

Ah well, least they are quick :p

http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/releases/1.5.0.6.html

Opera at the speed of light

Ok, maybe not that fast.

I came across an article by Sean Patrick Kane about browser speeds using Javascript. The top 3 browsers were put up against each other, those being Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Opera. I’ve heard a lot about Opera’s speed concerning Javascript, so no doubt it came out on top followed by Firefox.

The test was done by doing various Javascript things…

Try/Catch with errors
Layer movement
Random number engine
Math engine
DOM speed
Array functions
String functions
Ajax declaration

Have read of the full article here, you can even run the tests yourself…

http://celtickane.com/projects/jsspeed.php

Wonder how long it will be until the other 2 browsers are even close to the speed of Opera.

Think i’ll stick to Firefox, I feel comfortable using that.

FireBug

Whoa, this is awesome for developers, just came across it…

“Nobody likes to see errors in their web pages, but with FireBug you won’t mind as much. FireBug adds a little icon to the Firefox status bar which tells you if your page is busted. Open up the FireBug panel and you’re looking at the errors that occurred in that page, and only that page. No more digging through the muddy pile of errors in the JavaScript Console window.”

Check it out: http://www.joehewitt.com/software/firebug/