Posts tagged: BROWSERS

About a year ago I filed a minor bug report against the Camino browser, noting that text selection didn’t work quite like “real” Mac apps, where if you double-click a word and then drag, you select by words (likewise for triple-clicking and paragraphs). I quickly learned that this bug went back almost seven years.

Activity on the bug for most of those years consisted of people marking other, new reports of the issue (there were usually a few each year) as duplicates of that original bug. It was kind of sweet, like postcards from a friend you don’t see very much anymore.

Safari and Opera understand CSS files mistakenly sent with a text/plain MIME type. Gecko browsers, on the other hand, do not. Don’t ask how I learned this.

Very cool feature from the WebKit team, coming soon to a Safari near you – the Web Inspector:

The Web Inspector highlights the node on the page as it is selected in the hierarchy. You can also search for nodes by node name, id and CSS class name.

One of the unique features of the inspector is the ability to root the DOM hierarchy by double clicking a node to dig deeper. This lets you easily manage large nested pages and only focus on a particular sub-tree with minimal indentation.

…at least that’s what you’d think by looking at the User-Agent string sent out by the Blazer web browser:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; 
  PalmSource/Palm-D050; Blazer/4.3) 16;320x448

Embarrassing, especially for a Mac/Palm/Unix guy. I mean, if I did use Windows, I’d run something cool like Windows 2000 Server.

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Gene commented on Mon May 21 20:42:23 2007:

Hello, silly……. That is talking about the compatibility of the Blazer browser, not the operating system It is used by web sites to tell the server how to serve up the web page to the browser for best handling and viewing.

Camino 1.0b2 is out. Lots of great bugfixes, interface improvements, and new functionality. SVG support. Java Embedding Plugin support.

I’d like to pick out one really tiny thing from the release notes that exemplifies the kind of attention to interface detail that the Camino team is applying:

Allow shift modifier key to reverse the sense of the “load in background” preference when loading a url with Command-Return.

I would guess that the average user probably didn’t know:

Missing in action for many months after a server hard drive failure, the webkit2png utility by Paul Hammond reappeared in August. It uses WebKit to automatically render PNG images of web pages. It beats regular screen grabs mainly in its ability to render full-length images – as if you had an infinitely tall monitor. By default it produces three versions: an actual-size “clipped” version, an actual-size long version, and a thumbnail-size long version (here’s an example). It requires that you have PyObjC.

Flock, a Firefox-based browser with special features for bloggers, is now available in “Developer Preview” form. Because it’s based on Firefox, stability and performance are pretty well ironed out. The interesting stuff, in brief, is:

• bookmark/favorite storage via del.icio.us
• fulltext searching of all pages in your history
• integrated “blog this” tool (supporting the common APIs) that works not just with URLs but with text selections within pages

Those are the ones that struck me the most, but there’s more; read the intro pages that appear by default when you launch Flock.