Wednesday, 23rd September 2009
Gmail for Mobile: Reducing Startup Latency. Cheeky iPhone optimisation trick—parsing 200 KB of JavaScript takes an iPhone 2.2 device 2.6 seconds, so Gmail embeds code components in /* comments */ in a script tag and evals them on demand later on when the features are needed. # 10:29 pm
More technical details about Google Chrome Frame. It’s implemented as a Browser Helper Object, uses IE’s cookies, history and password-remembering, includes the WebKit developer tools and appends “chromeframe” to the regular IE user agent string—though not apparently the Chrome Frame version itself. # 10:20 pm
PubSubHubbub for Google Alerts. “Think of it as a search API that tells *you* when it finds new results.” # 9:30 pm
Diesel. Yet Another Asynchronous Python Comet Library, of interest because this is the first one I’ve seen that uses Python’s generator coroutines, taking advantage of the return value of the yield statement to feed messages in to a generator function. Currently only works on Python 2.6 on Linux due to a dependency on 2.6’s epoll support. # 5:15 pm
Ask browser users, and they’ll tell you the overwhelming reason why they can’t upgrade to a more modern, standards-compliant browser is because their work won’t let them. Ask IT departments why this is the case and they’ll point to the six- to seven-figure costs of upgrading turn-of-the-century Intranets written to work in, and only in, Internet Explorer 6. Google have provided a way for websites to opt out of IE6 (and even IE7) support without requiring enterprise-wide, Intranet-breaking browser upgrades.
— Charles Miller # 3:08 pm
Red Dust. Tom Coates used Flickr’s new Galleries feature (which lets you build a curated collection of up to 18 photos from other Flickr users and add your commentary) to construct a stunning compilation of photos of the Sydney dust storms. # 2:20 pm
In the past, the Google Wave team has spent countless hours solely on improving the experience of running Google Wave in Internet Explorer. We could continue in this fashion, but using Google Chrome Frame instead lets us invest all that engineering time in more features for all our users, without leaving Internet Explorer users behind.
— Lars Rasmussen and Adam Schuck # 9:59 am
Introducing Google Chrome Frame. Here’s what Alex Russell has been up to at Google: An IE plugin (for 6, 7 and 8 on all Windows versions) which embeds the Google Chrome rendering engine—sites can then opt-in to using it by including a X-UA-Compatible meta tag. Seems to be aimed at corporate networks which mandate IE for badly written intranet applications—they can roll this out without retraining users to use another browser or breaking their existing in house apps. # 9:57 am