Simon Willison’s Weblog

<META HTTP-EQUIV="X-BALL-CHAIN">. Mozilla hacker Robert O’Callahan discusses the technical implications of freezing copies of older rendering engines, including the increased footprint and the terrifying prospect of documents in different rendering modes communicating through iframes and the DOM.

# 22nd January 2008, 6:55 pm / browsers, dom, ie8, mozilla, roberto-callahan, xuacompatible

The versioning switch is not a browser detect. PPK: “In other words, the versioning switch does not have any of the negative effects of a browser detect.”

# 22nd January 2008, 4:34 pm / browserdetect, browsers, doctypeswitching, ie8, internet-explorer, ppk, web-standards, xuacompatible

Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8. This has huge implications for client-side web developers: IE 8 will include the ability to mark a page as “tested and compatible with the IE7 rendering engine” using an X-UA-Compatible HTTP header or http-equiv meta element. It’s already attracting a heated debate in the attached discussion.

# 22nd January 2008, 12:40 pm / browsers, http, ie8, internet-explorer, web-standards, xuacompatible

Safari CSS Reference. Official documentation covering the CSS properties supported by Safari, including the -webkit proprietary extensions.

# 22nd November 2007, 11:51 pm / browsers, css, documentation, safari, webkit

CSS3 and the death of Handheld Stylesheets. I hadn’t looked at CSS 3 media queries before (which let you apply different styles based on media features such as screen width, height and colour availability)—they seem like a much smarter solution that handheld stylesheets and also appear to be preferred by device vendors.

# 16th November 2007, 9:53 am / browsers, css3, mediaqueries, mobile, russell-beattie

CSS Transforms. WebKit can now do transforms (scale, rotate, translate and skew) in CSS via a new -webkit-transform property. Transforms behave like position relative in that they don’t affect the layout of the page. You can also provide a full affine transform matrix as a shortcut.

# 26th October 2007, 9:45 pm / affinetransformation, apple, browsers, css, graphics, matrix, safari, transforms, webkit

Tabula Fracta. Mozilla hacker Robert O’Callahan offers advice for anyone aiming to create a new rendering engine from scratch. The WHATWG’s work on specifying real-world browser behaviour and error models gets a well deserved mention.

# 9th October 2007, 1:20 am / browsers, html5, mozilla, roberto-callahan, whatwg

Native DOMContentLoaded is coming to Safari. I filed this bug over two years ago. They’ve just committed the resulting patch to trunk.

# 8th October 2007, 1:07 am / browsers, domcontentloaded, javascript, onload, safari, webkit

Seeking market share, Microsoft removes WGA anti-piracy check from IE7. Hopefully this will accelerate the rise of IE7 over IE6.

# 5th October 2007, 11:55 pm / browsers, ie, ie6, ie7, internet-explorer, wga

Multi-Safari. Lets you run multiple versions of Safari on the same Mac. As with the multi-IE hacks, all versions use the same underlying HTTP libraries (which belong to the OS) so the simulation isn’t entirely accurate.

# 5th October 2007, 11:51 pm / browsers, multisafari, safari

WebRunner 0.7—New and Improved. A simple application for running a site-specific browser for a service (e.g. Twitter, Gmail etc). This is a great idea: it isolates your other browser windows from crashes and also isolates your cookies, helping guard against CSRF attacks.

# 27th September 2007, 1:55 pm / browsers, csrf, gmail, security, sitespecificbrowsers, twitter, webrunner, xulrunner

Opera 9.5 alpha, Kestrel, released. “With history search, Opera creates a full-text index of each and every page you visit, and when you go to the address bar, you can simply start entering words you know have been on pages you’ve visited before, and items matching your search show up.” I just tried this; it’s magic. I’m switching back to Opera from Camino.

# 16th September 2007, 8:34 pm / browsers, camino, full-text-search, history, kestrel, opera, search

Opera 9.5 (Kestrel). The latest Opera alpha includes a bunch of CSS3 features (including an almost full implementation of CSS3 Selectors) as well as the ability to use SVG for scalable background images.

# 4th September 2007, 10:49 am / annevankesteren, browsers, css3, opera, opera95, releases, selectors, svg

WebCore Rendering I—The Basics. Dave Hyatt has started a series of posts explaining the internals of WebCore’s rendering system.

# 10th August 2007, 3:21 pm / browsers, css, dave-hyatt, html, internals, safari, webcore

Enabling the debug menu on Safari for Windows. “Turn off site-specific hacks” is one of the menu options.

# 12th June 2007, 1:18 pm / apple, browsers, safari, safari3, windows

Timing and Synchronization in JavaScript. Comprehensive overview of how browsers (Opera in particular) load scripts and queue events, with suggestions for best practices.

# 30th April 2007, 2:24 pm / browsers, javascript, opera, timing

Camino 1.1 Beta. Camino now has session saving. I simply won’t use a browser that doesn’t have this feature.

# 25th February 2007, 1:16 am / browsers, camino, sessionsaving

Live DOM Viewer (via) Neat tool from Hixie that provides an insight in to what browsers are actually thinking.

# 6th February 2007, 1:12 am / browsers, dom, ian-hickson, javascript

How to enable session saving in the new Camino 1.1a2 (via) I’ve stopped spending time in any browser that doesn’t have session saving built in—sorry Safari!

# 15th January 2007, 1:49 am / browsers, camino, safari, sessionsaving