browser posts

I successfully switched my regular Firefox profiles back from Developer Edition to regular edition by waiting for the version to update. Continue reading post "#3305"

I accidentally opened up my main Firefox profile in Firefox Developer Edition and now it won't let me open it in regular Firefox. Continue reading post "#3261"

I've upgraded my Firefox Android install to the new version running GeckoView. Continue reading post "#3014"

I decided to start up my old cell phone, a Motorola Droid 2. Continue reading post "#2452"

Quite a latent Firefox bug this weekend. All extensions were disabled for all Firefox users at a specific time because of an expired certificate.

Looking at a page discussing the code of the first web browser (WorldWideWeb), I noticed a line designating port 2784 as OLD_TCP_PORT. After looking into it a bit more, I determined that this was the port used for the web until port 80 was officially designated in January of 1992. Continue reading post "2784, the first HTTP port"

Apparently, Amazon video no longer works with Firefox ESR (60.4). Continue reading post "#2193"

I've been noticing a problem in Firefox for a while now where the tab key will suddenly stop moving focus to links on the page. Continue reading post "#2144"

@supports is a good way to apply an entire block of styles only if (modern) browsers support a particular property-value combo. There is no similar block-level mechanism for selector support. Selectors are automatically ignored if their values or syntax aren't recognized by the browser, so they basically already do this at the ruleset level.

Except, sometimes you want to apply styles to other elements that don't use the selector, but only if the browser supports the selector. Continue reading post "CSS: checking support for selectors"

I had forgotten that CSS attr() is only supported for values of content. Continue reading post "#1819"

I recently added support for HTTP 0.9 to my site. I have access to no browsers that use that protocol, and it's highly unlikely that anybody is visiting sites with one. Why support it then? It's not that hard (for me), and it fits with the progressive enhancement related concept that all browsers should be able to use the most basic functionality of a website that they are capable of.

Crazy Mac IE 5 bugs with the HTML class attribute: If you have a space after any class in the attribute, it will treat any CSS class selector that contains that string at its beginning as a match for the element. Continue reading post "IE 5 Mac class attribute with space bug"

Well, Firefox forced my hand by upgrading even though I had "Never check for updates" checked. So I now have Firefox ESR installed. Continue reading post "#1675"

The recent release of Firefox 57 is pretty nice in many ways, but the loss of certain extensions is probably going to keep my primary browser from upgrading until they're updated or suitable replacements are found.

Looks like an update to Opera Mini brought support for position: fixed at last (in high savings mode, or sometimes extreme). I'll finally be able to remove my JS test for it. Continue reading post "Opera Mini now supports fixed position (sometimes)"

Once again had to recover some of my Firefox tabs after an update (this happened…

After a recent OS and Firefox update, I found myself with a window with 120+ emp…

Firefox tag groups / panorama has been removed from Firefox proper. Luckily, t…

Progressive enhancement is a development strategy meant to provide older and / or less capable browsers with a working website while providing the more capable with a rich, full experience. It is often presented as a set of layers of support, with HTML at its base, then CSS added to that for styles, then JavaScript for advanced behavior. With this, it's often posited that a well-crafted HTML experience can be used by any browser. However, for really old browsers from the early web, the new web provides many things that can make pages difficult to read, functionality unusable, or even entire sites inaccessible.

Today, I'm going to go back as far as I reasonably can in terms of browser support, to the second web browser ever made, and the first widely supported one, Line Mode Browser. I can't look at the first, WorldWideWeb, because it was only made for NextStep and, as far as I can tell, isn't accessible for me to test with. Line Mode is though. It was open-source by the w3c and kept available. I was able to get it with MacPorts with the 'libwww' package (run as www on the command line).

Line Mode was based on WorldWideWeb, and in fact was less featured, so it is likely to have any issues WorldWideWeb has and more. I will look at some issues that Line Mode has with modern web pages, and provide some solutions that will improve the abilities of even the oldest browsers to use a page.

IE 10 has recently graduated from beta and is now the current official release. It started out Windows 8 only, but now is available on 7 as well as a preview release. Hopefully that will allow it to grab more IE users quickly. IE, which has long been the bane of web developers, has been getting better and better with each release. IE 6 has always been a pain to develop for, having many bugs/quirks in rendering pages. In all but fairly simple sites, it always took me a fair amount of time to fix after getting things looking right in other browsers. Luckily, the market share is low enough that at work we don't even worry about it anymore. IE 7 was better. Using a subset of HTML4/CSS2 level development, I usually have had to do only minor tweaks unless the sites were fairly complex. Luckily, It's share is almost to the cutoff point where we stop developing for it as well. With IE 8, I've been able to do most HTML4/CSS2 level stuff without worries. display: inline-block;, :before, :after, onhashchange, etc. It still remains a limiter in using some selectors and in making use of HTML5/CSS3 level techniques, though using an HTML5 shiv and CSS3 PIE or allowing for progressive enhancement to skip over some features in it works rather well. IE 9 has brought some HTML5/CSS3 stuff to the table, like selectors, HTML5 semantic elements, SVG, though it's missing some important ones, like CSS3 columns and HTML5 form stuff. Since I develop to support IE 8 usually without browser specific tweaks, IE 9 basically works automatically, and has some style enhancements over 8.

And now there's IE 10. IE 10 has added a lot more and is finally coming close to other browsers in implementing the not-yet-fully-standardized standards. It's still missing some good ones, but the list of things that have to be skipped, worked around, etc, for IE's current version has shrunk a good bit. It even implements some features that others haven't yet.

The big one is the CSS3 grid layout module, which is the one I'm most excited about for the future. This module is pretty close to allowing for a real decoupling of markup from style that CSS has promised finally for page layout. Continue reading post "IE 10 and CSS Grid Layout"