I find it really quite funny that people actually believe the story about some Google boss accidentally  sending the email with the details of their new browser. The comic within was great, certainly a finished piece as far as I could see. And then, the launch of the browser the next day – funny how it was ready in time regardless of this so called accident. All in all what a great bit of publicity. It got a lot of attention on the national news here in the UK – after all news agencies love a story like when a big company supposedly makes a big mistake.

Besides the drama behind this beta launch there is a very good application waiting to be taken up by the hordes of internet users. You would expect no less than brilliance from the company with the reputation for innovation that Google rightly boasts. There are many things done right with this browser. Immediate impressions are of a clean interface with usability at the forefront of the design. For example, a pop-up window, when blocked will actually be placed at the bottom of the page, so if it was actually a requested page then it can easily be dragged up to full view. My only concern with the interface is it somehow looks a bit flat. I guess Google were thinking that its best not to distract from the real reason you are using a browser: to view websites. The icons and buttons are clean and simple, they get the job done.

Page load times seem fast which in my mind is a good indication of a good browser rendering engine. The HTML rendering does need a few tweaks though as some hyper links are showing incorrect colours and attributes as set in CSS style sheets. Still, this is only a beta version.

The browser also has many other features that take a little while to notice at first. For example, a built in spell checker and the ability to drag text areas as you can in safari.

All in all first impressions are very positive and I look forward to further developments.

Ever noticed than Internet Explorer seems to render PNG files a slightly different colour that firefox and other browsers? It’s due to the fact that explorer doesn’t handle the gamma properly. Well there is a work around, simply use this tool and delete the gamma. Simple as! Took me a while to find out that though!

What is it? Well apparently search engine companies are focusing more on trust these days than on other quantifying methods such as page rank (PR). Will we one day have a little green Trust Rank bar on our browsers telling us how much people trust a certain website? I hope not, as just with Google Page Rank there are clever seo people who know how to manipulate such figures. Also how do we vote a confidence or trust on a website? Surely people are going to down vote their competitors

I don’t know too much about all this TR stuff, I don’t know if anyone does. But if you do, I would like to hear your views on this issue.

PNG image files are great. They support full transparency unlike GIFs which tend to look blocky. The only problem is IE 6 doesn’t support PNG transparency, and with about 30% of people still using IE 6 this is a real problem.

On a recent project I needed to use PNGs because of their transparencies, GIFs just wouldn’t cut it. I racked my brains trying to think of a solution, and finally I decided to Google it and see if anyone has found a solution.

They have!

On this site the developer found a way of getting full transparency using a bit of Javascript. It works great, but does take a few milliseconds to load. I guess the only real problem is if someone is using IE 6 and have Javascript disabled. I reckon this would be a tiny fraction of a percent.

As you are probably aware, Internet Explorer is infamous for ignoring standards which has always made building CSS heavy sites very difficult. For example, in a recent article I described how I built a CSS only site, only to find out it didn’t work at all in Internet Explorer 6. God knows what Explorer 5 would have rendered it like!

Anyway, it has come to my attention that there is a solution. It wont stop the errors you get, but you will be able to test and employ the various hacks needed. Here is a link which will allow you to install individual versions on Explorer from version 3 to 6. You can of course get version 7 from Microsoft. Now if only they could release Safari with that too!

I think this is one of the biggest technical issues affecting many web designers at the moment. Many designers (probably most) have now switched over to full CSS design, also known as CSS-P. Its potential advantages are a more useable, flexible and compliant design, however from my experience this isn’t happening yet.

There are really three ways to build a site in terms of mark up:

HTML only
This is the old school way of building websites. Lots of ugly font tags all over the place, and a method of building sites that really is quite dated.

Full CSS
Semantic mark-up and a clear separation between design and content is what this is all about.

Hybrid
A mixture of both above. Read the rest of this entry »