500null : Adam Detrick

According to the list of over 2,400 websites that Microsoft claims are “highly trafficked sites that have not yet fully accommodated IE8’s better implementation of web standards,” microsoft.com is among the “incompatible.”

fail.

I’ve been trying to teach myself design lately, and as it turns out, it’s much harder than learning how to code. Having always admired the way that data can sometimes speak for itself, I was inspired to try making a few infographics. What I’ve attempted to do is represent some data with as little agenda as possible other than bringing some interesting information to light. Hopefully posting these will put some pressure on me to keep working toward improvement…

Continue reading →

I think it may have been 2006 when web developers everywhere first thought they saw the light at the end of the IE6 tunnel. We knew a day would come when we could stop wasting so much time getting our websites to work in that crappy browser. It is now 2009. Though the IE6 browser share has gone down significantly, there’s still a good 20% average of users out there browsing with the technology of 2001. Ajaxian rang in the new year with a post on this topic, pointing out that the last 20% may be the hardest to get rid of.

The real irony of this problem is that even though IE6 represents so much less of the browser share now, the complexity of web apps have increased in a way that actually makes supporting IE6 harder in 2009 than it ever has before. It is no longer an annoyance, it’s a real problem – and it’s becoming clear that developers can not and will not wait for that 20% to go away on its own. In December, 24 Ways wrote about addressing the problem with a “sliding scale” of support, and 37signals dropped support for IE6 completely last October.

I say forget about sliding scales of support, or dropping support completely. This is the year to purge IE6 users; The year to give the digitally illiterate a safer, faster, modern browsing experience. Allowing a user to remain on IE6 isn’t helping anyone. The best way to improve the situation is to get that 20% to get off of IE6, one way or another. Giving your users a path to upgrade is helping you, the user, and anyone else who makes websites…

Continue reading →

Is it just me, or does the new Google favicon look a little bit too much like AVG’s icon?

I see that I’ve been getting a decent amount of hits on a post I wrote a while ago about unobtrusively using the rel attribute of links as a hook for javascript pop ups. I promised that I’d eventually provide a cleaner, abstracted version of the javascript for that – that was in June. It’s finally time to stop being lazy and post some javascript that isn’t so ugly…

Continue reading →

Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 is now available for download as a public preview release, and it really brings the good stuff. As much of a Firefox advocate that I am, I had to admit that Google Chrome was a faster, cooler browser – until now.

This release brings Firefox up to speed with Chrome in many ways, but the most impressive features have to do with speed and javascript handling. Mozilla’s TraceMonkey adds javascript compilation (and optimization?) to their js engine, “SpiderMonkey”. I have no idea if SpiderMonkey runs the compiled javascript in a virtual machine like Chrome does, but the proof is in the pudding: In every site I’ve tested, Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 loads and runs sites faster than Google Chrome.

Continue reading →