I recently decided to recode a Web site I had developed several years ago to make it cleaner and easier to modify. The design involved lots of rounded corners and I had used images for some of the corners and CSS hacks for others. These methods did the job but made the markup somewhat bloated and ugly, and the many images also increased the page download time.
CSS to the rescue! I decided to make use of the CSS3 border-radius property which allows for rounded corners without any images or extra HTML. CSS3 hasn’t been properly implemented yet, however the border-radius effect can be achieved in Gecko, Webkit and KHTML-based browsers using -moz-border-radius, -webkit-border-radius and -khtml-border-radius respectively. Opera’s Presto rendering engine had a similar property but this has unfortunately been removed. Opera’s market share (around 2%) is small enough that I can feel okay ignoring it until the developers choose to bring back the border-radius property. Internet Explorer, however, has a majority market share and predictably has no support for border-radius nor an equivalent proprietary property.
One of many solutions I found to Internet Explorer’s disability was a JavaScript solution, DD_roundies, by Drew Diller. Using conditional comments I included the reasonably small 9kb js file in my HTML source only for Internet Explorer users and added a rule for each ID or class that I wanted to have rounded corners for. Now when I load up my page in either IE 6, 7 or 8, the borders of the appropriate divs are as rounded as they are in Firefox.
The beta version of Google’s own Web browser, dubbed ‘Google Chrome’, was released today. Ten minutes ago I installed it.
As with most things Google, the user interface is very minimal and clean. There are no menu bars and the address bar also serves as the search box and history bar which is a nice idea. All settings (saved passwords, bookmarks, etc.) can be imported from other browsers such as Firefox or IE which makes for an easy transition.
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Last week Microsoft released the second beta of Internet Explorer 8. This new version of IE is at last a step in the right direction for Microsoft, as compliance with CSS standards is now a major priority.
I downloaded the new beta and started the installation, only to be met with the message
A previous build of Internet Explorer 8 is already installed on your computer. You must remove it before installing the latest version of Internet Explorer 8.
Apparently upgrading the previously installed version was too big an ask. Never mind, I thought, I’ll just uninstall the older version of IE8. But wait, it’s not listed with all my other programs in ‘Uninstall or change a program’ (or ‘Add/Remove programs’ if you’re running Windows XP).
It took me a few minutes to figure out, but Internet Explorer 8 is actually listed under the ‘view installed updates’ list rather than the list of installed programs. Great, now I can go ahead and install the new version!
Today is supposedly the official release date of Firefox 3. Over a 24 hour period, Firefox is attempting to set a Guinness World Records for the most software downloads. The release of Firefox 3 is scheduled for 10am USA PDT on the 17th of June, so get ready to download!
For those who may not know, Firefox is a Web browser. If you are using Internet Explorer, you should go and download Firefox right now. Firefox is faster, more secure and easier to use. Oh yeah, and it’s much more friendly to Web developers than Internet Explorer.
