The war on IE6

It seems that the decline of IE6 has plateued at around 15-20% which has brought frustration to many web developers around the world. For nearly a year now I stopped supporting IE6 on my personal sites but 99% of my work is for clients who do not want to exclude what is a significant portion of their audience. This has lead to a signifucant portiin of development time taken up by finding hacks for IE6 or worse still dropping features that IE6 won’t support. Most clients wont accept that IE6 users should have a degraded experience and would rather lose a feature than have it only available to other browsers!

CNET Video page was a beast to get working in IE6 as even when it looked perfect scrollong down would cause divs to partially collapse and colours to flicker. IE6 also had issues with Ajax loading in content after the page had been rendered and wouldn’t expand boxes to accomodate the content. The hacks were ugly and made me hate IE6 more than ever. Note the page has been redesigned since these issues but I imagine many haslayout and delayed loading issues still remain.

Until IE6 is gone this is just a daily problem for developers and with the failure of Vista and the apathy/ignorance of users and corp IT departments something more drastic was needed. .net magazines started a campaign a couple of months ago to unite developers in putting IE6 to the sword. Check out bring down ie6 for the details. It has caused some controvecy as many developers feel that if your weblogs and clients say that IE6 is still important we should support it. And to be fair some users have no choice. However, rather than just allowing a page to appear broken in IE6 by boldly stating the reasons why you will recieve a degraded experience if isong IE6 as mobile me and google mail have done you both educate the ignorant users as to the existance of alternatives and irritate corporate IT departments into action. When the company MD cant access certain sites or keeps getting alerted to reduce performance, features and security because of his old browser it wont be easy for the IT department to make excuses for having firefox or IE7 on the users systems.

I think it could be taken 2 steps further. Educate users that you dont need admin rights to install firefox. In fact the first time I used firefox at work I installed it on a memory stick. Scandisk have memory sticks with U3 feature that runs several apps directly from the usb dongle. It’s self contained and so can be taken with you and run on any pc. However, i found memory stick run apps a little sluggish especially on scandisk dongles (I only use corsair now) so installing in the My Documenta folder is my usual recommendation. Where I work I am surrounded by IE6 users, all of them hate it but felt they had no option. A quick demo of a My Documents install and everyone’s converted. If this was added to the advise on upgradeing I am sure uptake would be higher. Note, installation of flash and java support for these browsers does require admin rights.

The next step would be to treat IE6 like a mobile browser. A mobile browser has reduced features and performance so has a cut down version of the site with just the essentials (i know there is more to it than that, screen res, bandwidth etc). So my IE6 site would have the content but not the look and feel of the full site. Again this will probably just be on my personal sites and for pro-bono clients, for the clients that pay the bills the best I can hope for is to include a message advising to upgrade their browser and link to the campaign page.

The more sites/developers that get on board the more effective this will be. Hopefully boosted by a succesful Windows 7 launch and MS dropping support for IE6 will see the browser retired for good.

Tools of the trade

So starting a new job on Monday I needed to set up my rig with the tools/apps that I have learned I cannot live without.

HP EliteBook 8530w

My new laptop is a HP EliteBook 8530w, I’ll be writing a review and a comparision with my Dell XPS m1530 soon.  First major difference is that it’s running Windows XP rather than Vista. A bonus, many may say, but I do miss quick launching apps with a hit of the Windows key and then typing a few letters followed by enter. Fortunately, there is the free, and brilliant, Launchy to the rescue. Alt-space takes the place of the windows key for firing up the launchy text box which works much like Spotlight on mac.

For web development work I found the following tools invaluable:

1) Faststone image capture - the ultimate screen capture tool, does wholepage, video, page portions and even scrolls a page and captures it as one image. The video feature can also be set to only record a portion of the screen which is great for screencasts or demos where you don’t want a massive filesize or a squashed/compressed illegable video from a fullscreen recording.

2) Browsers - firefox and google chrome were one of the first things I installed. I would have also used IE Tester but this seems to be a bit redundant now that Microsoft have released their own version so I downloaded SuperPreview

3) Aptana Studio - My IDE of choice. I code in aptana for html, css, javascript and PHP. It has great tools and features and cuts out a lot of the nonsense that are in some WYSIWIG editors. It is based on Eclipse and so is Java based and chomps though a lot of ram so you’ll want at least 2GB of Ram on XP and probably 3-4GB on Vista if you are running it along side other ram hungry apps like Photoshop. Has great plugins that allow you to preview your page on iPhone or sync with subversion.

4) Vertrigo - This is a WAMP app by a Polish developer that is free and easy to install. You simply run the setup and you have an Apache server with PHP and MySQL ready to go. What’s great about it is that it doesn’t try to be constantly running on your system. Just fire it up when you need and close it when you don’t. Good idea to install this as one of your first apps as I have had conflicts when installing it on systems with a lot of other apps that may have been using ports/resources that it needed.

5) An IM client. In my opinion Skype had the best IM client for a long time (not to sure about the latest design) but seeing as most of my contacts are on Yahoo/MSN now I opt for the YIM client. I may switch this for Trillion or another all in one client in future but having an AIO client usually means features such as file transfer or group chat.

6) VLC media player - Not only is this the best player because it plays the most formats it is also even better at playing those formats than the native players. This is especially evident when playing HD content. HD MOV/MP4 files natively play in quicktime but even on decent spec systems can stutter at times. VLC plays them smoothly even on low spec systems (I’ve seen Hi-res video playing fine on netbooks with VLC). It also playes flash video (FLV) and supports more obsure codecs like HD MKV, which is becoming the standard for distributing large HD video files.

7) Adobe CS4 - no getting round it, although the price tag seems ridiculous and there are some alternatives out there, a serious designer/developer will almost always end up with Adobe software. I’ve given up fighting it and fortunately so have finance so will be getting CS4 installed shortly.

Firefox Plugins - The list of must have plugins seems to have shrunk as I find I am using the same small list regularly and others are just a distraction. I now use Firebug, Web developer toolbar, colorzilla, measureIT, ImageZoom, Delicious, and may get round to installing Scribefire now that I’ve started blogging again.

9) Office - Not too fussed whether it is MS office or Open office plus Thunderbird but best to keep to what everyone else running in the office so have the now ageing MS office 2003.

10) WinRar - For opening everything from ZIP/RAR files to ISO or 7zip - another AIO solution for compressed archives.

For entertainment I could add iTunes and a few other apps but as I’m tight on HDD space on this system I will stick to my iPhone for my music jollies. Fortunately I can now get my podcasts straight to my phone over wifi so PC syncing no longer a daily requirement.

What apps are in your utility belt? What tools can you not live with out?

IE7 critical update, more users moving browser

Microsoft released a critical out-of-band patch for IE7 causing panic updating in IT departments around the globe. Some took advantage of this update to encourage users to make the switch to a more secure browser like Firefox or Google Chrome.

This prompted me to take another look at the figures for browser usage on some of the sites I maintain to see if there is a shift from IE after this update. I was expecting to see the usual 60-70% IE dominance split almost evenly betwen IE7 and IE6. However, it seems IE6 usage has significantly dropped off in the last few monts across a range of sites. The users don’t seem to have all shifted to IE7 either as overal IE usage has dropped to around 50%. The increase has been seen in Firefox 3, Safari and Google Crome. Safari seems to have gone up from an average of 2-3% to 3-5% depending on the site. Google a new entry is around 2-3% and Firefox is enjoying 30-35%. Dare I hope that soon I will no longer have to support IE6!?

Well I expect I’ll have to wait until Windows XP is no longer supported by Microsoft before it finally dies or an unpatchable security hole is found and users are forced to upgrade.

In any case if you haven’t done a windows update today do it now and get IE7 patched even if you don’t browse with it.

Will check browsers stats in a couple of weeks to see if there is a dip/change after everyone has update panic.

Testing IE6 on Vista (multiple IE take 2)

Despite numerous free and better browsers being available for a number of years IE6 (Internet Explorer 6) is still used by about 30-35% of web users. This means despite it’s bugs, lack of support for many css techniques or image types as a developer I still have to support it.

I previously wrote about how multiple versions of IE could be installed on one system but this only worked on Windows XP and was extremely buggy, throwing up errors everytime it encountered flash or javascript on a page.

When using Vista even this buggy version of IE6 would not work. Obviously some developers asked Microsoft for a way of running IE6 on Vista. Microsoft said that it would compromise the security if Vista and so the only way was to install a virtual machine running windows XP and IE6. microsoft even provided the virtual machine software and temp XP license for free. I was pleased with this solution as it meant it would be very unlikely Joe Public would get a new Vista PC, decide they want IE6 and be able to install it. The end of IE6 looked near!

Unfortunately, Vista didn’t take off and replace XP, thanks in no small part to Apple’s smear campaign and users with old/obscure hardware being very vocal about performance… But that’s another topic. This meant continued IE6 was needed. While running the Virtual PC worked it was a waste of system resources and slow to open and close so I soon got sick of it. Then came along IETester.

This standalone app enables you to render pages as IE5.5, IE6, IE7 and the latest IE8 beta as seperate tabs. Pages load without the annoying error popups of MultipleIEs and ironically faster than Vista’s built-in IE7 browser.

It unfortunately doesn’t yet support flash in some of the IE versions but this should be in an update. The IETester toolbar replaces the IE toolbars so unfortunately you can’t run IE developer toolbar to help debug. Despite this I highly recommend grabbing this free download (donate if you can) even if you are running XP.

Note if the file is no longer being hosted comment and I will host it for you.

Firefox 3 and Firefox 2 windows media support

Those of you trying out the Firefox 3 beta or considering it may want access to firefox 2. This is particularly true for developers as you will want to test in both version of the browser and the much loved Firebug plugin is not supported in Firefox 3 yet.

Fortunately there is an excellent guide on getting both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 running at the same time thanks to Hikikomori’s blog redemption in a blog

The problem I encountered is Windows Media Player video embedded in a page will not play. I tried re-installing the plugin but while this works for firefox 2 it does not for firefox 3.

I then recalled I encountered this same problem when first upgrading to Vista. A fix is to copy the needed dll files into the firefox 3 plugin folder. You can just copy the files over from firefox 2 plugins folder or download only the required ones from dll dump.

Quote from last blog post on this topic:

You can find the missing files on dlldump.com

• npdsplay.dll
• npwmsdrm.dll
• npdrmv2.dll

If this doesn’t solve the problem get more indepth help here: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=206213

Have Apple got it wrong with the iPhone?

At this year’s dconstruct conference Peter Merholz explained how just packing more features is not a good way of evolving a design and how the iPod and Wii are examples of that. Not the most technically advanced or feature packed compared to rivals but got the user experience part right and is a success as a result. ( here his lecture in the dconstruct podcast here)

The idea of not feature stuffing a phone seemed to be a great idea then. Especially when you consider 80% of people only use 20% of the features of their phones. However, at the price point Apple have launched with you would have to say the that it likely only the 20% elite/pro users that would pony up the record-breakingly expensive fee and contract combination.(see prices here)

Surely early figures will show great sales but hype and a shiny interface will only get you so far. Users that had basic handsets before will love the iPhone as it does the basics incredibly well. But if you have a top-end pocket-PC or symbian phone you’ll be hugely under-whelmed and may see you’re upgrade as a bit of a downgrade.

I’ve been using the iPhone since it launch in the UK a few days ago and the novelty has already begun to where off and I sorely miss my
XDA exec. It’s not just the big features like video calling, 3G Internet, and picture messaging - it’s even little things like being able to select text/numbers on a webpage and paste them into a word doc/email or being able to delete music/video/app without a computer. Also the camera seems to be such an after thought. The quality is so low - not just resolution but sharpness too. There are also no settings to adjust, or support for recording video.

These issues may cause iPhone sales in europe to reach critical mass sooner than Apple may have planned for. Once the mac fans that would buy a brick with the apple logo on and then those that are caught up in the hype/fashion statement of owning one have all purchased the price will have to drop to sub £50 for the real target audience - the 80% that like to use the basics - will start to lap it up. By then I am sure the novelty will have worn off for the serious phone users that like their features and so many will be looking to get out and buy a more feature rich phone. Perhaps by then the Apple iPhone 2 will be out - but will it be too late. Will the pro users be once bitten twice shy? Will Google Andriod be a serious rival by then? Will the next generation of windows mobile have surpassed the iPhone interface?

With all these questions hanging over the iPhone I wouldn’t put money on the long term success of Apple in the mobile market as readily as some who seem to think they will take it by storm like the iPod has with the portable music industry.

The current kings of mobiles remain symbian and windows mobile based smartphones - watch out for the new 8GB Nokia N95 (black) and the XDA Exec if O2 still let you buy them now that they do the iPhone.

Microsoft make a desperate push for IE7

With uptake of the latest Internet Explorer browser being slow compared to that of main rival Firefox, Microsoft have started a big push to encourage more users to make the change.

The first big advantage Microsoft had was having it pre-installed on it’s latest OS - Vista and not allowing the obsolete Internet Explorer 6 to be installed (which would undermine vista security anyway). However, with Vista uptake being slow and with the tech savvy already using firefox, opera or other browsers IE7 is struggling to make much ground.

Latest figures I have from various sites I run/developed show that on sites for web developers or tech savvy users Firefox now has the majority over both all other browsers combined.

On consumer sites it is about 30% IE7, 28% IE6, 40% Firefox and the remaining 2% using other browsers. So although overall Internet explorer has the majority users still, IE7 alone has not caught up with firefox.

On business sites the weighting is slightly more in favour for Internet explorer but then the figure is increased for IE6 rather than IE7.

In a bid to convert more users to IE7 this week we’ve seen them <a href=”http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39289859,00.htm”>remove the validation requirement</a> to download it.

Now they have sent out a newsletter promoting Internet Explorer 7. It seems to be targetted at IE6 users as it focuses on the improved security in IE7 and the fact that it doesn’t render correctly in Firefox:

<em>”The Internet is a vast place–and not every site is friendly. How do you help protect yourself online? With Windows Internet Explorer 7. Already, the Internet Explorer 7 Phishing Filter prevents nearly one million visits per week to known dangerous websites. In just a few clicks, see how the latest version of the world’s most popular web browser can help you be safer online.”</em>

The latest version of <strong>the world’s most popular web browser</strong> may not be a statement the internet explorer team can use for much longer…

As a developer I am happy with this push to IE7 - the sooner we get rid of IE6 the sooner I will stop having to support it. It is currently holding designers/developers back in what can be done as we have to ensure whatever we do is supported it. Binning IE6 will mean - less hacks, more advancement, less development time - resulting in savings for everyone.

Even Microsoft can’t develop HTML emails for Outlook 2007

HTML Newsletter Developers have been complaining about Outlook 2007 since it’s release as it uses word to render emails rather than a web browser. Some have described it as taking email design back 5 years. Microsoft defended their decision for various reasons - mainly for more consistent results for users of Outlook looking to forward/create html emails of their own.

Now it appears even Microsoft are struggling to develop HTML emails that will render correctly in Outlook 2007. The first line of the latest xbox live newsletter reads “Read this issue online if you can’t see the images or are using Outlook 2007“. If even Microsoft can’t develop a newsletter that shows up consistently on it’s webmail (Live mail/hotmail) and Outlook 2007 client how are us as designers/developers supposed to manage. Clearly this should show it’s time to correct the mistake of using word rendering in Outlook 2007 or for designers to follow Microsoft’s example and simply ignore the latest Outlook and simply offer the users links to a page they can view in a web browser.

I don’t know how my employer would feel about me choosing to ignore Outlook 2007 when building the next newsletter but it will certainly be my recommendation. Our overseas offices seem to have ignored the client as I cannot read the emails that I get from them for the services I subscribe to if I use Outlook 07. If enough companies do this maybe this will prompt some action from Microsoft when there users complain.

The Vista Experience

I’ve had Vista Ultimate installed for about a week now and feel ready to give feedback on the new Microsoft OS.

Installation

Having the full Ultimate 32-bit edition I had 3 install options - 1) Upgrade, 2) Clean install from within windows 3) Clean install booting from CD.

I used the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor to see if I could expect any hardware/software issues. While my hardware checked out ok there were several apps that were not Vista friendly. Two were flat out incompatible and required removal before an upgrade should be attempted. This was Norton Internet Security 2006 and Nero Burning Rom OEM.

This is where I think some people come unstuck with upgrades, they don’t check the software incompatiblies before attempting an upgrade. However saying that after removing the offending programs and a couple of the apps classed as minor problems my clean install from within windows failed.

I opted for a clean install booting from the Disc.

Drivers/hardware

After a fairly quick install I thought all my hardware had been detected as Windows looked so good. However, closer inspection showed a lot of missing drivers including my graphics, and sound cards. Without drivers the display was limited to 800×600 but still appeared clear and colourful. I still had sound, if only in stereo. Once the correct drivers were downloaded and installed I could get full surround sound, high-resolution graphics and the long awaited Aero enhancements.

Finding how to turn on the Aero enhancements wasn’t obvious but a quick search of the help solved that.

I thought I would have little use of Flip 3D other than showing off. However, as my Logitech mouse has additional buttons I found one of them activated flip 3D. I could then use the scroll wheel to skip through the open apps. Rather than waiting for the one I want to come to the front I could use the mouse to click any of the programs in the deck to go to it. This soon became a very quick and easy way to navigate between programes. I still use Alt-tab too but Flip 3D is defintely more useful than I imagined.

Ultimate Extras

The main reason I got the Ultimate edition was for the Ultimate Extras. So far it’s not earnt it’s hype. There have been no cool updates to speak of. Even the DreamScene and GroupShot extras demoed at CES are absent. I did manage to download GroupShot from the Microsoft research site (which works great) but this is available to all windows users (even xp I believe) not just Vista Ultimate. DreamScene is still unavailable as far as I can see.

Access rights

As I did a clean install of Vista on a different hard drive my previous XP installation was still intact. A problem I had in the past with dual boot systems was not being able to access some files on the alternate installation due to access rights. This is not a problem for Vista. When trying to view my windows XP documents folder I am warned I do not have Access rights, however, I am offered the option to “take over ownership” As long as you are logged in as an administrator on your Vista build you can take over ownership of any folder and then access it anytime. As to what happens to my XP installation when I try restarting that again I can’t say as I haven’t tried yet.

From the viewpoint of Front-end developer

Of course it wouldn’t be a good blog post without looking at Windows Vista from the viewpoint of a front-end developer.

The first change is of course Internet Explorer 7 being built in to the OS. This means if you were hanging on to IE6 for testing purposes you will need to get the stand-alone edition. I haven’t tested installing this on Vista yet but this worked fine on XP.

Firefox installed seemlessly as always but I encountered a problem when trying to view online video. Although Windows Media Player 11 is installed as part of Vista the required dll files required by firefox and other browsers are missing. This means playing streamed windows media is only possible in IE7. This is quiet a sneaky move by Microsoft but easily remedied. Simply download the missing dll files into the firefox plugins folder (usually C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins) or better still in the windows media folder so it can be used by all browsers you may install.

You can find the missing files on dlldump.com

• npdsplay.dll
• npwmsdrm.dll
• npdrmv2.dll

If this doesn’t solve the problem get more indepth help here: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=206213

What about the tools of the trade? The Adobe/Macromedia Apps -
You’ll be pleased to know Dreamweaver 8, Flash 8, Photoshop CS2 and Fireworks 8 all run on Vista. However, there are some compatibility issues. If you use the Windows Aero effects you will find they become disabled when you open Fireworks. Windows Vista will switch to “Windows Vista Basic” mode until you close the program. Flash also has issues. It will not force Vista in to Basic mode but you will probably want to do this manually as whenever you enter or exit a set of grouped items the usually near instant transition effect of entering or exiting the group is slowed to a snails pace. This means a 2-3 second wait every time you edit or exit a grouped object - nightmare.

If found no negative side effects in Dreamweaver 8. Photoshop I’ve only opened to see if it would run and haven’t done any indepth testing yet.

The Vista shadow versioning feature could prove useful. Often I make sequence of pages and use one as a template for the next page. In my absent mindedness I sometimes save over my template with the most recent work - trouble. With Shadow backup each individual file is backed up by windows so that I can get back to previous versions of a file if I save over it. Not actually got it to work yet as none of my files seem to have previous versions yet even when I tried a creating a test file. This works like a charm now.

I use a program called PowerDirector from Cyberlink to edit and export video in web friendly formats or for making home movie DVDs. This cannot be run or re-installed anymore. Tech supports solution is to upgrade to their new Premium edition which is Vista Compatible. I am still considering this. Other Apps not liked by Vista is Norton Internet Security 2007.

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Firefox 3 on the horizon

You can download this blog post in audio format here (right-click and save target/link as..) or play it using the podcast player on the right.

Firefox 3 - code named Gran Paradiso is under development. It will use the Gecko 1.9 engine and the latest build released already is said to have passed the CSS Acid2 test. Although Opera, Safari have already achieved this it’s a big landmark for Firefox and a good sign of things to come.

Firefox 2.0 already features the most advanced CSS 3.0 support including CSS rounded corners and alpha transparency and Firefox 3 is set to have full support. Other features include improved graphic rendering and support for Javascript 2.

Of course we can expect there will be many bug fixes and tweaks making Firefox faster and more stable. It has been optimised to make better use of your systems hardware so if you have a good graphics card you should notice big improvements both in visual quality and speed for sites that take advantage of this.
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