With all the chatter about Apple wanting to kill Flash, can Flash survive, HTML 5 FTW, etc., I think there is one major, major problem people need to be aware of: HTML 5’s video element can never replace Flash as a video player, unless somebody sorts out the messy legal issues surrounding video codecs.
As much as IEtester has already proven indispensable, it is not 100% win just yet. However, if you have a Windows box or virtual machine with IE7 or higher, and you want your websites to support Windows IE versions 6, 7 and 8, I recommend you try it out.
It sounds too good to be true. I’ll have to try this when I get home and write an update with the results. IETester claims to be a program that can render your web pages using any version of Windows IE, from 5.5 through 8 beta 1. It is just an alpha, however, with known issues (including Flash not working in IE6).
I have mixed feelings about Google’s new web browser. Under the hood, it sounds brilliant. The UI itself lacks innovation, but does seem to collect the best ideas from every other browser and integrate them well.
Forget algorithms, psychoacoustic models and bit rates. When you look beyond the technical implications of lossy compressors, all they do is remove data from images and sound we won’t likely miss. If only we had compressors that did the same thing for text.
If you’ve seen last year’s tech demos of the next version of Flash, then you probably know that Flash is well on its way to becoming what Director was five years ago: an expensive software package bloated with features the majority of its users will never need. If Flash killed Director by being a cheap alternative, then when will we see a cheap alternative to Flash? And will it be proprietary software or not?
New features in Firefox 3 make bookmarks a complete waste of time.
Microsoft’s new browser has better support for web standards, but also new proprietary features.
Microsoft left IE6 with unfinished CSS support, but at least it allowed the web to grow on its own.
If extensions don’t excite me, what does a browser have to do to make me love it?