Web Browsers in 2008 - December 30th, 2007

2008 is set to be an interesting year for web browsers. The two big players are set to release the next version of their software. Firefox will be releasing Firefox3 and Microsoft will be releasing Internet Explorer8.

Firefox 3 will be the first to be released. It is currently in its beta version 2. Taking a look at what is expected; Firefox looks like it will go from strength to strength. The lists of new features are too much to list here but I can point out a few of the good ones. It is thought private Browsing sessions will be introduced to Firefox 3 which means that when you are browsing nothing is saved to the history or the cache of the machine you are using, also no form data will be stored. They want to make is easier to install add-ons and have a visual indicator if new updates are available. You will also be able to search your web history and apply tags to web pages so you can search for them after you have visited them in your history; Again a good little touch. Probably the most important thing though is the support for web standards. I believe more web standards will be included in Firefox 3 including parts of Css3; however they will be thin on the ground until later updates of Firefox.

Internet explorer will be released later on in 2008, at the moment it is planned to be released in the fourth quarter of 2008. That means we have a long wait, but im sure most people in the industry can do that. IE details are rather thin on the ground at the moment. It’s not got a beta version available but doing a little research can bring up a couple of details. They say they are going to make it more secure. This is a dead cert really as IE7 is not seen as a safe web browser. Microsoft has also pledged to make IE 8 more standards compliant. If this happens then it could be a step in the right direction though I can’t ever see IE being a developer’s tool of choice. One thing we can take from all this is that Microsoft seems to be listening a little more. There was a 5 year gap between IE6 and IE7. This left them behind in the browser market and what people want from their browsers now. It’s no surprise that they now plan to release another version within two years.

Also in 2008 we might get to see Opera 10. Again info on this is thing on the ground but I expect we will see something from opera. They have recently opened an antitrust complaint against Microsoft to either stop them shipping windows with Internet explorer or ship internet explorer with other browsers pre installed. Opera seem to like biting at Microsoft’s heels and good on them. One thing opera have said is that they want to develop Opera 10 so it can be used on any platform which includes, PC, s Games consoles such as the Nintendo Wii and mobile devices. They will develop Opera to build on what they already started with Opera 9. They will build more on the ‘Widgets’ that are available for the browser. Opera want to develop this idea of widgets to the point where we no longer use a desktop, we will use a web browser and widgets to do anything we need to do on a PC. I won’t hold my breath for that one though.

Gary
SEO Programmer

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Css3 Web Fonts - December 27th, 2007

Ok I need to start with an apology, the web fonts feature is not strictly Css 3. It’s actually a Css 2 recommendation that never got implemented in any browsers apart from IE. Though with IE it wasn’t fully implemented and you had to use their standards for it to work which isn’t exactly in line with what Css is trying to achieve.

Personally I can’t believe this has not yet been implemented. I think it’s a great feature that would be widely used especially by web designers who like things to look exactly how they want too. Traditionally you have only had certain ‘web safe’ fonts that can be used on your website. These are mostly made up of standard fonts that everyone has on their machines. If you don’t have the specific font on the end user machine then the font would not be used on the website. Basically Web fonts is the ability to display any font on your website regardless of whether the end user has the font installed on their machine.

The Css selector is @font-face. Look familiar? @font-face works by first declaring the font you want to use on your website and secondly specifying a path to where the font can be found. The font can be stored on your server or it can be stored at an external location. The syntax can be seen below.

@font-face {
font-family: 'The New Font';
src: url('http://www.example.net/newfont/');
}

The big question is when will we see this implemented. Well the people behind Web kit already have it supported. (That means Safari supports it) and IE kind of supports it but only in their own way, they have said Css3 will be included in the next release of IE (which means IE8) so this could be years off yet. Opera are set to be next to include it and Mozilla (Firefox) have said it won’t be included in the first release of Firefox 3, this means it may be included in an update later in 2008. Rest assured though the feature is on its way so the future looks bright!

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