Tag: svg

SVG and XHTML are a missed opportunity

too bad really that SVG has to suck so hard

After a couple days of working with SVG, I have the feeling that nobody on the SVG working group gave any thought to how vector graphics could make interactive web GUIs better. It seems they were more concerned with lions, and tigers, and bars (oh my). In other words, SVG was designed to be primarily an image file format; a vector alternative to PNGs and JPGs.

That’s a shame, because SVG could be perfect as a means of escaping the rectangular tyranny of HTML and CSS. Think of the fun of being able to tilt photographs, fill text with gradients, or create circular buttons. Unfortunately, if you try to achieve these effects using SVG and XHTML together, you won’t be having any fun. You will be too busy doing geometry calculations by hand (which the SVG engine should be doing for you).

Vector web

here are a few data points

maybe we will finally see rich vector graphics, and new user interfaces that do not suck, and are accessible? also, a google search that could interpret vector graphics would be far superior to the fuzzy matches we get today one presumes. back in 1997, when dave was still a thought leader, he called for the lineto moveto web.

Firefox

I will switch to mozilla in the next couple days. I have watched Mozilla since about M5 (May 1999), but never found it superior to IE on windows. A few factors made me switch:

Now, I hope that mozilla.org moves to apache.org to enable a really competitive XML stack.
2004-06-13: Mozilla 2.0. Brendan eich: Mozilla 2.0 platform must-haves
2005-03-30: foxylicious. For a while, there were only dorky extensions available for mozilla-based products. More recently however, genuinely useful extensions are popping up left and right. My latest discovery is foxylicious, an extension that syncs your del.icio.us bookmarks into your browser bookmarks, and back. Very cool.
2005-11-26: here is what I am currently using to make browsing safer and less annoying:

  • Use Firefox (duh)
  • Don’t install the Flash plugin
  • Turn off “Allow sites to set cookies” and keep a small whitelist
  • Use NoScript to only allow javascript on a small number of sites
  • Install this hosts file to remove most advertising
  • Use TargetKiller to get rid of pages opening up in new windows
  • Disable Java

It’s amazing how much faster and pleasant the web becomes if you take the garbage out.
2006-09-27: Flux Player for X3D

The free Flux Player is a browser plug-in for viewing and interacting with X3D content and virtual worlds.

2006-10-03: Web3D Vision

AB: Vlad, what’s your vision of “Web3D?” How do you differentiate it from the common “2D web” experience and existing “networked 3D” applications?

VV: I think the 3D web is somewhat of a middle ground between the 2, blending 3D with 2D content. It should also retain one of the main characteristics of early HTML content, which is that you should be able to copy-and-paste from sites that you visit to bring the same content to your own sites.

“Web3D” won’t be about meshes and normal maps and fragment shaders, but it will be about enhancing the current web experience with 3D content, whether that’s for data visualization, for aesthetics, or for novelty factor. Taking advantage of 3D features in UI is also an interesting area, and I hope that putting 3D capabilities alongside HTML will allow for easier experimentation in that area

2006-10-04: big-time refactoring ahead: rdf is out, as is XPCOM. We’ll be lucky if we get all of this by 2008, indeed
2006-10-05: Nightly Tester Tools allows you to make extensions work with ff 2.0 and other good stuff
2006-11-25: Layout.spellcheckDefault. how to enable ff spell check consistently (also for single line controls)
2006-12-15: FF Microformats Mozilla Labs “Microformat Detection Extension for Firefox 2”. with ie8 reportedly having microformats built-in,this is a no-brainer. now, if this helps with the data web.
2007-01-02:

If Mozilla proceeds with this goal for Firefox 3 to be a broker of information, then that will significantly raise the stakes in the browser war again. Microsoft will surely follow and the smaller browsers will innovate around microformats to keep ahead. And it makes perfect sense for the web browser to do brokering, because information is so fluid and ‘small pieces loosely joined’ these days. There’s a best of breed app for every data type – so why not use the best app where possible?

hopefully, ie8 and ff3 will agree on some common microformats features, while competing on the implementation
2006-12-23: Cliche Finder highlights cliches on a page. maybe this could be the next step for the firefox inline spell checker, which i love. with widespread tools like these, maybe the deterioration of language can be countered or even overcome.
2007-01-25: Firebug 1.0

2007-01-29: Firefox EXSLT this should help with xml editors like BXE
2007-02-12: FF offline web apps taking shape. No ui changes, simple to implement. Nice!
2007-04-06: Fullerscreen finally parity with IE. This should be great for kiosks
2007-04-19: Better Gmail

Better Gmail is a compilation of Greasemonkey user scripts that add features to Gmail

Super awesome. I spend a lot of time in gmail, and this really helps
2007-05-06: Firebug Staffing. Nice. Yahoo rarely do something right over there, but this is one of those times
2007-05-19: Whereami. Chregu is taking a per-site approach to geolocation. I think this is a good strategy until we have a standard way of doing this
2007-07-24: YSlow for Firebug. Nice, even though it’s basic. It told me to use a CDN for maps.google.com. Riiight.
2007-07-28: SVG Photos demo

The demo situation for open web technologies is pretty bad; you can find lots of flashy demos all over the place when you look at, say, Silverlight, but it’s hard to find demo-sized chunks of code to show off the capabilities of the web.

GeoFlock

The geoFlock Extension gives you a suite of in-built maps and mapping tools for your web browser. Create and save a topbar map using the addresses or address links you find on web pages, or by manually adding locations. Geotag Flickr photos within the Flock photo uploader, geotag blog posts within the blog editor (including microformat geo class values, view in google maps/google earth links and insertion of quikmaps.com maps).

exposes lots of gmaps features in a ff extension. if our UI weren’t so complicated, maybe users would find all these features themself.
2007-08-06: Only 25% of downloaders actually become ff users. Wow. Say hi to “Firefox Internet” or “Internet with Firefox”

2007-08-10: Unusable Firefox

Firefox locks up several times a day. I found a forum which suggested disabling the anti-phishing functionality. Several people seemed to have benefited from said disabling.

I see the stupid beach ball cursor far too often. You’d think that hanging apps were a thing of the 90s, but apparently not.
2007-08-11: Xvfb + Firefox. How to run jsunit in xvfb properly
2007-10-27: Firefox Kerning. ff 3 turns on kerning and takes the performance hit, but the result looks a lot better. Now we only need non-ugly fonts and subpixel rendering on linux.
2007-11-09: Firefox Memory fragmentation. Wow, bleak picture for firefox. Even with all their fixes for ff3, this still sucks a lot and we’ll probably see leaner browsers take over. Such as khtml based ones.
2007-11-26: Canvas 3D exposes opengl as a ff extension. With kmz / collada example.
2008-01-06: Firefox Viral Campaign

Compared to Internet Explorer users, Firefox users are 21% less likely to be a sales representative or agent at their current place of business.

2008-01-07: Browser Sync. I wish we maintained this better. It would be useful to sync cookie allowlists, at the very least.
2008-01-13: Thoughts on Firefox 3.0. Nice, detailed review
2008-02-05: iGoogleBar. Neat. I like the tighter integration.
2008-02-28: Firefox Throttle. Bandwidth utilization throttling plug-in for Firefox (Windows only)
2008-02-29: FF 3 Performance Boost. At this point networking is the bottleneck, particularly MTU which is still only 1500 bytes max. Jumbo frames, where are you?
2008-03-11: FF 3 Memory Usage

We’re significantly smaller than previous versions of Firefox and other browsers. You can keep the browser open for much longer using much less memory.

this rocks.
2008-03-21: iMacros for Firefox

iMacros was designed to automate the most repetitious tasks on the web.

useful for those retarded and user-hostile online banking sites
2008-04-21: Mozilla JS Shell Server

allows other programs (such as telnet) to establish JS shell connections to a running Mozilla process. This functionality is useful for interactive debugging/development of Mozilla applications, remotely controlling Mozilla, or for automated testing purposes

JS shell examples
2008-04-30: Del.icio.us for FF

Today I’m pleased to announce a beta release of an enhanced version of our Firefox Add-on for del.icio.us that now has full Firefox 3 support

verdict: it sucks. The save a bookmark dialog no longer autocompletes, and they now spam you with an inane “you need cookies to use delicious” on startup. I could care less about the other crap they added when the basics don’t work.
2008-06-06: Slow Firefox

heavy use of Firefox 3 on a Linux system can cause the system as a whole to perform poorly. It’s clearly an issue that the Firefox developers need to fix, even if it’s not entirely their fault.

that fsync nonsense takes all the fun out of the otherwise decent speed of firefox 3.
2008-06-12: FF Microformats API. Here’s hoping microformats finally take off. My code is ready 🙂
2008-08-29: TraceMonkey. More JITing for js. Now if only the DOM were not so slow.
2008-09-02: Tracemonkey is head to head with v8. Interesting times. Now someone should do something about jumbo frames to speed up the networking part, too.
2008-10-06: Geode

an experimental add-on to explore geolocation in Firefox 3 ahead of the implementation of geolocation in a future product release. Geode provides an early implementation of the W3C Geolocation specification so that developers can begin experimenting with enabling location-aware experiences using Firefox 3 today, and users can tell us what they think of the experience it provides. It includes a single experimental geolocation service provider so that any computer with WiFi can get accurate positioning data.

Sigh, why did that take 3 years? This should have been deployed years ago.
2008-11-05: Layout engine comparison. Lots of detailed tables. Looks fairly up to date
2009-01-12: FoxReplace. Quite useful for tedious HTML forms work
2009-01-19: instrumented Firefox. firefox is becoming ever more of a web app, now adding instrumentation / experiments.
2009-02-05: Firefox.next

Some preliminary work has been done on identifying key elements of all 3 projects, and we will continue to refine these plans in order to get a good jump on things as Firefox 3.1 finishes. You can find these first passes here: Personas Ubiquity Prism We absolutely crave feedback. We hope to get to a crisper and more tightly-scoped set of plans over the next month or so, and we’ll continue to point out when there are more changes that we’d like feedback on.

I am decidedly unimpressed. Why bother making the chrome of the browser more interesting, when you can make the browser viewport more interesting and powerful?
2009-05-29: Firefox Trojan

the .NET update automatically installs its own Firefox add-on that is difficult — if not dangerous — to remove, once installed. Annoyances.org, which lists various aspects of Windows that are, well, annoying, says “this update adds to Firefox one of the most dangerous vulnerabilities present in all versions of Internet Explorer: the ability for Web sites to easily and quietly install software on your PC.”

A trojan for .net, only uninstallable via the registry. Getting desperate?
2009-06-11: Mozilla Jetpack. Writing ff extensions with just html, css, js. This has the potential to be huge.
2009-07-06: Multi Process Mozilla

Ben Turner and Chris Jones have borrowed the IPC message-passing and setup code from Chromium.