Geek Daily

I must say that my first expereinces with Chrome have been very positive. I’ve been browsing around my usuage spots with it today and I am noticing a difference, a good one.

A bit about my habits

Normally I browse with Firefox. I use Firefox for all the typical reasons; it’s more secure, has better web staqndards support, easier javascript debugging, Firebug, and a host of other great extensions that improve my browsing experience. However, Firefox is a big memory hog, not as big as early reports of IE8 mind you. There are plenty of intense sites that just don’t perform well for me in Firefox (especially in a terminal server environment) and are sluggish. For those of you that are yelling at me, yes I have Firebug turned off and it is still slow.

First reaction

I was pleasently surprised when these sites were blazing fast when using Chrome today. Quickly looking at the Task Manager, it looks like Chrome is only using a fraction on the resources of Firefox as well.

Putting it to the test

To put Chromes promise of better performance for JavaScript and Ajax applications I decided to pull out all the stops. Benjamin Joffe’s Canvascape is a 3D JavaScript world using the canvas tag. Firefox really chokes on this app, especially in textured mode. I thought that if Chrome could preform well here it probably would perform well just about anywhere.

To my delight Canvasscape runs smoothly and flawlessly in Chrome, even in textured mode. It runs so well it seems that the walking speed may need to be adjusted to as it seems to walk very fast or maybe that is just because I am used to the very slow performance in Firefox.

Conclusions

This first experience with Chrome has been very positive and I hope that future betas and the final product continue to perform this well. Currently Chrome doesn’t have a lot of options, not extensions facility which will hopefully be added in a future beta. Hopefully performance isn’t degraded once more features start getting added to the browser.

Popularity: 2% [?]

If you haven’t heard by now Google has annouce Google Chrome. Chrome is a new browser from Google that is based on WebKit and includes a lot of exciting new features and looks to push web standards to the fore front were they can’t be ignored any longer. Check out the comic book that explains Chrome.

On the other hand, early test of IE8 beta 2 don’t look so promising. According to InfoWorld IE8 consumes a whopping 400MB of RAM and executes upto 200 concurrent threads. In short, it uses more resources than Windows XP..yes I mean the OS!!!

Popularity: 2% [?]

It amazes me that not more businesses are adopting Cloud Computing. With things like GMail and Google Apps available for free and rivaling the expensive desktop suites like MS Office why not use them? There are many reasons why some businesses choose not to use online applications.

Privacy

This is a huge hurtle for advocates of computing in the cloud. Business just don’t trust a 3rd party to host their sensitive email and business documents. This is for good reason too. There is no way to know 100% for sure that someone is not looking thorugh private communications.

That being said for non business uses cloud computing is perfect for the average internet user. You get access to your email and documents from anywhere in the world at anytime as long as you have an Internet connection.

Reliability

A debate broke out on Slashdot yesterday, as often does, in response to an article posted about recent outages of Google Apps and GMail. The article speculated these outages hurting the adoption of online computing. Some commentors strongly disagreed.

As the debate hit upon different arguments and angles the main discussion centered around GMail versus MS Exchange and which was better and more reliable from a business point of view. There were strong opinions on both sides which got me thinking…there is no right answer. No matter which you choose there will be trade offs. It just depends on your specific needs.

Here is a nice list of pros and cons for each choose. You decide which fits your needs and budget best.

GMail Pros

• FREE or just $50/user/year for premium accounts
• 24/7 access from anywhere with an Internet connection
• Solid reliability from Google’s enterprise data center
• Platform independant
• No overhead costs

GMail Cons

• Must trust Google to respect and protect your privacy
• No access if Internet is down, many fault points along the pipe

MS Exchange Pros

• No 3rd party privacy concerns
• More in control (or at least that is the illusion)
• 24/7 web access (some minor limitations)
• Access to stored emails and can send within network if Internet is down

MS Exchange Cons

• Expensive Windows and Exchange license fees
• Large overhead costs
  • Network administrator(s)
  • Servers and backup technology (data and power)
• Dependant on Windows (some may not care)

I am sure I have missed some points on all those list but those are the basics. You decide what you need and what you can afford to compromise on (financially and personally).

Popularity: 6% [?]

Friday Roundup for May 9, 2008

Here is what I found interesting this week.

IE and Windows XP Service Pack 3
Sadly Microsoft has decided to keep shipping IE6 with SP3 for Windows XP. They missed a great opportunity to boost IE7 adoption.

3 Golden Rules For Working From Home
One of the great things about working from your own home is freedom.
Freedom to start work when you want, wear what you want and work the
hours that you want. Right? Well actually, probably not.

In reality working from home doesn’t work like that –- well not in
my experience anyway. You usually end up working normal business hours
plus a few more to boot (though you may still be in your PJs).

Popularity: 10% [?]

Here is what I liked this week. Enjoy!

Comparing Popular JavaScript/Ajax Frameworks
After four days of ASP.NET AJAX training with Stephen Walther I set out to learn more about my options in choosing a solution for a JavaScript/Ajax framework. If I realized days later I would be writing this comprehensive post on 7 of the most popular frameworks, I may have just went with the “Inny-Minny-Miney-Moe” method!

jQuery AJAX calls to a WCF REST Service
Since I’ve posted a few jQuery posts recently I’ve gotten a bunch of feedback to have more content on using jQuery in Ajax scenarios and showing some examples on how to use jQuery to cut out ASP.NET Ajax. In this post I’ll show how you can use jQuery to call a WCF REST service without requiring the ASP.NET AJAX ScriptManager and the client scripts that it loads by default. Note although I haven’t tried it recently the same approach should also work with ASMX style services.

SQL SERVER - Better Performance - LEFT JOIN or NOT IN?
First of all answer this question : Which method of T-SQL is better for performance LEFT JOIN or NOT IN when writing query? Answer is : It depends!

Video: Write Your First Silverlight Game
In this video, I demonstrate how to start writing your first Silverlight game. I show how to create a dramatic space scene, add a soundtrack, and associate movement with the mouse wheel. This is the first part of a two-part series.

Reading binary files using Ajax
But when it comes to binary files, helping hands from server-side technologies are often necessary.

So I googled around to see what I can do about binary files with Ajax and found this Marcus Granado’s post at http://mgran.blogspot.com/2006/08/downloading-binary-streams-with.html

What he posted there worked like a charm for FireFox and Safari but I couldn’t get it to work for IE.

But luckily, within the same page, someone had posted up a solution for IE as a comment, which is written in VBScript.

Safari CSS Masks
Webkit continues to impress with it’s early implementations of new standards. WebKit now supports alpha masks in CSS. Masks allow you to overlay the content of a box with a pattern that can be used to knock out portions of that box in the final display. In other words, you can clip to complex shapes based off the alpha of an image.

Popularity: 36% [?]

Here are some interesting stories from this week.

IE 8 strict mode doesn’t allow for CSS opacity?
So the fact that this has been labeled as by design suggests that IE8 will be the only browser produced in the last 10 or so years that will not support opacity in its strictest mode. Thats rediculous.

Google Will Sell Performics, SEOs Exhale
Exciting news from The Official Google blog today that reveals Google will stop scaring SEOs everywhere and will sell off Performics, the search marketing company that they accidentally acquired when they bought DoubleClick last year. To avoid the conflict of interest that comes when you’re a search engine selling search engine optimization services, Google will split Performics into two companies – an affiliate marketing company and a search marketing company – and then sell the search marketing half.

Webforms is dead. Long live MVC!
Scott Hanselman’s fourth screencast *confirms* that the interfaces and abstractions made as part of the MVC (HttpContextBase, IHttpRequest, IHttpResponse, etc.) will not be put into the existing Webforms model. That means that once MVC is released, the old HttpContext object in WebForms will *not* inherit from HttpContextBase, nor will the WebForms versions of HttpRequest and HttpResponse objects implement the interfaces.

But I’m not moving my mouse!
The IE team reacted correctly: the bug has been solved in IE8b1. When the mouse does not move any more the mousemove event stops firing, as it should.

However, this same bug was recently introduced in Safari (Windows) and Opera!

Safari 3.0 and Opera 9.26 support mousemove correctly, but Safari 3.1 and Opera 9.5b have copied the IE bug.

Popularity: 40% [?]

Here is what I found interesting this week.

Key events and Safari 3.1
There has been a change in Safari 3.1 for how keypress events are handled. John Resig interviewed Yehuda Katz to get the skinny and understand why this was done.

eBay Discriminates Against Ebook Sellers, Squashes All Digital Downloads
In what will go down in Internet history as probably one of the lamest decisions ever in e-commerce, running second only to the firing of AOL CEO Jon Miller in 2006, eBay announced yesterday it will no longer allow any digitally downloadable product to be sold via an auction.

Where’s my .NET 3.5 (on IIS), Dude?
The not so obvious ‘problem’ is that if you fire up a machine that has .NET 3.5 installed, you might be surprised to find that the IIS service panel’s ASP.NET does not show an option to select the .NET Runtime of 3.5.

Opera and WebKit pass Acid3 test
The latest builds from Opera and WebKit are scoring a perfect 100/100 on the Acid3 test. Wow!

Where is Firefox on Acid 3? Here.
Some people have been surprised to not hear much from Mozilla around Acid 3. WebKit and Opera are duking it out, but what about Firefox?

Mike Shaver of Mozilla has posted on his views that Acid 3 is a missed opportunity and is pretty damning of the whole thing.

Using the YouTube API via Ext
With the YouTube API recently released, there’s bound to be lots of cool controls coming out soon. Thorsten Suckow-Homberg spent a weekend hacking up a Ext-based user extension that leverages YouTube’s chromeless API to build The Ext.ux.YoutubePlayer.

20 Types of Pages that Every Blogger Should Consider
When you use WordPress you’re given the choice when publishing between doing it as a ‘post’ or as a ‘page‘. Posts go up on your blog while ‘pages’ are static pages that you can publish without it having to go up on your blog.

Popularity: 25% [?]

I have decided to start doing a Friday round up of all the interesting articles I find during the week. Here are some stories I found interesting for the week of March 3 to March 8. Enjoy!

Internet Explorer 8 will render in Standards Mode by default
The IE team has announced that it will render HTML markup in “the most standards compliant way it can.” It is nice to see that MS has decided to actually listen to what web developers want, in regards to IE, for a change.

The Top 5 Recommendations For Monetizing Your Blog
The readers over at ProBlogger have given their top recommendations on how to make some money with your blog.

Acid 3 released, Webkit praised
Jon Tan ran a few tests and posted the results. Hixie commented on his blog about the release, and praised WebKit on how they have been closing a large number of bugs

Silverlight to run on Symbian phones
Microsoft is working with Nokia to get Silverlight running on Symbian mobile phones. Would this help influence your decision to use Silverlight for UI over other technologies?

MVC Framework Preview 2 released, Jeff Palermo disappointed
Jeff gives a good overview, along with his opinion, of the changes that have been made in preview 2.

Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 is now available for download.
Take the first release of IE8 for a test drive. Will it deliver this time?

Popularity: 18% [?]

James Edwards has posted a very interesting article on SitePoint. He has developed and implemented (on SitePoint) a script that will unblock any ads that have been blocked by the AdBlock Plus extension for Firefox.

It is quite an ingenius idea. Now before you light your torches and grab your pitchforks, he has also explained how to block the unblocking script and he plans on removing it from SitePoint next week. It seems he lost a bet a had to expose his secret.

See, a while ago, when the whole firefox is blocked debacle was raging, I made some hand-waving statement about how easy it would be to circumvent ad-blocking software (though of course, I wouldn’t say how). Then a little while later (not quite sure when … I was probably drunk) I lost a bet, and had to prove it. The stakes were high, and I felt a little dirty, but I’m a man of my word, so I had to do it. And as it happened, it turned into a fun and interesting challenge, with a relevant point to make …

Popularity: 6% [?]

Netscape Navigator Goes Quietly Into the Night
On New Year’s Eve, the news went out from AOL that the long life of the Netscape Browser was coming to an end.

Though this news will have little or no impact on the vast majority of web developers, those of us for whom Netscape was their first browser will give a wistful sigh of rememberance.

Coming Soon: Changes to the CSS Working Group?
On December 14th, one of the key members of the CSS Working Group, L. David Baron of the Mozilla Corporation made an announcement:

“I’ve informed the CSS working group that I am no longer participating in member-only mailing lists or meetings. I believe the member-confidential nature of the group hurts the future development of CSS by making the group:

* fail to accept the contributions of many who would like to contribute to CSS and
* get mired in debates and stalling tactics that companies would not be comfortable using in public.

“I still intend to participate in any discussions that take place on www-style, public-css-testsuite, and other public forums.

“I support rechartering the CSS working group as a public group.”

Although there have been few public follow-ups, representatives of Microsoft and Google expressed their support. It seems like change within the CSS Working Group is coming, but like everything the Group does, it may not happen quickly.

Popularity: 16% [?]