Fennec is the codename for Mozilla’s answer to mobile browsing. While an alpha and now beta versions have been available for the Nokia N810 for several months, this week it was the turn for Windows Mobile based devices. Mozilla have now released version 1.0a1 for WM6.1+ devices to developers for testing.
We have been waiting for a mobile version of Firefox since forever, currently on WM6.1 we have a choice between using Internet Explorer 6 Mobile or Opera Mobile, There are some other browsers available but none that really tear people away from IE or Opera. While Opera Mobile is vastly superior to IE6mobile and renders pages as a desktop browser does, it unfortunately comes with a small price tag unless bundled with your operator and so means a lot of people are stuck using IE. Fennec is about to change all that.
I’ve been playing with Fennec since its release on the 15th and I have to say its rather good. Navigation is quick to respond and doesn’t take long to get used to, like existing mobile browser users swipe and tap the screen to pan and zoom in on pages, tabs and menu items are available by pulling the left and right edges of the screen respectively, to open side menus, this works well on a mobile device as you save space for viewing the website, although I did find when reading some pages I accidentally opened the menus more than I’d liked.
Websites load as expected and without any particular long load times, other than the expected result of mobile browsing, I tested via WI-FI and didn’t notice any load time at all, built in javascript engine was able to handle some very javascript heavy sites like Facebook with out giving up in the way mobile IE does. I could even get Youtube working once I’d enabled plug-ins.
There is support for basic add-ons and as mentioned before tabbed browsing, both of which help to improve the mobile browsing experience although opera has had both these (tabs and widgets) for a while, Fennec seems to load them quicker than the version of opera i have installed.
The only problems i found while testing fennec were a result of my win mobile device, it seems to use a lot of memory which my poor tytnII doesnt have much of spare, am sure on the newer win mobile devices it runs fine.
Overall for an alpha development Im very impressed, the basics are already in place and Im looking forward to the next release.
Search engine giant Google caused a global slowdown of the internet earlier today when an internal error caused millions of websites to slow down. The issue affected almost all the services provided by Google including Gmail, Google News, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Analytics, Google Maps, Google AdSense, and Google Search.
Google have blamed the fault on a routing error that caused their servers to direct traffic via Asia which caused a bit of a traffic jam as the western world went to Asia and back.
This is another frustrating reminder of how so many websites are tied into the mountain view factory, my own website was experiencing delays while browsers tried to access the analytics’s javascript from the Google servers. This has once again brought up that question of do we rely too heavily on Google and its services?
When an error by a third party causes a major issue with your website resulting in a delayed page load, would you continue to use them and their services? Or is it because the fault was caused by Google we should just ignore it?
I was showing a friend around my website at the time the fault was occurring and pages were taking a long time to load, but when we browsed the site via chrome the page didn’t load at all, I put it down to the internet connection in my office as it sometimes plays up and a lot of other sites were loading slowly. If I had been showing a potential customer around my site or I ran an e-commerce website this would have been a critical blow to my business, in terms of potential sales and what impression would my slow loading website give?
The main cause of the slowdown was due to the analytics and adsence code. As Google host these on their own servers each website that has it installed has to make a call to the Google servers to download the javascript files, as most browsers don’t render a page until it has received the html code, this results in a blank screen if there is an issue including a remote file.
I think we need to change the way we include remote files, I for one am going to change the way my site uses the analytics code so I use an ajax request to trigger the javascript rather than including it on the page. I have noticed lots of sites pause when trying to load analytics in the past and this way my site will continue to work even if Google send my visitors on a trip around the world.
It includes not just a new design but also a re-think on all sections of the current webmaster tools, how they are grouped together, how you navigate between them and also the information that they give you.
Search engine giant Google has fired a cannon ball into the browser war by releasing a television advert to inform the public of their own alternative to Internet Explorer.
Google is desperate to raise the profile of Chrome as so far only converting 1.4% of internet users to its browser. The clip was originally made for YouTube by a team inside Google Japan, but due to popularity they have decided to release it via popular television networks. Initially only in the US, if trials and uptake of chrome prove positive they may roll out to other countries aswell.
This could prove very successful for Google and I think this will definitely help them push up their market share. When did you last see an advert for Firefox or Internet Explorer when not on a company owned or fanboy site? I think we are definatly going to see an Upgrade to Internet explorer 8 advert very soon.
I found a very useful add-on this weekend for use with the open source editor Komodo (both IDE and Edit).
Its built by a chap called Stan Angeloff and is called HTML ToolKit.
What is it?
A growing collection of tools to help you edit & author HTML/XML documents.
What does it do?
Auto-complete HTML/XML tags. Knows all about HTML 4/5 and won’t auto-complete invalid tags. Recognises block (<div>, <blockquote>, etc.) and empty elements (<hr />, <embed />, etc.) and completes accordingly
Quickly convert word under cursor to a tag by pressing Ctrl+>
Default snippets for most common HTML that don’t get in the way
Insert entities by pressing Shift+Space
Create new list items, table rows, columns, etc. just by pressing ENTER
Wrap selection/current line in a tag by pressing Ctrl+Alt+W
Navigate around closing tags by pressing TAB/Shift+TAB to go back
Preview images in CSS files by holding down Ctrl and moving the mouse pointer over a ‘url(…)’
Why should I install it?
Because it will save you time.. I only installed it this weekend and have found it to become a very useful addition to my development tools.
How can I get it?
Visit the Activestate Community website and search through the available add-ons, alternatively you can clicky here to download
