A Smartass Education

Step 1) Index all things and make it easy to access, ease people into using this with a search engine that helps people find what they want and a catchy slogan like “Don’t Be Evil”.

Step 2) After building trust with your market convince them to use your open source software. In case they aren’t using it, buy majority of startup software and social networks that they are using. Further direct their focus by getting them to use Chrome and telling everybody it is a web browser, despite being a world domination app.

Step 3) Get your software on all types of media. We will start with showing them a taste of our “browser” and then a couple weeks later we will have every single mobile company using our open source operating system and development platform (Android).

Step 4) Use the “Google Network” that was built by 3rd party companies using our open source software and mobile devices to link all communications together and use all the media devices and world domination software in place on more than 75% of the global economy.

Step 5) Control “truth”, information, media, advertising, and define facts.

Today I tested 2 different beta browsers. Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, and Google Chrome.

Finally browsers are starting to evolve at a faster rate. Firefox 3’s “awesome bar” has become a must have feature that other browsers are working to clone and CSS support is starting to not suck quite as bad.

So first is Google’s new browser “Google Chrome”. It’s a mashup of Safari and Firefox, and wow is it fast. I mean things that work slowly on my site on a crappy laptop work much faster with this new browser. Google, being smarter than Microsoft, has opted to keep the browser open source and let a community of people develop it just like Firefox. This means, that though there are currently no extensions for the browser, there will be.

Firefox is the best browser because in it’s core it complies to standards, and then it lets people extend the functionality of the browser in a zillion different ways with add-ons. So now that Google has come along with a similar product, and they have sped up page loads and JavaScript execution.

Google Chrome has a coupe of slick new features, like clicking Shift+Esc will open a “task manager” just for the browser. It shows you the memory and cpu usage of each tab and process like flash. You can then end those processes. They extend this further by making each tab it’s own “sandbox” where one tab does not effect the others. So if a tab crashes, none of your other tabs will crash. That alone is worth the prices of admission.

Another plus for me was how right out of the box I didn’t need to install any plugins. Flash worked, the DivX player worked, Java worked. My thought is that they just copied the plugins directly from my Firefox install and are able to use the same files. I also dig the “new tab” thing showing links and screenshots of all your most visited pages.

Web Developer Note: Acid2 Test = Perfect, Acid3 Test = 77% (Firefox only gets 57%).

I haven’t had any crashes with this beta browser yet either, which is very odd. It wasn’t able to load my OGM movies, but then again, on my x64 vista it took me an hour of dicking with Firefox to get those to load, due to the badly made plugin installer that doesn’t understand how to install itself in a “portable browser”. In Firefox when an OGM movie doesn’t load it often crashes the entire browser.

Both Google and Microsoft have added features to their browser that we will refer to as “porn mode” since it lets you browse the internet with out leaving records of where you have been. This is helpful since with the new way address bar’s are working you can almost always find your way back to someplace you have previously been.

So next I was going to give my personal views on Internet Explorer 8 beta 2, however when I tried to install it on vista x64 I was told that this operating system is not supported.

For shame Microsoft. Even if it’s 32 bit you can still make a 32 bit program run just fine. I am amazingly disappointed by this. Especially since this is your second beta. So instead of talking about their new features I will go off of what I have read about it.

Basically Microsoft has taken their “copy a good idea and make it better” to heart, and have taken to copying such features as the awesome bar and improving it by listing the URL next to the site name that it finds.

Now, I love copying and improving. So many people bitch about things getting stolen from one thing and stuck in another, but that’s what allows us to evolve. Why re-invent the wheel? Just make it last longer and not go flat.

What I want is for them to “copy” the CSS support from other browsers to their browser, because though all computer guys and web designers (real designers, who don’t use FrontPage) will use Firefox or another standard compliant browser. End users will still use whatever their computer comes with that has the word internet on it.

I run a website where I would think people would be smart enough to use Firefox, yet 80% of my traffic is from Internet Explorer. Now I will forgive you all for it since a large majority of you are at schools and offices where you cannot install things.

All Microsoft needs to do to stop being hated by web developers is 3 things:

1) Proper CSS3 support. I mean seriously you are talking in your blog and writeups about how you fully support CSS2.1 now, but who cares. I want CSS3 so I can start making vertical lines and have drop shadows under my text.

2) Open Extension format. I realize that Microsoft doesn’t like open source, and I respect that as a developer. However you can just make a SDK for add-ons, since most of the best “features” of Firefox are only there because we have added them of our own accord.

3) Remove Active-X. I don’t care how many websites use it. Those sites have ways for people to view their content in other browsers. This is the main reason people get infected with the old trick: “You are infected with spyware. Click here to remove”. Then it installs a program that adds more spyware while pretending to remove some of it.

Right now IE8 is still a beta, and browser betas are lousy. The Firefox 3 beta was garbage at supporting already existing things like JavaScript and plugins. So all I can do right now is hope that Microsoft will pull their head out of their ass and do the 3 things I listed. Then I will not have to spend an extra 3 hours on every new page I design just trying to make an Internet Explorer workaround for some positioning bug.

For now, Firefox is still king. However I foresee Google adding extensions and other web applications and then becoming the best browser. It’s already faster and doesn’t crash.

Download: Google Chrome | IE8 Beta 2