The Web Is Round

Posted on December 23, 2004

It’s official. Now that Firefox has effectively overtaken the Mozilla Suite, all the major web browsers’ icons are round:

Robots in Disguise

Posted on December 20, 2004

Kelson

Wondering just how many Netscape 4 visitors this site gets, I pulled up some server stats and noticed two very strange patterns.

The first appears to be a spider, calling itself Mozilla/4.08. It’s already suspicious, since the real Netscape 4 includes the language and OS, as in Mozilla/4.08 [en] (Windows NT 5.0; U). Then there’s the pattern: lots of hits from the same IP, all to actual pages—not a single image, style sheet, or script—and some interesting mistakes that look like it misparsed the links.

The other pattern showed Netscape 4 requesting favicon.ico. The thing is, Netscape 4 doesn’t know about favicons. This is scattered across a few visitors from various IP addresses and looks like actual visitors—show up, look at a page or two with images and styles, etc. Versions range from 4.06 to 4.8, and platforms include Windows XP, Linux, BeOS, and—believe it or not—CP/M. Actually, the last set of hits admit to being Mozilla/4.7 [en] (CP/M; 8-bit; Fake user agent). The only direct reference I can find calls it a robot, but it seems the anonymizing features in Squid use CP/M in their example fake UA.

So why do browsers and robots fake their identity? Continue reading →

Taking the Web Beyond the Typewriter

Posted on December 18, 2004

Kelson

I recently stumbled across an old copy of the Demoroniser (which my American-trained sense of spelling keeps trying to spell as demoronizer), a script designed to correct some of the, well, moronic HTML generated by Microsoft Office. Aside from flat-out coding errors, Office would use non-standard characters for things such as curly quotes or em-dashes that would only show up on Windows computers. If you viewed these sites on a Mac, a Linux box, a Palm, etc., they would seem to be missing punctuation everywhere. His solution was to convert these to their plain-ASCII equivalents.

Over the last year or so, WordPress and A List Apart have converted me from “stick with the lowest common denominator” to “let’s show real typography.” Since the days of the Demoroniser, Unicode has become a standard part of HTML, so modern browsers* can either display a full range of characters or convert them to something they can display. You probably won’t be able to see Chinese text in Lynx, but a properly encoded curly quote—“ or ”—will show up as a plain old ".

For one thing, real typography looks much nicer. Continue reading →

Browser Switch Campaigns Compared

Posted on December 17, 2004

Kelson

Firefox – Switch [archive.org] is the first of these sites I noticed. Based on Apple’s “Switch” campaign, it’s aimed at raising awareness of Firefox and convincing people to switch from IE. It has stories of people who have switched, a top 10 list of reasons to switch, and answers to questions about just how you go about this switching thing, anyway.

Stop IE [archive.org] is, as its name implies, a negative campaign. It focuses on the security risks inherent in using Internet Explorer and provides a list of alternatives, though Firefox is the only one it deals with in any depth.

Browse Happy is my favorite of the bunch, because it’s an inclusive campaign. It’s run by the Web Standards Project, so the goal isn’t to promote Firefox or eliminate Internet Explorer, it’s to promote choice and get people away from today’s Internet Explorer. The WaSP’s ultimate goal is to encourage people to build a vendor-neutral web in which you can use whatever browser you want—including IE—and get the same high-quality experience. That’s a goal I can agree with, and that’s why Browse Happy is the one I promote. The meat of the site is stories of people who have switched away from IE, with profiles of four browsers: Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, and Safari.