Category: Tech

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SafariWow. I have to admit I was not expecting this at all, but Apple has just announced they’re releasing the Safari web browser for Windows.

Increased consumer choice, of course, is a good thing. The most immediate benefit, though, is that Windows-based web developers (the majority) who haven’t been willing to buy a Mac to test their sites in Safari will be able to do full testing on all four major rendering engines: Trident (IE), Gecko (Mozilla/Firefox/etc.), Webkit (Safari) and Presto (Opera).

Also, there’s some really cool stuff available in recent versions of WebKit that will be great to have available for a wider audience.

Interesting thought: this may be the first browser released since Opera expanded to Linux in ~2000 that is available in the same version on Windows and Mac, but not Linux. Even when Internet Explorer was available for the Mac, it used a different engine than the Windows version did.

I wonder what impact this will have on the development of Swift. Its main claim to fame was porting WebKit to Windows, and it’s been months since their last release.

I also wonder what the status is on re-merging the KHTML and WebKit forks. It’s gotten to the point that Konquerer is only an approximation of Safari, making testing on Linux a little harder than it used to be.

(via Asa Dotzler)

No doubt there’s a 500-comment Slashdot discussion already.

Update: Slashdot’s all over it, and Opera Watch has a thread going as well.

Update 2: I’ve posted my thoughts on the implications for Opera. There’s an update at CSS3.info, where they have previews of upcoming CSS features available in Safari 3.

Update 3: I’ve updated the Alternative Browser Alliance to reflect Safari’s new status. This also solves a nagging doubt I’ve had as to whether the default browser on Mac OS should really be considered “alternative.” On Windows, it definitely is.

Update 4: The Webkit team and Web Standards Project have weighed in. The Windows version of WebKit should be available later today, which will be nice for following progress on issues as it moves from beta toward final version. It turns out there’s a regression and at least the Windows version no longer renders the Acid2 test correctly.

Update 5: The author of Swift says that Swift isn’t going away [edit: the blog has since vanished], and points out that “Swift renders more like a Windows Application, both in the GUI and in WebKit. Safari, looks just like OS X, similar to iTunes 6 and below.” Ever since Apple started porting apps to Windows, I’ve found something odd: A common complaint about third-party Mac software is that it doesn’t look and feel native (one of the big reasons we have Camino as well as Firefox), yet when Apple ports their own apps to Windows, it makes them look exactly the same as they do on Mac OS instead of making them work like native apps. I mentioned this to Katie yesterday and she suggested it might be a case of turnabout being fair play.

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White LightningA question over at the Comic Bloc Forums reminded me that I hadn’t gotten around to writing a full profile of the Impulse villain, White Lightning. Fortunately I had a full list of appearances already, so I was able to look up the answer to the question, but it felt like being caught totally unprepared. So yesterday I re-read all her appearances, and tonight I wrote up a profile of White Lightning.

Just for fun, I did some searches for her name. Mostly I came up with cars, horses, wax and, of course, booze. And an alpaca. Back to the booze, there was one point at which the character was mistakenly identified as as Moonshine (later explained away as an in-world mix-up, which would have made more sense if she hadn’t been the one calling herself the wrong name!)

Fedora LogoNow the funny thing: the “…in pop culture” section in Wikipedia’s article on Moonshine reminded me that Fedora 7, which just came out last week and which I installed at work a few days ago, is codenamed Moonshine.

The only way the timing could have been more appropriate would be if I’d written the character bio the same day as the Linux release.

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I recently stumbled across an archived mailing list post of mine from the days before spammers started targeting WordPress. Someone had remarked that their spam problem had disappeared when they switched from Movable Type to WordPress, and I responded:

Oh, they hit us WordPress users too, just not as often as MT. Having it automatically moderate comments with certain keywords or more than X number of links helps cut it down, and the ability to (a) see all the latest comments and (b) mass-delete comments reduces the pain of cleanup. But they do target WP blogs from time to time.

I tend to get a pair of comments sent to the moderation queue every few weeks (presumably they figure if the first two didn’t show up, they won’t waste their time with more), but just this morning I had to delete a spam comment that came in last night and didn’t trip the moderation rules. (One of those with the generic “I like your site” messages and the author’s URL being the spamvertized site.)

That was September 2004. How things have changed! All WordPress blogs come with Akismet as an anti-spam measure, but I still prefer to use Bad Behavior, which has blocked ~2900 hits to this site in the past week alone, and Spam Karma, which has collected over 17,000 comment spams.

And with all those counter-measures in place, I get a couple of comments landing in the moderation queue each week. And just this morning I had to delete a spam comment that came in last night and didn’t trip either layer of defense (it was a generic piece targeting keywords found in a post). The filters are just barely keeping pace with the increased volume.

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Project Honeypot recently started tracking comment spammers as well as email harvesting bots. Oddly enough, even though they have data going back to March 22, and even though Bad Behavior and Spam Karma have blocked an incredible number of spam comments on this site (Bad Behavior has blocked 3807 connections in the past week alone)…none of the honeypots I manage have trapped a single comment spam.

And no, the honeypot on this site isn’t protected by those plugins.

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Flock. One of the problems with the ubiquitous Get Firefox! Get Opera! etc. web buttons is that while they might encourage someone unfamiliar with the product to check it out, they’re kind of pointless to someone who already uses your preferred browser. Sure, there’s a sense of, “Hey, this author uses Opera too!” but that’s about all it can do.

To make these a little more useful, on my Flash site, I use JavaScript to switch the button if someone’s using Firefox, and instead promote the Spread Firefox site. I’ve written up a similar method for Opera, though it’s less clear where to send people.

I recently discovered that Flock has taken another approach to solving this problem. As you may recall, Flock is a browser based on Firefox, focusing on social networking. It integrates with blogging sites, photo-sharing sites, bookmark-sharing sites and so on.

The Flockstars Extension expands on this by converting the button into a mini-profile. You fill in information like an avatar, usernames at Flickr, YouTube, etc., and links to your website(s). It generates button code that acts like an ordinary Flock button, but contains all this extra information.

The extension reads this information. Visitors to your site who are using Flock and the extension will see an icon in the toolbar, which will pop up a short profile and a menu of all the facets of your online presence.

It’s a cool idea, and seems to fit perfectly with Flock’s target audience. But it only solves half the problem. The browser promo badge is still there, still taking up space. The fact that the profile data is in the button code doesn’t make a difference; it might as well be stored in a set of META tags in the page head.

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