Ten Tonne Baby!

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Archive for the browser tag

• Session cookies not expiring when Firefox closes

  I’ve just been looking into a slightly strange issue where closing Firefox and opening again didn’t clear out session cookies. It looks like in the latest version of Firefox this behaviour is by design if you have certain preferences set.

  They have introduced a feature where closing the browser can remember the tabs you had open, and rehydrates these again when you start Firefox. This feature is controlled in the Settings > General > Startup section. If you have this set to Show my windows and tabs from last time, Firefox will no longer expire session cookies when the browser is closed.

  This seems to be a pretty big security concern, as you are prompted to switch this setting on the first time you try to close the browser, so the majority of users would have this set-up. I’m not entirely sure how it decides when a session cookie should expire under these conditions, any ideas?

  Posted:

  May 21, 2010 @ 13:52

  Categories:

  Development

  Tags:

  browser, cookies, firefox

  Comments:

  No comments so far

• Supporting native browser rendering of custom fonts

  I’ve just been reading an article from Jeff Veen on a font-embedding technology coming up shortly. We’re going to be in a situation soon where every major browser is about to support the ability to link to a font hosted on a web server, which is downloaded and used by the browser to render text. Although the technology is almost there, legal and copyright issues will take a lot longer to catch up. It looks like this could provide an interim solution, definately worth keeping an eye on.

  Posted:

  June 3, 2009 @ 8:33

  Categories:

  Design, Development

  Tags:

  browser, fonts, typography

  Comments:

  No comments so far

• EmbeddedStream Mobile Version

  

  After learning that I have at least one occasional mobile using accessing the site (yes Jimmy, that’s you!) I’ve put in place a much more appropriate stylesheet, linked in with the handheld media type. I’ve been testing this against Opera – pressing Shift-F11 will switch Opera to handheld mode and will emulate it’s rendering behaviour when running on a mobile device. I think overall it works pretty well. Some of the features include…

  • Only 2 images in the design, and these are mini, mini images (3K each)
  • Single column fluid layout
  • More appropriate text sizing and margins
  • Better sizing of form controls

  I don’t really know enough about how widely the handheld media type has been adopted by mobile browsers, but I guess at least Opera crops up all over the place and it will render really nicely. Any feedback from my one mobile user would be appreciated

  While I was in the mood I’ve also added a print stylesheet, so think I should now be covered all round. I might have a little rant about Aural media type shortly, but will save that treat for another day.

  Posted:

  December 11, 2007 @ 9:06

  Categories:

  Personal

  Tags:

  browser, Design, handheld, mobile, my sites, opera, rendering

  Comments:

  2 comments so far

• New browser

  I was just reading a post and someone mentioned offhand a browser that I hadn’t heard of, so I thought I’d share. Shiira is a new open-source product for the Mac based on the Safari rendering engine – details here.

  I can only assume that Jon Hicks was involved in the design – look at the logo below, then think about Firefox. I’m not complaining at all – love the fishy logo.

  

  Posted:

  April 26, 2007 @ 8:50

  Categories:

  Design, Development

  Tags:

  browser, hicks

  Comments:

  2 comments so far

• Browserfest

  So I guess you all know that IE7 is now on official release. This will come down via windows update in the near future, but I suggest you go and get it now if you have no compelling reason to do otherwise. The only minor pain will be cross browser testing, as you’ll need to run IE6 in a virtual PC (I think there are various articles around about hacking a standalone IE6 that will live happily side by side – good luck with that).

  Something that totally slipped past me is that Firefox 2.0 has also just been released! I have no idea what’s new just yet, but I love this little browser so I’ll be installing today. I think you should too.

  Posted:

  October 25, 2006 @ 9:09

  Categories:

  Development

  Tags:

  browser, IE

  Comments:

  2 comments so far

• HasLayout in IE7

  The majority of freaky rendering behaviour in IE6 came down to whether the haslayout attribute was applied to an element. This was a speed optimisation in the rendering engine – certain behaviour was skipped when deciding how to render an element if haslayout was false to increase the efficiency of rendering a page. The result was that a valid set of CSS instructions would produce unexpected rendering behaviour in IE6 unless haslayout was true on certain elements.

  One of the hacks used to get around this was to apply height: 1px to an element (in a hacks file, served only to IE6 via conditional comments). As IE6 treated height like min-height, this would have no adverse behaviour, but would result in haslayout resolving to true for the element.

  This morning I came across my first strange rendering issue in IE7 due to haslayout being false on a container element. I think a lot of the quirks have been fixed, but just be aware that the engine can still render differently according to haslayout. The previous height:1px fix is no longer applicable, as IE7 quite correctly respects any absolute height that you specify.

  The fix in this case was to set min-height: 1px, which is another attribute that will now result in haslayout being set. In our case this had no adverse effect on the desired rendering, and therefore was a suitable fix. The actual problem was minor – 1px of extra padding on an element for no good reason.

  I think in a lot of cases setting a min-height value would be a good approach (obviously this can be abstracted to a seperate file and served with conditional comments). However this is a fairly unobtrusive fix, so could stay with the core set of instructions without polluting the water too much.

  Posted:

  October 4, 2006 @ 11:55

  Categories:

  Development

  Tags:

  browser, bugs, css, IE, rendering

  Comments:

  No comments so far

• King PNG

  I was mulling over the changes coming up in IE7 and what was the happiest new feature. I think the one that gets me bouncing up and down is the support for full alpha channel in the PNG image format.

  I think that up to now the format has never caught on in a big way, as the main benefit is having full control over the alpha channel and being able to layer up semi-transparent areas, and IE6 would not natively support the opacity specified in the image.

  There were a few workarounds – more can be read on AListApart. These are based around using the AlphaImageLoader proprietary filter in Internet Explorer. However doesn’t provide the kind of flexibility you can usually get when you specify CSS background properties – for example, getting to control horizontal and vertical tiling behaviour.

  So with IE7, all of the major modern browsers will now support the alpha channel in PNG format (cheering from the stalls). This all sounds a bit geeky and dull so far, but this makes the life of a designer much more exciting.

  We’ve been able to do a certain amount with transparency up until now, but generally by faking it, where images happen to match up perfectly to give the illusion of transparency. However, this would mean that moving things around too much would require cutting new image assets.

  No longer! We can now see a point where the general browsing populous will all be rendering PNG images correctly, which means that we can do some very cool things. I’ll try to whip up some examples in the near future – feel free to add links to any showcase sites that you’ve come across.

  Posted:

  June 13, 2006 @ 11:15

  Categories:

  Development

  Tags:

  browser, IE7, png

  Comments:

  No comments so far