The most important aspect of HTML5 isn’t the new stuff like video and canvas (which Safari and Firefox have both been shipping for years) it’s actually the honest-to-god promise of interoperability. Even stodgy old Microsoft, who has been doing their best to hold back the web for nearly a decade, understands this and you’ll see it throughout their marketing for IE9. … The idea that the same markup, even with mistakes, will be rendered exactly the same. HTML5 represents the chance for browsers to work together and find common ground.

That’s Christopher Blizzard, the Director of Developer Relations and Open Source Evangelist at Mozilla in his June post, intellectual honesty and html5.

He’s referring to Apple’s HTML5 demo. It seems somewhere along the way, HTML5 went from specification to consumer marketing buzzword, and now everyone is confused about what HTML5 is and isn’t, and which browsers support it and don’t.

Thumbs down Apple. Thumbs down.

We’re going to do a baseline JIT for Firefox 4. It’s not done yet, and it hasn’t landed in any tree yet, so nobody’s tested it. It’s gonna give similar performance characteristics to Chrome. But we’re also gonna do tracing on top of that. What we discovered, is that for a lot of applications, especially when you want to do anything that’s actually CPU intensive, we smoke everybody. It’s not even fair.

So says Christopher Blizzard, the Director of Developer Relations and Open Source Evangelist at Mozilla in his interview with Lifehacker/Gizmodo.

I love seeing geeks talk sh*t.

FormData interface coming to Firefox

An overview of the FormData object of XMLHttpRequest, and how you will soon be able to use it in Firefox. From Hacks.Mozilla.Org.

Dealing With the Dreaded ‘Flash of Unstyled Text‘

Tips for mitigating, even eliminating the appearance of unstyled text when using @font-face. From Webmonkey.com.

So Apple announced the iPad, and it won’t support Flash.

That shouldn’t be a surprise. Neither the iPhone nor iPod Touch support Flash. Indeed most mobile platforms don’t (yet) support Flash. Even the smartest of smart phones have limited processing power and storage space compared to laptops and desktops.

According to Steve Jobs, Apple doesn’t support Flash on its mobile devices because “it’s buggy.” But I’d guess their decision has as much to do with Flash’s capabilities. Many of the products in that cash cow known as the Apple App Store could be developed using Flash instead.¹ Supporting Flash would undermine that billion-dollar revenue stream, piss off iPhone / iPad developers, and also put Apple at Adobe’s mercy.

Besides, everyone’s moving towards HTML5, right? Well yes they are, but not so quickly. I wouldn’t rule Flash out for another 3 to 5 years.

Why do I say this? Four reasons:

1. Flash has inertia on its side. Major content sites such as Disney and Hulu still use Flash to deliver video, animation, and interactive experiences. According to Adobe’s statistics, Flash has over 90% penetration in mature markets. Developers already know how to use Flash and ActionScript to create these experiences. In short: there are a lot of folks invested in Flash as a platform.

2. HTML 5 isn’t quite ready for prime time. It’s a shifting standard, a work-in-progress. Though even Internet Explorer 8 supports some significant HTML5 features, Internet Explorers 6 and 7 do not. And both browser versions are still used widely enough that dropping support is not an option for most developers.²

3. Flash is still the best cross-browser, cross-platform way to serve audio and video. Safari / WebKit, Firefox / Mozilla and Opera all support the HTML5 video element. They do not, however support the same codec.

   Apple is squarely in the H.264 camp. Google paid a licensing fee so that it could include an H.264 decoder in Chrome. H.264 is a patented codec. Any browser that wants to enable H.264 video will need to pay a licensing fee.

   Licensing fees and patent concerns are why Opera and Mozilla are backing Ogg Theora. Ogg Theora is an open sourced codec with no known patents. I should add here that Chrome also supports Ogg Theora. Google, perhaps wisely, chose to include both.

   The big monkey wrench in video element adoption, however, is Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer is waiting for them other fools to work out that default codec business before it implements support for the element.

   And all of this is before we get into the differences in how browser vendors will execute the specification. That’s a whole ‘nother headache.

   We will be using Flash until clients are willing to pay for separate Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer video integration or until the HTML5 working group agrees on a default codec.

4. Adobe is working to bring Flash to other mobile platforms. As Adobe’s Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch explained, We are now on the verge of delivering Flash Player 10.1 for smartphones with all but one of the top manufacturers. This includes Google’s Android, RIM’s Blackberry, Nokia, Palm Pre and many others across form factors including not only smartphones but also tablets, netbooks, and internet-connected TVs. Could the iPhone and iPad’s lack of Flash support be a deciding factor in consumers’ decisions not to buy an Apple device?

My Prediction for Flash

I suspect that as HTML5 gains prominence, Flash will — eff that, it should — shift from an authoring environment for its proprietary SWF format to one that generates HTML, CSS, JS and SVG code for the browser. I think the building blocks for such software are in place. Flash Builder (formerly Flex Builder) for example, eliminates (most of) the need for FLA files. Perhaps developers will one day use a mix of ActionScript and JavaScript in the Flash Builder authoring environment to create web-ready assets and animation that don’t require a browser plug-in.

Mobile-friendly Web Development Right Now

Despite the fact that Flash is supposed to come to every other mobile platform, Apple’s decision to keep Flash off of the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch is not without impact. Apple still runs the smart phone market; in some ways they drive the mobile web. That means the prudent path is (still) progressive enhancement, and ensuring that your critical content and navigation are built using HTML.

So will I buy an iPad?

Nope. I have a laptop, a smart phone (a T-Mobile G1), a desktop and an iPod Touch. To me, the iPad is that weird spot between my smart phone or iPod Touch and a laptop with the convenience of neither. It doesn’t have the pocket-sized portability of my iPod Touch or my phone. And it doesn’t (yet) have the robust features of a laptop — USB ports, optical media drives, and the ability to install any app. I can’t justify the value for the price.

Besides, I still much prefer books to e-readers. I can sell books, trade books, leave books, loan books, and get books wet. I am not about to soak in the tub with a $300 device, but I would with an $11 book.

What do you think about the iPad, Apple’s decision, or the future of Flash and HTML5?

¹ Many of these apps could also be built using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, but there’s no money in that either.

² There are scripts available to make IE act right, of course. ExCanvas, for example, mimics support for the canvas element in IE. Simple HTML5 isn’t much different from HTML 4.01. You can actually forge ahead with HTML5 now if you don’t need advanced features like DOM Storage.

If Privacy Icons become widely adopted (and I think Mozilla is in a unique position to help make that happen) then the correlation of good companies using the icons and bad companies not using the icons becomes rather strong. If a privacy policy doesn’t include any icons it’s synonymous with that policy making no guarantees for not using your data for evil. The absence of Privacy Icons becomes stigmatic.

Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla, on how browsers and companies could make privacy policies more user-friendly through a “bolt-on” machine-readable icon system, similar to Creative Commons. [Via Webmonkey]

Firefox 3.6 supports multiple file input. This new capability allows you to get several files as input at once, using standard technologies. This is a big improvement, since you used to be constrained to one file at a time, or needed to use a third party (proprietary) application. This will be particularly useful, for example, for photo uploads.

From multiple file input in Firefox 3.6. The post contains code examples and a link to a demo. You’ll need the beta version of Firefox 3.6 to take advantage.

Also see: Proposed File API specification

The Web Storage API is basically cookies on steroids, a unhealthy dosage of steroids. Cookies are always a pain to work with. First of all you have the problem of setting, changing and deleting them. Typically solved by Googling and blindly relying on PPK’s solution. If that wasn’t enough, there’s the 4Kb limit that some of you have hit when you really don’t want to.

The Web Storage API gets around all of the hoops you have to jump through with cookies. Storage supports around 5Mb of data per domain (the spec’s recommendation, but it’s open to the browsers to implement anything they like) and splits in to two types of storage objects:

Sharp discusses the different kinds of storage available in HTML5, plus browser support and fall-backs (such as Flash’s Local Storage Objects), and how to make an offline app.

And after you’re done reading about the Web Storage API, install the BetterPrivacy extension for Firefox which protects your privacy by letting you manage DOM Storage and Local Storage Objects.

In order to release an iPhone application without having to submit it to Apple’s insane App Store process, developers could just use Web technologies and create Web apps instead of native apps.

In other words, iPhone developers are doing it wrong. By focusing on native applications, they are subjecting themselves to Apple’s approval process unnecessarily. Safari, he argues, is all most application developers need, and the reluctance of iPhone developers to embrace web technologies has more to do with snobbery than functionality.

The fundamental problem on the iPhone is not Apple’s App Store approval policies, but the iPhone developers’ arrogant disdain for Web technologies. … They dismiss Web technologies as toys for children. JavaScript is just this little language that cannot possibly compare to real technologies such as the one they’re using. HTML is too simple. Real programmers don’t do that stuff. As to Web developers, they are just glorified pixel-pushers that should in no circumstance be taken seriously.

I agree that most iPhone applications don’t need to be native ones. I also agree that many developers — not just iPhone developers — dismiss client-side programming as kid stuff.

I suspect, however, that iPhone developers really prefer native applications because they’re trying to make money. Apple’s App Store lets developers get paid and helps them protect their product with a degree of digital rights management the web doesn’t provide.

Yesterday the folks at Surfin’ Safari announced several new and/or improved features to its Web Inspector. Web Inspector is a debugging tool similar to Firebug and Page Speed or YSlow. These updates will be be available in the next version of Safari. To use them now, install a nightly build of WebKit.

The latest version includes:

• Improved Editing Element Attributes and Style Properties feature
• Ability to create and modify existing CSS rules and selectors
• View colors in short hex, full hex, RGB, HSL or its name (if available)
• Storage monitoring is now rendered in an editable data grid and includes cookie data
• Ajax debugging
• New keyboard shortcuts
• Better support of the Firebug Command Line API

There are several additional features that I haven’t mentioned here. Read the post for a more complete picture.

1. Not all fonts are licensed for embedding and linking on the web.
2. Major browser developers have differing philosophies about where the responsibility for license compliance should fall.

Microsoft, for example, has not implemented @font-face, in part, because it believes in protecting type foundries from the potential intellectual property violations of embedded fonts.^* Opera, Safari / WebKit, and Mozilla leave compliance to the developer and support @font-face property.

In late May, a Typekit private beta launch brought the issue of embedded fonts and licensing back to the forefront. Typekit is a hosted font service that allows developers to select from a library of type chosen and hosted by Typekit and licensed for the web.

Ars Technica speculated about the future of web typography in its July article, The hazy future of Web typography.

Late last month (October, 2009), type foundry House Industries announced its support for WOFF, stating that the format satisfies the needs and concerns of browser makers, web designers, and type foundries, [and] offers compression to speed page load times, freedom from thorny legacy issues, and inclusiveness (font outlines can be Postscript or TrueType).

That same day, Mozilla announced that WOFF support would be available in Firefox 3.6.

Today (November 2, 2009) Ars Technica features an article with more background on last month’s announcements.

More about embedded web fonts

• Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 is now available for download
• House Party (Zeldman’s round up)
• after Firefox 3.6 – new font control features for designers
• Mozilla Supports Web Open Font Format
• Typographic diversity for the web
• Seven Web Fonts showcases
• CSS @ Ten: The Next Big Thing
• An introduction to W3C Web Fonts

* Chris Wilson and Jeremy Keith had a rather heated debate about this subject at 2009′s South by Southwest “Browser Wars” panel. Chris Wilson, who was a part of the Internet Explorer development team at the time, made essentially this argument. Microsoft does, however, have its own format for embedding fonts on the web

Critical JavaScript vulnerability in Firefox 3.5

The vulnerability can be mitigated by disabling the JIT in the JavaScript engine. This post tells you how to do so.

3D CSS transforms available in Leopard via WebKit nightlies

The feature was already available in Safari 4 for Snow Leopard, but now it’s available for Leopard as well.

Sometimes when developing and testing a site, you need to clear your browser’s cache. Clearing the cache is particularly important when testing SWF files. Browsers tend to hold on to those like a pitbull on a chew toy.

Firefox makes it easy to clear your cache with its Clear Private Data feature (Tools > Clear Private Data). But by default, the Browsing History and Authenticated Sessions boxes are pre-checked in addition to the Cache box. If you just want to clear your cache, you have to uncheck those boxes and then click the “Clear Private Data Now” button.

That’s a pain in the touchas when you’re in a developing – uploading – testing loop. Luckily Firefox let’s you change that.

What to do

1. Enter about:config in the address bar. Click the “I’ll be careful, I promise” button if one appears.
2. In the Filter field, enter privacy.item. These are the current settings for the Clear Private Data box.
3. Change the settings for privacy.item.sessions and privacy.item.history from true to false by double-clicking.

Restart Firefox, then go to Tools > Clear Private Data. Cache will be the only pre-selected option.

So what can you do with Unite? Several things, including:

• Share files, including photo downloading and music streaming.
• Host chats with your friends.
• Run a web server for a simple web site.
• Leave or receive notes on your computer.

Unite requires an Opera account, and an alpha build of Opera 10b (Windows, Mac, Linux).

Opera Unite is a local web server, but it interacts with a proxy server. This means that end users don’t need to establish a firewall or set up port forwarding on their machines. They can just install Opera and go.

After starting a service, you can set three levels of access control: Public (open to anyone), Limited (open to anyone with a password), and Private (available to you). With file sharing and web serving, you also control which directory you want to make available.

Once you have made a directory available, you can send the url — in the form of http://computernickname.yourmyoperausername.operaunite.com/ — to your friends. It’s viewable in any browser, including mobile devices.

Don’t be a dummy: be a safe(r) Unite user

As with any service that lets users share their hard drive’s contents, Opera Unite can be a potential resource hog and security hole. Opera got it right by making these services easy to start or stop, and by supporting restricted access via password. Still, it’s up to users to understand how it all works.

For example, I stumbled across one user’s web server directory that hosted PHP files. Unite, however, is a simple and light-weight HTTP server. There is no PHP, which means that everything — including his database configuration details — is being served as plain text.

So there are two lessons learned:

1. Unite is a basic non-Apache server with no modules that means there’s no PHP, Perl, Python, or even server-side includes available.
2. Don’t share directories with sensitive data, and limit the number of directories that are exposed via Unite

Something else to know: Unite ties you in to the My Opera social network and makes other members aware that your services are running.

Is Unite a game-changer?

I think it depends on what the game is.

I don’t think Unite is compelling enough for most users to switch to Opera as their primary browser or to join the My Opera community. But I would not be surprised if it gained some traction with the geek set.

The concept of Opera Unite is pretty powerful. I can see this being useful as an impromptu office file sharing network, or to stream music from a computer at home to another at a friend’s house party.

Keep in mind that Unite also comes with a JavaScript API that supports file I/O (input/output). In a way, Opera is moving us closer to ubiquitous computing and the browser as OS.

And perhaps that’s the real story of Opera Unite: it is now dead-simple to give as much as you get from the web and use the skills you already have to build new tools.

Lately, the day job has had me busting booty on a Flash/ActionScript project that makes considerable use of the ExternalInterface class.

ExternalInterface allows Flash to communicate with its HTML container using JavaScript. It’s a groovy feature, but one that changes the development process a bit. Unlike straight-up Flash development, ExternalInterface requires you to test interaction between the movie and its container.

One way to do this is using the Firebug console. Set up a simple debug function embedded in your HTML or in an external JavaScript file: function debug(data){ console.log(data); }. Then pass troubleshooting data to it using ExternalInterface.call('debug','data you want to write'); just as you would with trace().

I even used this technique to dump XML data to the console. Works amazingly well.

A minor drawback: compiler errors won’t be written to the console. Instead you will see a generic error message, and your movie won’t load.

Using Flash Tracer

For a more robust option, try Flash Tracer, a Firefox extension by Alessandro Crugnola. Flash Tracer uses native Flash logging to deliver trace() messages directly to the browser. To use it, you’ll need to install a debug version of the Flash Player.

Using LiveHTTPHeaders

Sometimes when sending and receiving data to and from a server, you can’t tell what’s wrong by looking at your Flash application. There could be an error in your server side code. Or perhaps there’s a problem with the data you’re sending. This is where LiveHTTPHeaders comes in handy.

LiveHTTPHeaders shows both browser-and-Flash request headers and server response headers. It also sends encoded GET and POST data from HTML forms or ActionScript URLRequest() / URLVariables() / URLLoader() operations.

This extension won’t show the actual data the server has returned. But you can use it to spot things like invisible line break characters and internal server errors.

Related posts:

• Essential Firefox Extensions
• My new favorite Firefox extensions
• Clearing LoadVars() in ActionScript
• OurIndustryIsBroken.com: Tracking site users and traffic with PHP, MySQL and ActionScript

I think niche browsers are a bad idea to start with. Browsers are commodities. For most computer users, their browser of choice is the one that came installed by default on their computer. Inertia, technophobia, and a lack of pressing need means they just use what’s there. Even getting advanced computer users to switch browsers requires a compelling reason to do so. Flock, for example, still isn’t particularly mainstream, despite it’s brilliant integration of services like MySpace and Facebook.

Ultimately, all anyone needs — dare I say wants — a browser to do is display whatever content she or he is trying to view, display it quickly, display it well, and not crash with any sort of regularity.

But let’s say Blackbird is an even more brilliant reworking of what is, in my opinion, the world’s greatest browser. Your problem is still one of positioning. African Americans Are. Too. Diverse. To. Be. A. Single. Market. Niche.

You would think black people would know this better than anyone. Though perhaps my assumption is just as faulty as yours. Maybe all 36 million of us really are interested in the same dozen or so sites, but I doubt it.

The problem with this sort of broad-based ethnic marketing — and I’ll add to that gender marketing — is that it tries to fit this wide range of ages, incomes, regions, nationalities, religious affiliations, and races* into this single, one-size-doesn’t-really-fit-all box.

What speaks to me will not speak to my senior-citizen parents. Gospel-themed anything will not work for my cousin who wasn’t raised in the church and converted to Islam a decade ago. Injecting Harriet Tubman or Martin Luther King into the conversation won’t resonate with Black Caribbean or African immigrants who came here by choice, some not all that long ago. Hell, there are even subtle differences of interest and experience between black folks who went to HBCUs and predominantly white universities.

In other words, what you think is of interest to African Americans probably isn’t of interest to most of us. What’s more, the most techno-literate black folks — you know, those computer users who are sophisticated enough to download and install another browser — already know how to use Firefox and Google. Some of us even use Macs. And while I wish y’all success, the early buzz indicates that almost nobody, not even the black folks, are digging this browser.

Love,

Tiffany

Elsewhere

• Blackbird Is A Custom Browser For African Americans Built On Top Of Mozilla on TechCrunch.com
• Blackbird, The First Web Browser for African-Americans by Karsh on BlackGayBlogger.com
• Blackbird: The African-American Web Browser from GreasyGuide.com
• Blackbird: The African American Web Browser and Philanthropy on the Web From Blog Around Harlem
• Blackbird: I was not waiting for this moment to arise by Cecily

*P.S.: I say “races,” even though I’m talking about black folks, because in the U.S., black ancestry legally and usually culturally means you’re racially black. This applies even if you are of mixed parentage, as Malcolm Gladwell is, or have a non-black grandparent, such as Ming and Aoki Lee (Russell Simmons and Kimora Lee’s daughters).

* P.P.S.: This is also some bullsh*t