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SVG/Canvas Marketshare: July 2010

Jeff — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 03:18:31 +0000

SVGI’ve updated my marketshare spreadsheet for July 2010 charting the percentage of web users who can view SVG and Canvas: 41.82%

Note that this number is lower than last month’s because I could not include hitslink.com stats (they’ve put their stats behind a pay-wall now). If anyone knows of a better source of stats, let me know.

P.S. This figure does not take into account any user that has a SVG plugin installed or authors who have used the excellent SVG Web or excanvas shims, so this is really a worst-case number.

SVG/Canvas Marketshare: June 2010

Jeff — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 06:47:33 +0000

[clipart]I’ve updated my marketshare spreadsheet for June 2010 charting the percentage of web users who can view SVG and Canvas: 41.49%

Note that I added “Canvas” back into the title of these blog posts, now that it is public that IE9 is supporting the HTML5 <canvas> element. I’ve also added SVG-as-an-image (usable inside <img> or as a CSS background-image), since that’s something that seems likely to be supported soon by all browsers (Firefox 4, IE9).

P.S. This figure does not take into account any user that has a SVG plugin installed or authors who have used the excellent SVG Web or excanvas shims, so this is really a worst-case number.

IE9: No longer failing

Jeff — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 16:24:26 +0000

[clipart]Ok, after getting IE9 preview 3 installed last night, I was able to update my SVG scorechart. I’m pleased to say that I would now unequivocally classify IE9 as a browser that supports SVG. Supporting gradients, patterns, masking, clipping and more actually gained them quite a few points.

I’m also pleased to see that they support conditional processing (the <switch> element) so you can see at a rough glance what feature strings they claim to support by accessing this page I made years ago. Not a bad feature set for first time out! Kudos to the IE team!

And they support <canvas> too!

In my brief look at IE9 while running through the SVG tests, I would say their biggest areas to improve on before final release are text (especially text selection) and DOM. Though Alexis assures me that they do pass quite a number of SVG torture tests.

Hey, now that we have all major browsers supporting basic SVG rendering, it’s really time to ramp up the effort on SVG Torture Tests to ensure DOM coverage and corner cases. We are looking for someone to lead this activity in the SVG Interest Group.

Oh, and I would love to have SVG-edit working in IE9.

IE9 Preview 3 SVG Score?

Jeff — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 05:37:41 +0000

[clipart]Nope!

I would love to tell you that I was able to install and test IE9 Platform 3 tonight. There seems to be a lot of good things in there (SVG improvements, canvas, audio, video) but the main problem is that it’s built on the fragile Windows stack. That’s not to say that other OS stacks aren’t fragile, but this is just tonight’s frustration.

Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit Happy Meal with extra cheese. Sony Vaio laptop.

Download and run iepreview.msi.

The installer downloads and tries to install KB2120976, KB2028560, KB2028551 first.

In the process of doing this, it aborts and says:

The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2739.

The failure window in the installation wizard has an “Installation Help” button. This button does nothing.

Thanks for the help!

Do a little sniffing around the web and find this page which tells me to run regsvr32 from an elevated command-line prompt to register the JScript DLL.

I do that.

Installer gives me the same exact error.

Then I decide to look at each one of the KB security patches. Each one tells me that I have to “Install the Genuine Windows Validation Component”. No matter what browser I try this in, it never seems to take – I always end up clicking on “Genuine Windows Validation, Alternate Method”. This gives me an .exe that I run that gives me a code to punch into a web form that tells Microsoft that I have a non-pirated copy of their software so I should be eligible to download software that will fix their software.

Right.

In each one of these patches, I get a dialog box that says

The update is not applicable to your computer

So this must be why the installer is failing, I guess? Maybe I could dig into why this problem is occurring, and hack around it. Let me just look at the source of the installer… oh wait…

So is this a broken installer? I’m not the only person who’s had this problem so far… go to the IEBlog announcement and search for ‘2739′.

P.S. I also love how the IEBlog redesign doesn’t let me link to individual comments anymore.

P.P.S. I am really trying to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt here, but c’mon…

Change of Affiliation

Jeff — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 17:53:01 +0000

[clipart]This is just to let everyone know that I’ve changed affiliations. I’m no longer working at Motorola, but at Google. From this blog’s perspective, nothing changes really – as always my opinions here are my own and not those of my employer.

SVG Marketshare: May 2010

Jeff — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 05:46:05 +0000

[clipart]I’ve updated my marketshare spreadsheet for May 2010 charting the percentage of web users who can view SVG: 40.55%

P.S. This figure does not take into account any user that has a SVG plugin installed or authors who have used the excellent SVG Web shim, so this is really a worst-case number.

Moving Right Along

Jeff — Fri, 07 May 2010 22:28:37 +0000

[clipart]When I started programming it was on the Commodore 64 (uh oh, you know this is going to be a long story – go take a piss first). I started with Basic and then eventually moved to assembly language to try and write a Bard’s Tale clone with a friend. We got pretty far. I just came across the notebooks where I had scribbled all those assembly routines too – great times! But by the time we got close to having something we could call a game, Commodore had lost the battle and the IBM PC clone market was taking off. Different instruction set, different hardware and capabilities. Doh!

[clipart]My next foray into the world of programming was DOS-based in C/C++ using Borland’s Graphics Interface (BGI). I even wrote an Expanded Memory manager at one point when 640kb of RAM just wasn’t enough. Borland had a great compiler for students of C/C++, everyone was using it and it was affordable, so I didn’t really think twice about using Borland’s technologies. Plus, it was all I had.

[clipart]When it became obvious that DOS had lost the battle and the world was moving to Microsoft Windows, I moved on again. First with Borland’s long-forgotten Object Windows Library (OWL) and then, when it was clear that Borland itself had lost the battle, I moved on to to the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) and then just straight access to the Win32 API. At that time I had Microsoft Visual Studio 6 – what an awesome IDE.

[clipart]Windows GDI lacked power so I eventually moved on to Microsoft’s DirectX (DirectDraw and then Direct3D). This was at a time when the entire known computing world was using Microsoft Windows. I barely thought twice about using Microsoft technologies. You go where the technology can be accessed.

[clipart]Along the way, I picked up a little of Sun’s Java at work because the entire known computing world was predicting how big it would be. Not too soon after that IE6 plateau’d and Microsoft had started really losing developers to Java, Flash and the web. Microsoft needed to “invigorate” their platform. I think “invigorate” is another word for “developers are way sick of the Win32 API, how can we win them back?” Markup alongside managed code was to be the future. They introduced C# and started work on Avalon which became Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight.

Except this time I didn’t go along for that ride. I kind of got tired of learning some new technology in my spare time, becoming proficient enough to write non-trivial software and then having the ecosystem replaced by something else. I had also started getting interested in open source and cross-platform capabilities because Linux was getting a lot of nerd-love and Microsoft distrust was so high.

[clipart]Sadly, my learned skills in the Win32 API, GDI, MFC are now completely useless to me. DirectX is becoming less and less relevant with the rise of alternative platforms. Even supposedly cross-platform frameworks like Qt, Java and SDL mean that you are locked out of some mobile platforms.

So what’s the point of my illustrious technology roll call and rambling history above? I wasn’t trying to put you to sleep there, promise.

Why do I have to keep learning technologies only to have them killed or moved around or not accessible on major platforms? I’d rather take already-learned skills and apply them to a new area. And putting all your eggs in one company’s basket just doesn’t seem like a good idea to me. I don’t care if that company is Commodore, Borland, Sun, Oracle, Trolltech, Nokia, Microsoft, Apple, Google or <insert name here>.

And that’s why I believe the Web will eventually win as The Platform: No one company controls it – they all contribute. JavaScript and DOM and CSS skills can now be applied to graphics as well as hyper-text. Fonts. 3D graphics. Video. Audio. Access to the file system. New APIs for accessing device capabilities (like touch screens, accelerometers, webcams). And remarkably, all browsers seem to be generally moving in the same direction, with innovations being fed back into stream.

No device ships without a browser – it would be suicide. The Web is universal. As is HTML (where HTML = a collection of web technologies).

[clipart]What we have here is a platform that is continuously and incrementally evolving, has loosely-coupled technologies, that no one company controls, requires zero install from the user and is ubiquitous. And it grew from just these tiny little seeds sown in the previous decade. That’s poetry.

Me like.

SVG Marketshare: April 2010

Jeff — Thu, 06 May 2010 19:12:56 +0000

[clipart]I’ve updated my marketshare spreadsheet for April 2010 charting the percentage of web users who can view SVG: 40.26%

P.S. This figure does not take into account any user that has a SVG plugin installed or authors who have used the excellent SVG Web shim, so this is really a worst-case number.

Full Flash in Froyo

Jeff — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 04:32:11 +0000

[clipart][clipart]While it sounds like the name of a bad porno, it’s clearly good marketing strategy by Google to bring content authors to the Android platform and to court tool-maker Adobe.

But I still say that the introduction of the iPad is a signal of doom for Flash-as-a-format. On the other hand, as Adobe gets more serious about producing HTML5, SVG, Canvas, JavaScript from their Flash IDE, well…

kthoom!

Jeff — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 12:55:51 +0000

[clipart]Sometimes I get an idea and I just have to see it through to a point where it will let my brain go. At work Thursday we were all slobbering over Steve’s iPad and someone brought up how cool the Marvel app is. I had to admit it was much nicer than any piece of software I’d used for viewing comics before on my laptop.

In the meantime, I’ve been carefully watching WebKit creep closer and closer to implementing the W3C File API (Go Kinuko!). Something I’ve been eagerly waiting for more browsers to do so you can open up local files in SVG-edit.

And then it hit me.

Why not a comic book reader done directly in the browser?

In case you don’t know, comic book archive files are just ZIP or RAR files containing JPEG images. Browsers can handle images. Some browsers can now handle opening local files. Even binary ones. So theoretically you could write unzip/unrar in pure JavaScript, extract the JPEGs, turn them into data: URIs and shove them into an <image> element. You can even do the unzipping in a separate thread using Web Workers.

Theoretically.

kthoom was how far I was able to get in a weekend.

Some limitations:

Unzipping is slow. None of the code has been optimized yet and I’m probably doing a lot of really stupid things.
Only supports CBZ files, not CBR files at the moment – I am accepting patches
Unzipping is really slow. I need to provide visual progress reporting from the Web Worker thread, I know.
kthoom will crash Firefox 3.6 about half the time. Firefox nightly (3.7) seems to handle it just fine. I opened this bug.
Did I mention that unzipping is slow?

If I’m honest, this was really an exercise to see just how easy/hard it would be to do something like this in the browser – and to get some hands-on experience with Web Workers. And hey, I’m not the first or even second person to think of doing unzip/deflate in JavaScript either.

It was my first experience writing JavaScript to handle binary files. It was fun. It took a weekend.

Some essential tools: Firebug, a hex editor, pen & paper, a clear mind, patience.

Now swinging my attention back to stuff I should be working on…