As per these requests I made a screencast of running the SVG video demos on Opera 9.5. My apologies for the crappy video - it's only my second attempt. Also, I should stress that the framerate of the video on Opera is perfect (any jitteriness is the screencast's fault, not Opera's).
The Opera web browser really puts the other guys to shame when implementing open standards. I wholeheartedly agree with Doug that it's a shame that I can't customize Opera's chrome the way I can with Firefox (you can only go so far with User JavaScript and widgets) - it would easily become my default browser (and not just the browser I test advanced features in). Anyway, those guys at Opera have released a development build of Opera 9.5 that supports video in the browser. This is a big step forward for the open web. Read the rest of this entry ...
How many times have you told a friend or colleague "Go to http://example.com/some/doc and search for XXXX" ? I do it a lot actually. Ideally web pages should identify significant sections of a web page with identifiers (id="foo") so that you can link to http://example.com/some/doc/#foo, but the problem is that not everyone follows this practice. In fact, there are a lot of big specification documents where you'd like to point someone to a specific paragraph to save someone time and encourage them to actually visit the link and read it. This becomes increasingly important as the mobile web accelerates and small screens with harder-to-use keyboards become more prevalent. I hope this Firefox extension will help. Read the rest of this entry ...
Here are a few links to keep you busy:
- There appears to be a formal agreement established between Microsoft and Novell to develop and support the Linux-based version of Microsoft's Silverlight, called Moonlight.
- Speaking of Microsoft, Alex Russell of Dojo speaks of how poorly the Microsoft IE team has communicated future plans. I agree. It's not a way to build trust among web developers who you've pissed off for so long. Where's the news on the next version of IE after 7?
- Speaking of web browsers, Apple announced the iPodTouch, which will soon put WiFi web browsing capabilities (via Safari) into the hands of many a music geek. Couple that with the iPhone now selling for $200 less and I believe that Safari is soon going to be one of the most widely used browsers out there in the Mobile Web, competing head-to-head with the Opera Mini. When Safari 3 gets out of Beta and is distributed to its millions of users, we'll suddenly see a huge increase in the number of users that can view SVG.
- Speaking of Opera, I mentioned yesterday that Opera 9.5 Alpha 1 was out. Here are some interesting performance results, though Mozilla evangelist Asa Dotzler is quick to point out that Opera still lacks an auto-update feature.
That's it for now.
I'm pretty happy with the performance of the Opera 9.5 Alpha 1 preview (Codename "Kestrel" - download here). So happy that I decided to finally try and figure out how to make a screencast today. Read the rest of this entry ...