• 200703 May

    Apologies to all for the delay between posts, the site authors are busy with jobs, family and holidays. We’ll have some new content very shortly. In the meantime, here’s a quick browser update.

    Based on my own statistics – and these are not, of course, meant to be in any way representative – April saw a pretty decent leap for IE7; its share of the market rose to 21.1%, up from 18.6% the month before. Even more encouraging, IE6 fell to 46.5% after its shock rise to 50.6% last month.

    Firefox’s share continues on a slow decline since I began my figures; from a high of 16.9% in November, it falls to 14.8% in the latest figures.

    Microsoft were noticeably guarded with details of changes in future versions of IE at their recent MIX event, although hints were dropped that we’d see improvements to CSS, RSS, and AJAX, and that Microformats could be on their way.

    In an effort to tie this post to the theme of this blog, let me ask a question: what three CSS3 features would you most like to see in IE8?

    Update: Maybe I should reword the question: With the presumption that all outstanding CSS2 bugs are removed, and all remaining CSS2 declarations implemented, what CSS3 features would you most like to see in IE8?

  • 200703 Apr

    I like to keep track of browser market share, specifically the growth of IE7, so that I can tell when its new CSS features become mainstream enough to start using. This month, I had a bit of a shock.

    I’ve based my figures on eight different websites I manage, from personal blogs to international businesses, to try and get a broad range of figures – although they are not, of course, meant to be definitive in any way. I’ve tracked figures back for six months – IE7 was launched in October 2006 – and only included sites with that much historical data.

    The figures (click here to see the graph) didn’t surprise me at first. IE7 started at 1.6% in October, had a huge boost to 12.1% in December, and growth has slowed since. Most of its share came at the expense of IE6, which started off with 60.8% and was down to 47.2% by February. But then, in March, IE6′s share increased to 50.6%. I thought I could put this down to an anomaly on one site skewing the results, but in 6 of the 8 sites I monitored, the result was the same – an increase in usage over the last month.

    I can’t explain it. It’s like it just refuses to lay down and die.

    If we want to move the web forward, we need to encourage people to drop IE6 as soon as possible. As far as I’m concerned, there are very few reasons to still be using it; either you work for a company that deploys software centrally and hasn’t upgraded yet, you’re a developer testing your code, or you don’t really know what a browser is and you’re unaware that other choices are available.

    I’m assuming that a reader of this article is a web developer interested in CSS3. If we want to start using all the new opportunities that it creates, we need to kill off legacy browsers that don’t support it. If you’re using IE6 and you have any option whatsoever, switch to a better browser; IE7 at the very least. If you know someone who still uses IE6 and has any option whatsoever, get them upgraded. Evangelise all the options; Firefox, Opera, Flock, whatever; get people switching. Let’s kill this dinosaur off and let the fast mammals evolve to take its place.

  • 200701 Mar

    My client wanted a page showing photographs of all their staff, and the design called for them to be semi-opaque against the page background, going fully opaque on mouseover, like so:

    opacity.png

    What would be the best way to do this?

    One would be to make an image sprite of the images two states:

    opacity_sprite.png

    And use it as background-image on the element, swapping to the other state on :hover. One small problem with this is that IE6 only supports :hover on the a tag; another is that because the results are being pulled from a database, you’d have to write a dynamic stylesheet as well, to call the swap on all staff photos.

    Another option would be to create two separate images of the original, one for each state, and write a Javascript function to swap them over on mouseover.

    There are other solutions as well, but none of them are the best way; the best way is to place them in the page with img, then use the CSS3 opacity declaration for the switch, as so:

    img { opacity: 0.6; }
    img:hover { opacity: 1; }

    Two short lines of code, much quicker, the same effect without any of the hassle.

    As with the rest of CSS3, however, one big drawback: no native support in the IE family. It works on just about every other major browser, however.

  • 200721 Feb

    A quick run through the visitor logs of 10 websites I run or manage shows that Internet Explorer 7 usage is still growing, although it’s slowed down considerably since the boom of December 2006 when Microsoft released it into the automatic update programme.

    Average share for the month of February (to date) is 18.4%; the number varies from 9% to 26%. These figures are from a range of different sites, from personal blogs to full corporate websites, and are intended to be indicative, not definitive.

    TheCounter.com puts the figure at 24%; Browser News provides a range between 14% and 25%.

    I think 20% is probably a reasonable estimate; that’s one fifth of the market. It’s pretty big, but even with Firefox’s share of around 15% and Safari’s 5% or so (as well as the smaller market share of Opera and others) that means that less than 50% of the surfing public use a browser with even the most basic CSS3 functionality.

  • 200709 Feb

    Mozilla released Gran Paradiso alpha 2, which is what will become Firefox 3. Running it through the CSS selectors testsuite shows there’s been a few improvements. It passed 32 out of the 43 selectors. Only 4 are buggy and 7 unsupported. That’s not a big improvement over Firefox 2.0.0.1, as that browser passes 26 of the 43, with 10 buggy and the same number of unsupported selectors. It looks like they’ve debugged issues with their attribute selectors so far, but this is only an alpha so there’s likely lots of improvements yet to come.

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