My Personal View of Browser Market Share is Pretty Sweet- Firefox Rules, Chrome is Massive, IE6 is Nearly Dead

January 26th, 2010 by Rob Larsen

Here are the numbers for DrunkenFist.com in the year 2009. There were 614,333 visits to that domain last year and the top browsers broke down like this:

Browser # of Visits % of Visits
Firefox 342429 55%
Internet Explorer 162977 26%
Chrome 35801 5.8%
Safari 33545 5.4%
Opera 22826 3.7%

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What I Read This Week (jQuery's live(), algorithms, IE8 + VPN, Chrome )

December 9th, 2009 by Rob Larsen

These are the posts that have kept me engaged during my quiet moments this week.

Demystifying jQuery .live() and why it’s generally faster than .bind()

A short article looking at jQuery's .live().

List of Algorithms

Just what it says it is- a big-ass list of algorithms. I wish more had source code.

Using a VPN Clobbers IE 8 Performance

The folks at HttpWatch detail the ins and outs of the way that IE8 handles their enhanced connection rules. The browser is set to use 6 open connections, but only when a broadband connection is in use, so there are situations where it can fall back to using just 2.

(down)Loading JavaScript as strings
Steve Souders is a font of performance wisdom. I wish I'd been able to check out the Velocity Online Conference today.

Technically speaking, what makes Google Chrome fast?
Front end engineers can learn much from the people who make browsers. That's the case here. The video content is excellent.

Computer science in JavaScript: Base64 encoding
This is a great series, moving the discussion of JS beyond the browser and the DOM and into a more primary, and therefore really interesting, realm.

Want to Test Your Site Without a Mouse For Accessibility's Sake? These Keyboard Shortcuts Will Help

November 30th, 2009 by Rob Larsen

Once thing that's vital to testing the accessibility of a web app or site is running through it without using a mouse. If you can successfully work a site or app without touching the mouse, you've gone a long way towards ensuring that your site is available to a wide range of people and devices.

One thing that's difficult about that process is most of us rely far too much on the mouse when browsing. Which is where these lists of keyboard shortcuts for Firefox, and Internet Explorer come in handy.
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getElementsByTagName Namespace Prefix Strangeness in Safari/Chrome/WebKit

July 7th, 2009 by Rob Larsen

Is It Me or the Browser?

I had a Safari bug on a project I'm rushing to get out the door. We're using a Flickr feed to populate a div with link+thumbnail to some flickr images. In Firefox/Internet Explorer I simply did the following to build the links:

flickr : function(obj) {
//get the full list of items
	var items = obj.getElementsByTagName("item");
//make sure it's not empty
	if (items.length > 0 ) {
//start the HTML block
		var blob = "<div id='flickrFeed'>";
//loop through the items (we only want 5) and build some links)
		for (var i = 0; i< 5 ; i++) {
//get the link
			var flink = items[i].getElementsByTagName("link")[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue; 
//get the thumbnail
			var flurl = items[i].getElementsByTagName("media:thumbnail")[0].getAttribute("url");
//smash them into the string
			blob+="<a href='"+flink+"'><img height='75' width='75' src='"+flurl+"' /></a>";
		};
//close the div
		blob+="</div>";
//pop it onto the shelf, for later use
		$("hyperspace").innerHTML+=blob;
	} else {
//if there's somethign wrong with the feed, go to default contentk
		social.fallBack.flickr(); 
	}
}

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