Thoughts On Web

After IE8, Microsoft is working hard to improve their Browser’s Javascript performance. The new browser had been in development only for the last three weeks, since microsoft released Windows 7.

Microsoft today claimed that its next browser, Internet Explorer 9 (IE9), has nearly closed the JavaScript performance gap between itself and rivals made by Mozilla and Google, even though the browser has been in development only a few weeks.

Microsoft dug a huge hole when it mostly abandoned IE6 and the Web from 2001 until 2006. Their early efforts at ramping back up with IE7 were a big disappointment to most Web developers and while their efforts with IE8 were much better, they’re still at least a full generation behind the modern browsers.

Microsoft’s IE8, and to an even greater extent, IE7 and the older-but-still-widely-used IE6, have been left in the dust on JavaScript performance by rivals, particularly Mozilla’s Firefox, Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari. The latter two are built atop the open-source WebKit rendering engine.

IE9 had improved its Acid3 score. They have made some improvements in IE9, which now scores 32 out of 100. IE8, they scored 24 out of 100. Current builds of Chrome, Safari and Opera all score 100, while Firefox 3.6, which is still in beta, makes it to 92 out of 100.

Release schedule for IE9, or public preview are not yet available.

Related Links:

• An Early Look At IE9 for Developers
• Microsoft: IE8 faster than Firefox, Chrome

There are huge list of suggestion topics for google labs.

I added below two suggestion the to list of topics to increase the usability of the gmail.

1. Provide Show/Hide link(or button) for the sidebar.
2. Provide the Preview pane to quickly read mails.

Provide Show/Hide link(or button) for the sidebar.
By toggling this link we can get maximum space for the mails so that we can get more space for reading mails; which further can be useful for my second suggestion.

Provide the Preview pane to quickly read mails.
I’m a big fan of Gmail, and prefer to use it over Outlook, but the feature to preview a received
mail would be most welcome. I get tons of spam and unwanted mails from friends as well (chain letters, etc.) and its boring to have to open them to see if they are relevant.It is a critical attribute to working productively. Gmail just gets increasingly more frustrating by the day as I have to click into a message and back out. Its unnecessary.

My suggestion is to make the inbox window splitted into two either horizontally or vertically (like outlook client). one pane could be used for listing the mail items another one for preview the mail. Single click on the mail subject opens the mail in preview pane. (user has all the options like forward, reply, reply to all, delete).Double click on the mail opens in full window. The proposed functionality is same as the outlook client , i hope this feature would  improve the usability of gmail.

If you have any suggestions post it in google lab suggestion.

Would you like to setup your website project in single click, Deploy is the tool for you.

Each time you get ready to begin a site, you have to add certain things to each page:

• Declaring Document Type Declaration (DTD – XHTML Strict, Transitional, etc)
• Declaring Page encoding (UTF-8, etc)
• Link your stylesheets (CSS)
• Import/link your javascript library or choice

You may also add folders in your work directory for:

• PHP includes
• Images
• Flash
• etc

All of these things are common for most of the web develpers. Even those these things are pretty straightforward, making a new file, or copying and pasting from a previous project can take up valuable time better we spent those times on building our site code.

Generate Code With Deploy

Deploy is a free, open source, online tool which allows users to quickly deploy a web project folder in only a couple seconds.

Deploy gives you a dead-easy way of choosing your DOCTYPE, linking CSS, importing the jQuery library (and common plugins) and creating common file folders.

After choosing those options hit the “Deploy” button; The tool will generate the ZIP file for easy download. You can also bookmark the page and regenerate the code again without having to choose the options all over again.

Deploy’s bookmarking feature allows the user to go through the form only one time and then bookmarking the next page (deploy.php). When the user returns to that bookmark it instantly generates another .zip folder with all the settings the user had previously entered.

If you have a Mac you could add that bookmark to your dock and it’s only a click away. Windows and Linux users could also add the bookmark to their desktop and it will always be right there waiting.

Project Deploy is a great time-saving tool for any web designer.

Web page load time is an important factor in web design and development, not only web developers but bloggers and site owners need to optimize their web pages so they load faster or else retaining users will be difficult.

There are many tools which analyze web pages and show you ways to improve load times. Firebug for Firefox is a useful plug-in for analyzing web page CSS, JavaScript, DOM and other stuff.

Google has released a Firefox addon called Page Speed that is integrated with Firebug.  The Page speed add-on when installed adds tabs to Firebug console. Yahoo has a similar addon called YSlow for Firebug that analyzes web pages and suggests improvements for performance of web pages.

Page Speed - firebug tab in action

You can analyze web page performance using this add-on, click on “Analyze Performance” button in the page speed tab in firebug. It gives optimization tips upon examining the web pages. The tips ranges from highly recommended, moderate to least. These tips will provide short description and clicking on the link will take you to page speed documentation where you can read more on how to optimize your site.

The Show Resources link will show you the objects loaded in the web page with the type of the object, file size and transfer size. You might find some scripts and images that are too heavy here, better to get rid of them or minimize them.