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Tabbing systems are becoming increasingly popular in all forms of web design, not just Wordpress. This is expected, as they are a very unique and effective way of displaying alot of content in a small amount of space. Common uses of tabs in Wordpress include displaying popular posts, recent comments, post categories, etc, etc… You get the idea. Here are some of the more popular solutions to getting yourself a fully-functional tabbing system in just a few minutes:

1. StereoTabs – Simple tabbing system, part of the scriptaculous library.
2. DOMTabs – I’ve heard good things about this system.
3. TabMenu – Another great and lightweight tabbing system.
4. Tabifier – Another lightweight javascript tabbing script.
5. UI Tabs – Powerful tabbing system run off of jQuery.

The jQuery UI team has announced today, the release of v1.7 of their effects and UI controls framework. They have also opened up greater communication with the community via the new development wiki.

There’s a ton of new stuff in 1.7. They’ve fixed hundreds of bugs since 1.5.3 and are introducing many new features, a better core architecture, and major theming improvements.

The key new features include:

• A new site dedicated to the jQuery UI project
• jQuery 1.3 compatibility
• Revamped and optimized plugins
• A new extensible CSS framework
• Major enhancements to the Themeroller theming applicaton
• Demos & Documentation including offline support
• Bundled themes

The introduction of the new ThemeRoller-ready CSS framework is especially important as it not only allows for easy theming of included jQuery UI but also allows plugin developers to create their own extensions that can take advantage of ThemeRoller’s visual theming capabilities.

This new release is immediately available for download and the team has provided a Getting Started with jQuery UI page to help get new users up to speed quickly.

Read more on the new release on Ajaxian.

Proving itself a staggering 42 times faster at rendering JavaScript than IE 7, our benchmarks confirm Apple’s Safari 4 browser, released in beta Tuesday, is the fastest browser on the planet. In fact, it beat Google’s Chrome, Firefox 3, Opera 9.6 and even Mozilla’s developmental Minefield browser. ZDNET used the SunSpider suite of JavaScript tests to determine which browser was the quickest, and the Safari 4 beat every browser in terms of speed, on both a PC running Windows XP SP2, and a Mac running OS X 10.6 with all updates applied.

Below are the actual figures if you want to see how all seven browsers scored against each other, but for quick reference we determined on a PC that Safari was a whopping 42 times faster than Internet Explorer 7, just over six times faster than Internet Explorer 8, 3.5 times faster than Firefox 3, and 1.2 times faster than Google Chrome. Here’s Safari versus the rest, excluding IE 7:

Read the rest of this entry »

Long ago the king of the browsers was Netscape. Microsoft turned their massive shift very quickly once they realized exactly how important the browser would be to the future of computing and brought Internet Explorer in line with Netscape… and then the browser wars began. As a web developer I can tell you those years SUUUCKED. Each company would include “features” that only worked with their browser, build web apps when the web was young was difficult (I realize this still exists, but nothing like it did back in the day).

Last month, Microsoft’s market share in the browser dropped below 70% for the first time in eight years, while Mozilla broke the 20% barrier for the first time in its history. Initial data sets provided by Net Applications suggest that the Internet Explorer will drop once again significantly in December to below 69% and Mozilla will climb above 21%.

This doesn’t mean IE is out… 69% is still the lions share but it shows that other browsers are making in-roads to Microsoft’s stranglehold on browser marketshare.  The contenders are FireFox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera. FireFox is clearly in the lead as the primary competitor to IE. I personally use FireFox as my daily browser; when the next release comes out and their uber JavaScript engine is in place I can’t see myself going back to IE for anything unless it requires it. Chrome has the mighty Google backing it… it seems Google can do very little wrong lately and Chrome fits nicely into their long term strategy. However, Chrome is still immature in comparison to FireFox at this point.

For crazy detailed stats on each browser gain, decline, etc check out How serious is the market share loss of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer? at TGDaily.com.

I agree with the summary of the authors of the article… I’m stunned at how Microsoft is just letting this happen. Web apps may not be able to counter desktop apps yet (ok GMail is CLOSE… if they’d just get the contacts to sync correctly!); let’s face it… Photoshop via the web ain’t happening anytime soon. However, more and more applications are moving to the cloud. Google understands this and is pushing it agressively, MICROSOFT knows this and is building out cloud architecture… so I’m completely baffled as to why they would allow this to happen. IE8 beta’s appear to be a dude… slow, proprietary, and still not comforming to standards. Whereas the new-comers are quick, have excellent plugin architectures, the new rendering engines used in Chrome and the next release of FireFox make “web 2.0″ site rawk. I guess the best we can hope for at this point is that Microsoft has a card up it’s sleeve for when Windows 7 comes out.

Cyber Nations is a free persistent browser-based nation simulation game. Create a nation anywhere in the world and decide how you will rule your people by choosing a government type, a national religion, ethnicity, tax rate, currency type, and more in this new geo-political, nation, and government simulator. Build your empire by purchasing infrastructure to support your citizens, land to expand your borders, technology to increase your nation’s effectiveness, military to defend your interests, and develop national improvements and wonders to build your nation according to your choosing.

Declare war on others and purchase from a wide variety of military options including soldiers and tanks used to defend against and attack your enemies, cruise missiles to bomb their cities, and nuclear weapons to bring wrath upon those who dare cross you. View your nation on real world maps and watch as your borders expand (or recede) over time. Communicate with other nations through private internal messages or discuss and debate issues in the Cyber Nations Forums. Send foreign aid packages and trade with other nations to grow your nation and improve your status in the Cyber Nations world.

Cyber Nations is an Internet web based game about simulating nation building and management and will require you to exercise your management skills on a day to day basis. You can play Cyber Nations with most modern web browsers that have JavaScript enabled. Cyber Nations runs 24/7 so even while you are not online your nation will still be active allowing other players to interact with you through trade offers, foreign aid offers, war declarations, private messages, and much more.

Visit the Cyber Nation Forums where there is a very active community ready to help and answer your questions or the Cyber Nations Wiki for lots more information as well.

Cyber Nations, A nation simulation game