PaulSpoerry.com

Once you learn markup, backend coding, some SQL… the biggest pain in the butt as a web developer is when a client calls and says “hey this doesn’t look right” when in fact it looks just fine on your machine. Turns out they have IE6 (why… WHY would they not upgrade… but they are the client… so we fix it to work with IE6). Enter Xenocode.

The Xenocode Browser Sandbox is a game-changer for browser testing on Windows-based machines. With a single click of your mouse you can have an open and working browser without any installation. You can test in various IE versions, Firefox, Google Chrome, and even Safari. And really test, too, not just screenshots.

http://www.xenocode.com/browsers/

Recently published Market Share statistics show the browser down almost 7% from the beginning of last year, continuing to slide down as time goes on. On the other hand, open source browsers such as Firefox and Google Chrome are constantly increasing. Firefox’s market share increased by about 4% in 2008, and Chrome reached over 1% in the first few months of its availability. Opera’s share remained steady around 0.71 percent.

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.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has been getting all the attention lately because of a severe zero-day security hole(fixed), but Microsoft wasn’t the only one scrambling to fix its browser. Mozilla and Opera have issued quick patches to fix several security flaws in their browsers.

The Mozilla patches fix several severe security holes in Firefox 2.x and 3.x. These holes allowed crackers to run malicious code and install software on your machine without any user intervention, according to Mozilla.

Opera also announced an update to its browser that fixes 7 severe security holes affecting all platforms. “The update fixes seven security bugs, some of which were previously known. Version 9.63 of the browser addresses separate code injection risks stemming from flaws in HTML parsing and text inputing, respectively. A critical bug with similar arbitrary code injection risks involving the handling of long host names in files has also been patched. The latest version of the software also lances a cross-site scripting flaw, involving XSLT templates, as well as bugs in feed preview.”

Most of the attention went to Microsoft however, who released a patch (now available via Windows Update) for a zero-day vulnerability in pretty much every version of Internet Explorer. “The vulnerability could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.” The update is being pushed via Windows Update.

So… no matter what you’re using, look for an update!

The gang at Google just continues to impress. As if GMail didn’t rock you like a hurricane already it now supports viewing PDF’s in your Web browser. Anybody who knows me knows that I HATE HATE HATE PDF’s. The documents are rediculously heavy and require an application to load. GMail’s “in-browser” PDF viewer is uber fast, includes a search feature, lets you download or print the PDF, zoom in and out, as well as quick paging via next/previous arrows.