Pensador’s Blog

Google confirmed tomorrow’s launch of Google Chrome beta, a new open source web browser that borrows the rendering engine from Apple’s WebKit and components from Mozilla Firefox.

An important design aspect behind Google Chrome is that each tab will be assigned an entire process instead of a thread within a process. This means that if a particular website causes the page to hang, only its tab will have to be closed. In addition, a task manager will allow the user to see which page, plug-in or web application is consuming system resources, a feature available in all modern OSs.

Google has published a comic that explains in 38 pages their web browser project.

How will this affect the battle for market share between existing web browsers? Will Google Chrome be adopted by Firefox or IE users?

Update 1: added a screenshot (found at TechCrunch).
Update 2: The Google Chrome webpage is up.

I can give at least two reasons: its PNG rendering and CSS support. When I worked on the new version of Pensador’s Blog and compared the results on both Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7, I had the naïve assumption that I was covering most of the browsers, until my girlfriend told me she could not see half of my site on her laptop.

To be honest, at first I had the usual arrogant geek reaction—she must be doing something wrong. She had to send me a screenshot so that I could realize she was using version six of the infamous browser. I am not going into the technical intricacies as to why PNG and CSS are not well supported; all I will and can say is that IE just recently started to comply with the web standards.

Here are the side-by-side screenshots comparing Pensador’s Blog on Firefox 2, IE 7 and IE 6 respectively:

As you see, the PNG transparency was competely ignored and here is why the blog posts do not show up:

I was forced to convert all those PNG files to GIFs and to hack my CSS to get the desired results. For some reason, the “main” div in which I put the blog posts is too wide to fit in the “page” div. However it should fit since its width was 600 px and the menu on the left was 180 px, adding up to the 780 px of the “page” div. Anyway, I had to reduce the size of the “main” div to 585 px for it to show up on IE 6.

Apple did it again. They already redefined the way we listen to music with iPods and now they will revolutionize how we communicate with each other. An iPhone is a combination of an iPod with a cell phone with Internet and email facilities. I’ll probably get one in 2 years, when my contract ends and the price will be more affordable than $600 :)

The final version of Firefox 2.0 has been released today. Here are the great new features:

• Spell check for textareas (thank you!)
• Search engine manager
• Updated user interface
• Navigation arrows for when you’ve opened too many tabs
• Updated Add-ons manager
• And much more!

Download it now!

After several offers from many sources, Google finally closed the deal yesterday.

Google has agreed to purchase popular video sharing site YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock, the two companies announced after the close of the stock market Monday. The deal marks the largest acquisition for Google in the company’s eight-year history.

I’m afraid that this acquisition will be just a merger with Google Video and YouTube will lose its unique user experience. Hopefully this won’t happen:

YouTube will retain its brand name and offices in San Bruno, Calif., the companies said, and all YouTube employees will keep their jobs. The acquisition is expected to close before the end of the year.

Source: BetaNews

Are you getting the following error from the W3C validator?

cannot generate system identifier for general entity “PHPSESSID”

This is because you are using sessions on your website and PHP adds the session ID to links on your page. If the URL already has a GET parameter, &PHPSESSID is added at the end. However, the correct code would be &PHPSESSID since for the validator the ampersand means that you are refering to a HTML entity. A quick way to fix this is to turn on the option arg_separator.output in php.ini. If you don’t have access to that file, you can use the following directive in a .htaccess file:

php_value arg_separator.output "&"

Advanced Micro Devices plans to acquire graphics chipmaker ATI Technologies for $5.4 billion, a move intended to increase AMD’s mobile-computing and consumer electronics capabilities, and help battle archrival Intel.

Source: ZDNet

What’s next? Intel buying nVidia?

Here are the release notes for this update:

Firefox 1.5.0.1 is a stability and security update that is part of our ongoing program to provide a safe Internet experience for our customers. We recommend that all users upgrade to this latest version.

Here’s what’s new in Firefox 1.5.0.1:

• Improved stability.
• Improved support for Mac OS X.
• International Domain Name support for Iceland (.is) is now enabled.
• Fixes for several memory leaks.
• Several security enhancements.

Download the latest Firefox update

Have you been looking for a good browser to replace Internet Explorer? If yes, we have at least something in common.

Mozilla Firebird is a small browser that doesn’t really need to be installed and that is fully customizable. There are versions for Windows, Linux, MacOS X and a few other systems. It’s got great built-in features such as pop-up blocking, downloads manager, tab browsing mode, Google search, source viewing of pages with formatted HTML, etc. Also, there are more than 100 extensions that you can install and that will give you what you need in terms of features.
I really recommend you to try this great app! And if you do try it, let me know what you think about it!
Download Mozilla Firebird (broken link)