Tag: firefox

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Design

Browser diversity starts with us.

Developers, designers, and strategists, here’s something you can do for the health of the web: 

Test all your sites in Firefox.

Yes, we should all design to web standards to the best of our ability. Yes, we should all test our work in *every* browser and device we can. Yes, yes, of course yes. 

But the health of Firefox is critical now that Chromium will be the web’s de facto rendering engine. 

Even if you love Chrome, adore Gmail, and live in Google Docs or Analytics, no single company, let alone a user-tracking advertising giant, should control the internet.

The development and adoption of accessible standards happens when a balance of corporate powers supports organizations like the W3C, and cross-browser-and-device testing is part of every project.

When one rendering engine rules them all, well, many of us remember when progress halted for close to ten years because developers only tested in IE6, and more than a few of us recall a similar period when Netscape was the only browser that mattered. 

Don’t think the need to test in phones will save us: Chromium powers most of them, too.

And don’t write off the desktop just because many of us love our phones more.

When one company decides which ideas are worth supporting and which aren’t, which access problems matter and which don’t, it stifles innovation, crushes competition, and opens the door to excluding people from digital experiences.

So how do we fight this? We, who are not powerful? We do it by doubling down on cross-browser testing. By baking it into the requirements on every project, large or small. By making sure our colleagues, bosses, and clients know what we’re doing and why. 

Maybe also we do it by always showing clients and colleagues our work in Firefox, instead of Chrome. Just as a subtle reminder that there are other browsers out there, and some of them kick ass. (As a bonus, you’ll get to use all those amazing Mozilla developer tools that are built into Firefox.)

Diversity is as good for the web as it is for society. And it starts with us.

See also…

The State of Web Browsers, 2018 edition

Categories
Apple Applications Design Google HTML HTML5 Microsoft User Experience W3C Web Design Web Design History Web Standards

Web standards secret sauce

When Apple chose KHTML rather than Mozilla Gecko as the basis for its Safari browser, some of us in the web standards community scratched our heads. Sure, KHTML, the rendering engine in Konqueror, was open-source and standards-compliant. But, at the time, Gecko’s standards support was more advanced, and Gecko-based Mozilla, Camino, and even Netscape 6 felt more like browsers than Konqueror. Gecko browsers had the features, the comparative maturity, and the support of the standards community. Apple’s adoption of KHTML, and creation of a forked version called Webkit, seemed puzzling and wrong.

Yet, thanks largely to the success of the iPhone, Webkit (Apple’s open source version of KHTML) in the form of Safari, has been a surprising force for good on the web, raising people’s expectations about what a web browser can and should do, and what a web page should look like. Had Apple chosen Gecko, they might not have been able to so powerfully influence mainstream consumer opinion, because the fully formed, distinctly mature Gecko brand and experience could easily have overshadowed and constrained Apple’s contribution. (Not to mention, tolerating external constraint is not a game Apple plays.)

Just how has mobile Safari, a relative latecomer to the world of standards-based browsing, been able to make a difference, and what difference has it made?

The platform paradox

Firefox and Opera were wonderful before any Webkit-based browser reached maturity, but Firefox and Opera were and are non-mainstream tastes. Most people use Windows without thinking much about it, and most Windows users open the browser that comes with their operating system, again without too much thought. This doesn’t make them dumb and us smart. We are interaction designers; they are not.

Thus, the paradox: even though Firefox and Opera offered powerfully compelling visions of what could be accomplished with web standards back when IE6 offered a comparatively poor experience, Firefox and Opera, not unlike Linux and Mac OS, were platforms for the converted. If you knew enough to want Firefox and Opera, those browsers delivered features and experience that confirmed the wisdom of your choice. If you didn’t know to want them, you didn’t realize you were missing anything, because folks reading this page sweated like Egyptian pyramid builders to make sure you had a good experience despite your browser’s flaws.

The power to convert

Firefox and Opera are great browsers that have greatly advanced the cause of web standards, but because they are choices in a space where most people don’t make choices, their power to convert is necessarily somewhat truncated. The millions mostly don’t care what happens on their desktop. It’s mostly not in their control. They either don’t have a choice or don’t realize they have one, and their expectations have been systematically lowered by two decades of unexciting user experience.

By contrast, the iPhone functions in a hot realm where consumers do make choices, and where choices are badges. Of course many people are forced economically to choose the cheap or free phone that comes with their mobile service. But many others are in a position to select a device. And the iPhone is to today’s urban professional gym rat what cigarettes and martinis were to their 1950s predecessors. You and I may claim to choose a mobile device based on its features, but the upwardly mobile (pardon the pun), totally hot person standing next to us in the elevator may choose their phone the same way they choose their handbag. And now that the iPhone sells for $99, more people can afford to make a fashion decision about their phone—and they’ll do it.

Mobile 2.0

Although there were great phones before the iPhone, and although the iPhone has its detractors, it is fair to say that we are now in a Mobile 2.0 phase where people expect more than a Lynx-like experience when they use their phone to access the internet. Mobile Safari in iPhone, along with the device’s superior text handling thanks to Apple and Adobe technologies, is changing perceptions about and expectations of the web in the same way social networking did, and just at the historical moment when social networking has gone totally mainstream.

Oprah’s on Twitter, your mom’s on Twitter, and they’re either using an iPhone or a recently vastly upgraded Palm or Blackberry that takes nearly all of its cues from the iPhone. Devices that copy the iPhone of course mostly end up selling the iPhone, the same way Bravo’s The Fashion Show would mostly make you miss Project Runway if you even watched The Fashion Show, which you probably haven’t.

Safari isn’t perfect, and Mobile Safari has bugs not evident in desktop Safari, but Webkit + Apple = secret sauce selling web standards to a new generation of consumers and developers.

Read more

  • Web Fonts, HTML 5 Roundup: Worthwhile reading on the hot new web font proposals, and on HTML 5/CSS 3 basics, plus a demo of advanced HTML 5 trickery. — 20 July 2009
  • HTML 5: Nav Ambiguity Resolved. An e-mail from Chairman Hickson resolves an ambiguity in the nav element of HTML 5. What does that mean in English? Glad you asked! — 13 July 2009
  • In Defense of Web Developers: Pushing back against the “XHTML is bullshit, man!” crowd’s using the cessation of XHTML 2.0 activity to condescend to—or even childishly glory in the “folly” of—web developers who build with XHTML 1.0, a stable W3C recommendation for nearly ten years, and one that will continue to work indefinitely. — 7 July 2009
  • XHTML DOA WTF: The web’s future isn’t what the web’s past cracked it up to be. — 2 July 2009

[tags]webdesign, webstandards, design, standards, browsers, CSS, webkit, gecko, mozilla, firefox, opera, safari, mobile, mobilesafari, iphone[/tags]

Categories
Browsers bugs CSS Design firefox Mozilla Web Design Web Standards work zeldman.com

Firefox test page

Firefox gurus, a page demonstrating the Firefox long content bug has been created for your browser fixing pleasure. Kindly visit the test page using Firefox 3.0 and Firefox 3.5 for Windows (and possibly also for Linux). The following defects should be evident:

  • At least half the comments should be cut off by the browser.
  • The footer should be cut off by the browser.
  • The form enabling you to add comments may also be cut off by the browser (or it may be incomplete, or the labels for such things as your name and email address may appear in the wrong location).

View the same page in Safari 3+, Opera 9+, or IE7/8, and compare. In the other browsers, all comments are displayed, the footer is displayed, and the content form is viewable and displays correctly. How often does Firefox compare unfavorably with some of these browsers? Hardly ever. Which is precisely why you want to fix it. (That, and you’d like your users to be able to view all the content on a page, not just some of the content.)

The test page is identical to this 2 July post, with comments frozen as of 9 July 2009, and with the site’s original CSS, which revealed the long content bug in Firefox.

A subsequent 8 July post documents the steps I and two other developers took in order to isolate this bug in Firefox, and the CSS workarounds (suggested by two of the site’s readers) which have since been put in place to cover up for this defect in Firefox. The thread also explains what we changed in the CSS to enable Firefox users to read long content on the site.

The CSS cover-up enables Firefox users to read all the content on long pages, but at a cost: there is a flash of red background during slow load times. And, obviously, it’s better to fix Firefox than to create somewhat flawed CSS workarounds that slightly diminish the experience for all users of the site.

Thanks for your help! Let me and this site’s readers know how we can assist you. And remember, please use the test page (not this page or any other page of the site) to isolate the bug in Firefox.

Read more

  • HTML 5: Nav Ambiguity Resolved. An e-mail from Chairman Hickson resolves an ambiguity in the nav element of HTML 5. What does that mean in English? Glad you asked! — 13 July 2009
  • Web Standards Secret Sauce: Even though Firefox and Opera offered powerfully compelling visions of what could be accomplished with web standards back when IE6 offered a poor experience, Firefox and Opera, not unlike Linux and Mac OS, were platforms for the converted. Thanks largely to the success of the iPhone, Webkit, in the form of Safari, has been a surprising force for good on the web, raising people’s expectations about what a web browser can and should do, and what a web page should look like. — 12 July 2009
  • In Defense of Web Developers: Pushing back against the “XHTML is bullshit, man!” crowd’s using the cessation of XHTML 2.0 activity to condescend to—or even childishly glory in the “folly” of—web developers who build with XHTML 1.0, a stable W3C recommendation for nearly ten years, and one that will continue to work indefinitely. — 7 July 2009
  • XHTML DOA WTF: The web’s future isn’t what the web’s past cracked it up to be. — 2 July 2009

[tags]firefox, browser, bug, firefox3, firefox3.5, windows, linux, bugs, buggery, debugging, demo, testpage, mozilla[/tags]

Categories
Browsers bugs Design firefox Mozilla Web Design Web Standards work zeldman.com

Firefox forces orange background flash

There’s good news and bad news. The good news is that Firefox 3.0 and 3.5 for Windows no longer cut long pages of this site in half, hiding 50% or more of the pages’ content, including the footer, because of a newly discovered bug in Firefox (discovered by this site’s layout).

The bad news is that the price of the “fix” is an annoying flash of reddish-orange background. When you first load a page in any browser, rather than the main content’s off-white background area, you instead see the text against a reddish-orange background, obscuring words (including the drop cap), disrupting user experience, and raising doubts about the professionalism of the site and thus of the opinions it expresses.

With the annoying flash of colored background, everyone who reads this site suffers. But without it, Firefox 3/3.5 cuts long pages in half. Until Firefox fixes the bug, all readers of this site will experience what I’ll label “the Flash of wrongly styled background color.” (Note: although the browser is still broken, the color flash has since been “fixed.” Impatient ones, skip ahead to the 9 July update. Narrative fans, keep reading.)

Here’s the story.

Validators were no help

My 2 July post, XHTML DOA WTF, has thus far received 194 comments. Firefox users told me the thread “died” after comment #44049 in Firefox 3 and 3.5 for Windows. The problem also later surfaced on In Defense of Web Developers, written yesterday morning just prior to my surgery. Let’s stick with the 2 July post, though, which is where we did our Q&A.

W3C and WDG validation services both indicated that there was an error on the page, but neither validator could explain it.

  • The W3C showed a long list of unclosed elements (which in fact were closed), a typical W3C validation error when that validator misidentifies the actual problem. The W3C validator has made this mistake since at least 2001. Whenever I complain to the W3C, I’m told they need volunteers to help them fix the validator. So I more often rely on the WDG validation service.
  • The WDG validator (usefully and apparently correctly) indicated that a single illegal UTF character in a comment it could not show me was causing the dilemma. This validator gave me a line number, but no code output—making the line number useless, and forcing me to go into my database and examine each of 194 comments visually for unsupported character problems.

In search of a single UTF-16 character

I next spent two hours of an insanely busy pre-surgery day unsuccessfully attempting to manually track down UTF errors in comments that no validation service was able to pointpoint. I had to apologize to colleagues and clients to whom I owed work, since the quest to make my personal site legible and usable to Firefox users took precedence over paying work in my sad little mind. (Call it a mark of the high esteem in which I hold Firefox; also call it a concern for readers.)

Automattic’s designer/developer (and my friend) Noel Jackson then took over for me and was eventually able to locate a single UTF error in a Japanese pingback. Or so it seemed.

WordPress, the power behind this site, is supposed to convert illegal UTF-16 to legal UTF-8, and we thought it had done so. Nevertheless, the only validation service to have claimed anything semi-coherent said otherwise. To solve the problem required brute force: we deleted the entire Japanese comment. To the clients and colleagues to whom I owed work I was unable to finish while tracking down a Firefox bug, I now also owed an apology to a Japanese blogger. Personally, I blamed Firefox for ludicrously Draconian error handling, but at least I thought we had “solved” the needless problem raised by such behavior.

Drudge work for nothing

I owe Firefox an apology. Draconian error handling of impossible-to-trace possible UTF errors was not the cause of its failure to display pages correctly. Inability to parse valid CSS on long pages was the actual cause.

Although my page now validated, Firefox still cut it off at the waist. Thanks to this bug, users of Firefox—many of whom care greatly about web standards (it’s one reason so many developers choose Firefox)—were unable to read more than half the comments about XHTML 2 and HTML 5 from their fellow standardistas. They were also unable to post comments or view the footer (thus making them unable to view other content on this site, as well as third-party site highlighted in the footer). This was a win for nobody, except maybe Microsoft, Opera, and Safari. And, like I said, we like Firefox and people who use it. Back to the drawing board.

Seek and ye shall not find

Nikolay Bachiyski, a lead developer at Automattic, then conducted a series of tests:

  1. He established that only Firefox 3.0/3.5 (and only in Windows) cut the valid web page’s content in half.
  2. He verified that the page’s content was valid (UTF-8) as was its markup.
  3. The DOM loaded properly.
  4. There wasn’t an (X)HTML parsing problem.
  5. Disabling JavaScript made no difference.
  6. Disabling CSS enabled all the page’s content to display in Firefox; turning CSS back on cut the page in half again. Clearly, the issue was with CSS.
  7. Nikolay then disabled the lines of Mozilla- and Webkit- oriented CSS3 that generate “warnings” or “errors” in the W3C validation service. But even with those lines disabled and the CSS completely valid, the page’s content failed to display completely in Firefox. The bottom of the page was still cut off.

A CSS “fix” with a drawback

Valid CSS was somehow to “blame” for Firefox’s inability to show a long page without hiding half the content.

You may ask why I didn’t discover this problem during the building and testing of my site’s redesign. You might even ask why my readers didn’t discover it (since I beta tested the redesign at several stages). The answer is simple. I never tested a dummy blog post with nearly 200 comments. It didn’t occur to me that more than 40 comments would be necessary to test whether valid CSS and XHTML would work in good modern browsers, let alone in one as excellent as Firefox.

Michel Bozgounov and Kyle Weems then proposed a simple CSS fix:

div#wrapper {overflow: visible;}

My friend Noel implemented the CSS fix while I was unconscious and having stuff cut out of me.

It works, and I thank all these gentlemen. But it has the unfortunately side-effect of inflicting a flash of reddish-orange background on the page until most or all content has loaded. (I had previously spent over two weeks eliminating that flash of background.) And it does this in all browsers (or nearly all), not just Firefox. To force Firefox to display all content on a page, I have to force every other browser to flash red before it shows content.

Obviously, it’s vital that Firefox users be enabled to read and comment on long or popular posts. But there must be a better way than deforming the CSS. And there is a better way: namely, a Firefox bug fix.

Our friends at WordPress have contacted our friends at Mozilla, so we are hopeful that this will be fast-tracked. Mozilla friends, call on me to help at any time.

9 July Update: 99% solution

With the addition of 1000px of min-height to #wrapper, the reddish-orange flash has been eliminated, at least in pages that load quickly. (On long pages, or with slow connections, the reddish-orange background remains painfully visible until the page finishes loading.) Read more about this CSS adjustment. Note that adding CSS workarounds is not the same thing as fixing browser bugs. (Indeed, CSS workarounds may retard browser development by removing the problem so it never gets fixed.)

A Firefox Test Page

As I am not entirely satisfied with this CSS workaround (despite my gratitude to its authors) and as I do not want Mozilla’s engineering wizards to be unable to fix Firefox because of changes to my CSS, I have posted a Firefox test page using the site’s original (perfectly fine, background-flash-less) CSS, and a page explaining the Firefox test page.—JZ

Read more

  • HTML 5: Nav Ambiguity Resolved. An e-mail from Chairman Hickson resolves an ambiguity in the nav element of HTML 5. What does that mean in English? Glad you asked! — 13 July 2009
  • Web Standards Secret Sauce: Even though Firefox and Opera offered powerfully compelling visions of what could be accomplished with web standards back when IE6 offered a poor experience, Firefox and Opera, not unlike Linux and Mac OS, were platforms for the converted. Thanks largely to the success of the iPhone, Webkit, in the form of Safari, has been a surprising force for good on the web, raising people’s expectations about what a web browser can and should do, and what a web page should look like. — 12 July 2009
  • In Defense of Web Developers: Pushing back against the “XHTML is bullshit, man!” crowd’s using the cessation of XHTML 2.0 activity to condescend to—or even childishly glory in the “folly” of—web developers who build with XHTML 1.0, a stable W3C recommendation for nearly ten years, and one that will continue to work indefinitely. — 7 July 2009
  • XHTML DOA WTF: The web’s future isn’t what the web’s past cracked it up to be. — 2 July 2009

[tags]browser, bugs, Firefox3, Firefox3.5, Firefox/Windows, browsers, firefoxbugs[/tags]

Categories
Accessibility Advocacy content copyright creativity CSS Design development DWWS Fonts Ideas industry links Real type on the web Standards State of the Web Tools Web Design Web Standards webfonts webtype

Web fonts now (how we’re doing with that)

THE WEB Fonts Wiki has a page listing fonts you can legally embed in your site designs using the CSS standard @font-face method. Just as importantly, the wiki maintains a page showing commercial foundries that allow @font-face embedding. Between these two wiki pages, you may find just the font you need for your next design (even if you can’t currently license classics like Adobe Garamond or ITC Franklin and Clarendon).

The advantages of using fonts other than Times, Arial, Georgia, and Verdana have long been obvious to designers; it’s why web design in the 1990s was divided between pages done in Flash, and HTML pages containing pictures of fonts—a practice that still, bizarrely, continues even in occasionally otherwise advanced recent sites.

Using real fonts instead of pictures of fonts or outlines of fonts provides speed and accessibility advantages.

Currently the Webkit-based Apple Safari browser supports @font-face. The soon-to-be-released next versions of Opera Software’s Opera browser, Google’s Webkit-based Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox will do likewise. When I say “soon-to-be-released,” I mean any day now. When this occurs, all browsers except IE will support @font-face.

IE has, however, offered font embedding since IE4 via Embedded OpenType (.EOT), a font format that enables real fonts to be temporarily embedded in web pages. That is, the reader sees the font while reading the page, but cannot download (“steal”) the font afterwards. Microsoft has “grant[ed] to the W3C a perpetual, nonexclusive, royalty-free, world-wide right and license under any Microsoft copyrights on this contribution, to copy, publish and distribute the contribution under the W3C document licenses,” in hopes that EOT would thereby become a standard. But so far, only Microsoft’s own browsers support EOT.

Thus, as we consider integrating real fonts into our designs, we must navigate between browsers that support @font-face now (Safari), those that will do so soon (Opera, Chrome, Firefox), and the one that possibly never will (IE, with a dwindling but still overwhelming market share).

The person who figures out a designer-friendly solution to all this will either be hailed as a hero/heroine or get rich. Meanwhile, near-complete solutions of varying implementation difficulty exist. Read on:

CSS @ Ten: The Next Big Thing

“Instead of making pictures of fonts, the actual font files can be linked to and retrieved from the web. This way, designers can use TrueType fonts without having to freeze the text as background images.” An introduction to @font-face by Håkon Wium Lie, father of CSS.

Real Fonts on the Web: An Interview with The Font Bureau’s David Berlow

Is there life after Georgia? To understand issues surrounding web fonts from the type designer’s perspective, I interview David Berlow, co-founder of The Font Bureau, Inc, and the ?rst TrueType type designer.

The W3C: @font-face vs. EOT

A discussion that shows why the W3C may not be able to resolve this conflict. (It’s kind of like asking the Montagues and Capulets to decide whether the Montagues or the Capulets should rule Verona.)

sIFR 2.0: Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses

Mike Davidson’s scalable and accessible remix of Shaun Inman’s pioneering use of Flash and JavaScript to replace short passages of HTML text with Flash movies of the same text set in a real font. The Flash movies are created on the fly. If JavaScript or images are turned off, the user “sees” the HTML text; text set in sIFR can also be copied and pasted. sIFR was a great initial solution to the problem of real fonts on the web, but it’s only for short passages (which means the rest of the page must still be set in Georgia or Verdana), and it fails if the user has a Flash block plug-in installed, as half of Firefox users seem to. It’s also always a pain to implement. I don’t know any designer or developer who has an easy time setting up sIFR. In short, while sIFR is an awesome stop-gap, real fonts on the web are still what’s needed. Which also leads us to…

Cufón – Fonts for the People

Simo Kinnunen’s method of embedding fonts, regardless of whether or not a browser supports @font-face.

Combining Cufón And @Font-Face

Kilian Valkhof: “Everyone wants @font-face to work everywhere, but as it stands, it only works in Safari and the upcoming versions of Firefox and Opera. In this article I’ll show you how to use Cufón only if we can’t load the font through other, faster methods.”

Adobe, Web Fonts, and EOT

Why Adobe supports Microsoft’s EOT instead of @font-face.

Introducing Typekit

Update May 28, 2009: Working with Jason Santa Maria, Jeff Veen’s company Small Batch Inc. introduces Typekit:

We’ve been working with foundries to develop a consistent web-only font linking license. We’ve built a technology platform that lets us to host both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM.

Read more

  • Web Fonts, HTML 5 Roundup: Worthwhile reading on the hot new web font proposals, and on HTML 5/CSS 3 basics, plus a demo of advanced HTML 5 trickery. — 20 July 2009
  • Web Fonts Now, for real: David Berlow of The Font Bureau has proposed a Permissions Table for OpenType that can be implemented immediately to turn raw fonts into web fonts without any wrappers or other nonsense. If adopted, it will enable type designers to license their work for web use, and web designers to create pages that use real fonts via the CSS @font-face standard. — 16 July 2009

[tags]fonts, webfonts, webdesign, embed, @font-face, EOT, wiki, css, layout, safari, opera, firefox, chrome, browsers[/tags]