blog.no-panic.at

I just received this email from Google and I must say I’m applauding to their decision!

Dear Google Apps admin,​

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5.  As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 ​as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010.  After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser.  We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience.  We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,
The Google Apps team

In short Google Docs & Google Sites will only support the following browsers from March 1st, 2010 (with Google Mail & Google Calendar following later that year):

• Internet Explorer 7.0 and above
• Firefox 3.0 and above
• Google Chrome 4.0 and above
• Safari 3.0 and above

Let’s hope this move creates enough momentum to get people to stop using those shitty old browsers that always give me hours (or even days) of headache, whenever I have to make sure a site is cross-browser compatible. I might even predict that this dreaded term of “cross browser compatibility” may soon be only a distant memory from the past, as all the latest browsers pretty much agree on how to render HTML and treat the DOM (and therefore JavaScript)

As much as I love the new Safari Beta Apple put out recently, there are a few problems which I’d like to point out.

• GrowlMail - As nearly everybody should know by now, the new WebKit kind of breaks the GrowlMail plugin for showing previews of new incoming mails. As a result I uninstalled the plugin and now I’m using Mail.appetizer
• Right click - I’m not entirely sure if this is indeed connected to the new Safari Beta, but since installing it, right clicking in most of my apps results in an application lockup for several seconds to minutes.
• Top Sites - I frequent quite a few online forums and as a result of them showing up in the top sites, I can’t see the “Posts since last visit”, because the sites seem to be loading in the background whenever the Top Sites are visible. So if I don’t click on the sites each and every time, the forums still count it as a visit and I “loose” the newest posts. Now I try to keep my Top Sites free of any online forums. We’ll see if that works out.
• Wordpress Visual editor  - A very annoying bug prevents me from adding links in Wordpress’ visual post editor. The screen dims and the link overlay kind of displays but I can never click anything in it. Only remedy is to close the tab and reload it. I switched back to the HTML Editor on my blog now…
• HTML Access Keys - I can’t use CTRL + S to submit HTML Forms that have the accesskey property set on their inputs. Kinda sucks for me, as I’m a total keyboard shortcut junkie.

That’s it for now, I’ll add to that as I encounter more.
(And yes, I also submitted those bugs to the Apple engineers as any good beta tester should do!)

[update:] There’s a fix for the GrowlMail problem. See comments for details!

PicLens let’s you instantly create a fullscreen slideshow of any images you are viewing on a webpage. It supports many popular pages like Flickr etc.

…just try it out - I love it

This could be really bad! Be sure to disable “Open ’safe’ files after downloading” in Safari’s preferences to circumvent this security hole.

Read more from Jürgen Schmidt, editor-in-chief at heise.de.

Proof of concept provided by Heise Security.

…finally! A Greasemonkey replacement for Safari & Shiira (and possibly other WebKit browsers). It allows you to “customize how pages from almost any site are displayed”.
This means with this plug-in it is now possible to hide those annoying ads on Userfriendly or completely re-style your favorite news site.

Take a look at the developers homepage to read more about SurfRabbit. I’ll definitely give it a try now