It’s not that I think Safari is a bad browser, I’ve used it on Macs and I’ve liked it. It’s just that I’ve never used any piece of Apple software on a PC and found it to be an enjoyable experience. iTunes is a bloated piece of software that needs to be rebuilt completely and Safari is a resource hog to the point of being almost unusable. I was using Safari the other day just for a change and having 5 tabs open used up nearly 500 mb of memory.

Chrome usage share is about double Safari’s and could become a real threat to both Firefox and Internet Explorer. Safari’s usage has stayed pretty much the same for the last couple of years. Add that to the fact that Apple doesn’t seem to be committed to making Safari on Windows run the best it can and it’s time for them to just give up on developing the PC version anymore.

I would think with one of Apple’s main goals being to get PC users to switch over to their computers, they’d want to use Safari to show people how great their software is, but I can’t see too many being impressed after using it. Plus, Apple’s annoying habit of trying to install software you didn’t ask for when Safari updates isn’t winning people over either.

I guess Firefox has just been around long enough that it’s not the cutting edge anymore, even if it’s the reason Internet Explorer doesn’t completely control the world. But it’s never sucked and I don’t think it ever will. The people behind it don’t seem to be the people that would allow that. As far as Chrome goes, it’s a good browser that does one thing great, it’s fast. But aren’t we at the point now where the differences are so small that it doesn’t really matter anymore?

Browsers are weird things, in a way. There are people that will swear Opera is the best out there, others love Safari (none of them Windows users). Chrome seems to be getting most of it’s users from Firefox which might be the reason FF’s growth stopped, although IE is still the main one out there. Why? Because most people don’t care what browser they use and probably don’t even know others exist.

So, who thinks Firefox sucks? Probably just “savvy” developers who think that other people really care what browser they use. The same kind of people that rip on what programming language you use or what OS is running on your computer. Once Internet Explorer 9 comes out, I don’t think it’s going to matter what browser people really use, except when it comes to the really cutting edge stuff, like what you can do with SVG and Firefox or some of the CSS3 stuff that’s Webkit only.

First, the Firefox way:

Simple, type of gradient, the start position, the start color, end color. Then I put in no-repeat and set the background color for longer pages. The Webkit syntax took a bit of figuring out but the same effect can be created:

Whoa, a lot more is going on here, but once you know what’s happening it’s not that complicated. First we set the gradient type, then the start position where I’ve set it to 50% of the width and 50% of the height of the page. Next the start radius, which I’ve set to 0. Then the end point, which is also 50% 50%. This causes the gradient to travel towards every side of the page. Next, the end radius, which you set to how big you want your gradient to be. And finally, your start and end colors.

Pretty simple once you know what to do, but I think I’m partial to the Firefox syntax and, hopefully soon, there will be a standard way to write this and it will work in Internet Explorer.

Here’s the great thing about it, you can just add a gradient to the background of any element on your site without having to worry about image sizes. The code for gradients it this:

I was messing around with gradients and I wanted to add one to the background of the body of a test page I was build. So I put:

You’d think this would add a gradient to the body background and you could move on to the next thing. I was surprised to find that it did this:

The gradient is only the size of the content! Add more content and it stretches out. This isn’t something that I can see being useful for a website and, amazingly, I couldn’t find anything on the web about people using CSS3 gradients for the body background. Every example I found just showed little squares of blue to red gradients. I messed around for a while and finally had an idea. What if I applied the background to the html tag? Here’s what you get:

Now the gradient stretches to the height of the whole page. Now, if you’re going to do this, you have to add a couple of things on to the end of your CSS3 mark up:

If you don’t add the no-repeat, the gradient will repeat on long pages and if you don’t set the background color, I set it to the bottom color on the gradient, the background color will be white on long pages after the gradient ends.

As usual, this won’t work in any version Internet Explorer that’s out right now and it doesn’t seem to be working in the IE9 preview, so if you’re going to use this, you’ll still have to do it the old way if you want IE users to have the same experience on your website. But that won’t be that big of a deal, if like me, you usually have seperate CSS stylesheets for IE7 and IE8.

Every once in a while, I’d give something else a chance, Opera or Safari. Neither, for different reasons, ever really caught on with me. I would last maybe a week uses them but would always go back to Firefox. Then in 2008, Google released Chrome. At first, my reaction was “Great, another browser.” I really wondered what Google could offer that the other’s weren’t already. I gave it a shot and at first, I wasn’t impressed. It didn’t seem any faster than Firefox and it was bare bones, seriously bare bones. Then I discovered Chrome Experiments. I was impressed but while it was pretty cool what Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine could do, it wasn’t enough for me to change. But something was happening to Firefox, it took up to 5 minutes to start up sometimes, it would crash and it would take forever to load some web pages. So I gave Chrome another try. And I kept using Chrome until Firefox 3.5 came out, which was supposed to fix most of the bugs that annoyed me.

Now I still use Firefox for when I’m building and testing a web site but I kept using Chrome for just surfing the web. In the long run, it is faster and with sites like Facebook and, of course, Google Docs, it loads faster and crashes a lot less. But that’s not the reason I want the other browsers to be like Chrome, it’s the JavaScript engine. Lately, I’ve started looking to jQuery in order to make some of the sites I build more dynamic. First of all, I know this stuff isn’t going to work that great in Internet Explorer and you just have to accept that. But a navigation I was working on today worked amazingly in Chrome but was jumpy and awkward in Firefox. Yesterday, I read an article at Webdesigner Depot on some annoying CSS3 bugs in Firefox.

So why will everything be better when the other browsers catch up to Chrome? With the web slowly moving towards HTML5 and CSS3 and the use of JavaScript to create dynamic sites, right now, to get the best experience, you have to use Chrome. Firefox just can’t render the JavaScript fast enough in a lot of cases and most of it just doesn’t work in IE7 or IE8. At first, Chrome’s bare bones design wasn’t a positive to me, but now I see that it’s the other browsers that have become bloated and that’s causing them to slow down. I get excited to think what I can make using CSS3 but then I have to slow myself done and ask, “If I make that, will it been seen by enough people to make it worth it?” I know that Firefox will catch up but will Microsoft advance Internet Explorer enough for web designers and developers to really use the tools out there? Or will Chrome just be always ahead, showing us the future?

Why am I so excited? It’s probably the little things, like being able to rotate elements or add gradients with out using images. Anytime you can use code to build an element and not use an image, the file size is going to be smaller and the page is going to load faster. I love building sites with CSS and rarely do I go back to the designer I’m working with and say “I can’t do that.” I enjoy the challenge, but most of the time, when there something that I can’t build, it’s something that I’ll be able to do with CSS3. I’m excited because this is going to open up new design possibilities that we haven’t be able to do yet. HTML5 will change the functionality of the web, but CCS3 will change the face of it.

Today I came across a link to 50 Awesome Animations made with CSS3 and although most of them only work in Safari and Chrome, it’s pretty exciting to see what can be done with CSS3. Some of them need Javascript, which is something I’m not too thrilled about. Why? Because one of the main complaints against Flash is it being a CPU hog and the cause of this a majority of the time is bad coding. And the amount of bad Javascript code out there dwarfs bad ActionScript code, so if CSS3 increases the amount of JS out there, I’m really hoping Microsoft steals V8, Chrome’s JS rendering engine! It’s open-source, but it would be more fun for everyone if MS stole it.

But once again, like my post about HTML5, we are going to have to wait for Microsoft to support CSS3 before we can really use it. Everything I read about CSS3 now tells you to make it look one way for supporting browsers and then another, less attractive way for IE. I don’t mind designs appearing a little different from browser to browser, but I have no interest in a site appearing completely different in one compared to the rest. Hopefully, with IE9 being released at the end of this year, Microsoft will add full CSS3 support and we can take the Internet to the next level, in terms of design.

The bottom line it this, CSS3 is going let us do things the either we weren’t able to do before or we needed something like Flash to create. It’s going to take some time, but over the next couple of years, what we are going to be able to do with a “static” web page is going to be amazing. The future is here, the rest of the Internet just needs to catch up!

Because a vast majority, around 90% (including me), of computer users run Windows as their OS and I can only guess at the amount of those that only have IE installed, it’s going to be up to Microsoft to bring in widespread support for HTML5 and CSS3 features. And there’s the problem and something that I just can’t understand about Microsoft and their development of Internet Explorer. What is stopping them from adding the support for these features that all the other browsers seem to be able to add? You might think you can ignore this, believing most people are smart enough to use Firefox or Chrome, but they aren’t. My parents still don’t understand the concept of a web browser, much less that there’s more than one out there.

Perhaps Microsoft’s IE development is just part of the overall corporate direction of the company. Something that has become a giant pain in the butt of web people everywhere was the shift in Outlook 2007 to use Word’s HTML rendering instead of IE’s. This has sent the whole HTML email design world back to 1998. I know it’s not a glamorous side of web development, but a lot of clients want that service and I can’t tell you how much time I’ve spent building something that, by today’s standards, is simple and only a couple of lines of CSS, only to have to rebuild it in tables and inline styles.

HTML5 isn’t officially done yet, but there is enough support that you could build a site using it, but for the most part you have to include a Javascript file in order for IE to recognize the HTML5 tags, not really a big thing, but it is a pain, especially if someone has Javascript turned off in their browser. And, sadly, there’s no Javascript file you can use that makes IE recognize the unsupported CSS3 attributes, at least that I’m aware of.

So what does this all mean? In the end, either we wait for Microsoft and IE to catch up or we return to the days of building different versions of sites for different browsers. I managed to miss that the first time around and I really don’t want it to happen again, especially now that we have 5 widely used browsers, not 2. And it’s not just IE that’s behind on this. Most of the CSS3 examples I’ve seen out there only work in Safari and Chrome, Firefox can run some but not the ones that rely heavily on Javascript. And I don’t want anything to rely on Javascript, but that’s an entire other post.