Published September 3rd, 2008
OK, everyone’s talking about Google’s ‘new’ browser (check out the comic for an easy introduction) and everyone’s going to have an opinion. Here’s mine, based on a few hours’ use.
First (and lasting) impression: damn, it’s fast. It starts fast, it renders pages fast, it stays fast. JavaScript in particular is noticeably smoother where in other browsers it has lagged. The latter is thanks to the new V8 JavaScript engine, the rest is at least partly related to the memory model, where each tab is a completely separate process. Given that it’s using WebKit — the renderer behind Safari — the speed difference between the two is striking.
And to be honest, as far as the ‘wow’ factor goes, that’s about it for me. It’s a browser. The minimalist layout is nice but in fact I’ve been doing myself with Firefox for a couple of years now. Oh, the tabs are at the top…ok. The address bar is ‘clever’…well I don’t particularly like FF3′s ‘Awesomebar’, and I’ve yet to see anything that this does that is likely to make me like it any better. The start page’s layout is very reminiscent of Opera, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing — I might well grow to like it.
But none of the above constitutes a ‘major breakthrough’ or ‘a paradigm shift in the browser space’. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, though. Maybe the behind-the-scenes, technical advances (esepcially the speed) will feed back into other browser projects. As it stands, it’s just yet another platform to test for incompatibilities.
But…the speed! I can see myself using it as a day-to-day browser for non-development purposes, just because it’s so quick to launch.
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Published July 28th, 2008
More of a reminder for myself than anything: here’s a simple changelog that could be of use when updating scripts to MooTools 1.2.
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Published July 21st, 2008
Just a quick heads-up for those who’ve been complaining about the MooTools version of the multiple-file uploader not working with MooTools 1.2 — it’s now been updated. The widget required three small modifications due to changes to MooTools’ syntax.
Get the modified code here (old 1.1x-compatible version also included).
Category: Javascript | Tags: | 10 Comments »
Published July 9th, 2008
…yes, I know, I go on about Firebug a bit.
OK, a lot.
But good as it is it can still be improved, as this list of Firebug extensions proves. There were several on the list that I hadn’t heard of before and have already installed.
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Published July 8th, 2008
Some time back, while experimenting with MooTools, I found myself with the requirement to be able to call a function whenever a particular method on a given class was called. In effect, I needed to treat the class’s method as an event and fire a particular function when the method was called.
So I wrote a very small addition to the Mootools’ own Class code, which allowed this. The new method, Class.bindFunctionToMethod(), allows you either to intercept the method call before or after it’s fired. If fired before you can change the arguments being passed in, while if fired after then you can alter the return value.
Of course you need to be careful how you use it: by ‘piggy-backing’ on method calls like this (especially if you alter the arguments or return value) you’re potentially altering the script’s behaviour in a way that’s not necessarily evident by looking at the classes themselves.
You can download the code here: it’s heavily commented, so it should be fairly obvious how to use it. It works just fine with MooTools version 1.1+ and 1.2.
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