Note: This will be a quick one long and rambling, because my Macbook Pro is in the shop and I’m using an old 13″ Macbook to write this, and it makes me want to punch babies that’s how I roll.

RockMelt is a new browser that puts more emphasis on your own social network of friends, backed by the some of the guys behind the Netscape browser. If you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t heard of it, watch their promo video below:

That video is pretty much all their website has to offer curious onlookers right now, and it sure makes you feel good watching it. Until you realize that the warm fuzzies Toby is talking about have more to do with his involvement in social networks and being connected to his friends in general than they do with those connections being integrated into your browsing experience.

Personally, I think the toolbars of your Facebook friends and applications looks nice, but after using it for five minutes, I wanted to hide them. I like my screen real-estate, and it’s creepy to have a dozen of my friends and family staring at me from the sidebar while I’m spanking it to my favorite Brazilian transvestite pr0n.

If I hide that toolbar, I’m hiding the very feature that sets RockMelt apart from other browsers, so while it’s great that you can hide it, what you’re left with at that point is a very vanilla browser that is exactly the same as every other browser.

One thing that actually really pissed me me off is that when I connected RockMelt to my Facebook account (which it prompts you to do immediately upon first-time launch), it set my online status to “online” automatically. I never show myself as online, because if you don’t have my real chat client names (Gtalk, AIM, etc), I probably don’t want to talk to you anyway. It took me a minute or two to figure out how to turn it back to “offline”. I don’t know if that’s RockMelt’s fault or Facebook’s, but given how creepy-uncle Facebook has been over the last year, that did not make a stellar first impression.

Speaking of Facebook – am I the only one that’s creeped out by the fact that Facebook is one of the backbones of this browser? For all they have done to betray my trust over the past year, the LAST thing I want to do is facilitate them knowing what I’m doing online more than they already do.

Do I think RockMelt has formed an unholy union with Facebook to spy on me? No – but RockMelt doesn’t tell you much of anything right now (and Facebook never does), so my lack of understanding about what data is being collected and stored by Facebook by way of RockMelt makes me very uncomfortable.

Also, it’s pretty clear by the way Facebook integration stands apart from the other social networks like Twitter that RockMelt is focusing primarily on Facebook. Considering how often Facebook’s API changes (read: breaks) and how much they are moving forward with their own agendas, I’m not sure this is a good long-term plan. One article on TechReview comments: “It’s not a generic ‘social browser.’ It’s a Facebook browser.”

Considering how Facebook is already trying to re-invent the web, I don’t know what that means for RockMelt in the future.

There are some nice features to RockMelt though. The right-side sidebar gives easy access to twitter with a simple but elegant UI, however it doesn’t really seem to be optimized for people with a large number of followers/following.

Also in that right sidebar, you can add RSS feeds to keep track of your favorite websites. They’re displayed beautifully, with a square site icon (based on the site’s favicon) and an unread count badge. If you’re on a site that has a detectable RSS feed, the “add feed” button turns green.

I think this could actually work to help people who don’t know or care what RSS feeds are learn to use them more. The one-click nature of subscribing when you’re on a page with an RSS feed makes the whole process cleaner and more clear than traditional RSS subscriptions, where the process is slightly more technical and deliberate.

On other browsers, even if a non-technical user can decipher what “Subscribe to RSS” means, they still have to do some work to access those feeds. RockMelt makes it a no-brainer – the user doesn’t need to know what RSS is for them to immediately see the benefit of subscribing – however it also simplifies it to the point where it could potentially be useless for people who already know and love RSS, and are subscribed to many feeds.

I subscribe to over 100 RSS feeds, so RockMelt is clearly not going to be of much help there. Maybe one solution would be to sync with Google Reader (please?) and let you pick your top five that you want to have in your sidebar.

That right-side toolbar references “Apps and Feeds”. I wonder if some sort of Facebook application integration is on their roadmap, which would be great, because then the useless jackholes that spend all day playing Farmville at the office won’t even need to switch browser windows to annoy the living shit out of everyone they know.

Another nice feature is the “Share” button built into the browser, that puts Twitter and Facebook sharing just a click away.

Of course there are already bookmarklets for all that already, and most websites now have share functionality built into their content, but for the less tech-savvy who might not know they exist, this makes it easy for people to share what they’re looking at in a way that uses a consistent UI on every single page they visit.

One UI irritation I ran across is that if you have the share pop-up activated and switch apps, it can be easy to forget that it has focus, so when you switch back to RockMelt, and go to type something in the url bar, the comments box in the share popup still has focus, which could lead to some embarrassing moments when you meant to pull up your favorite pr0n site but ended up accidentally sharing it with your Facebook wall. (I only accidentally shared the RockMelt website. This time.)

Ultimately, other than perhaps a morbid sense of curiosity, whenever a new browser comes out, I’m more worried than excited. If it becomes remotely popular, that’s one more browser I have to test on, one more variable thrown into the standards mix.

It’s not as bad these days as it used to be. Most current browsers have some semblance of standards-compliance, and display differences are minimal. (If you don’t believe me, you haven’t been in the industry as long as I have. Trust me on this one. It used to be so, so much worse.)

I’m pleased to say that RockMelt’s rendering seems fine, and while I haven’t had a chance to do any complicated DOM-tomfoolery with it yet, all of my initial tests showed layout and javascript working exactly as expected, and exactly as it would appear in any other browser. So that’s good news.

It may seem like I’m hating on RockMelt – I’m actually not.

Is it a browser for the power user? I’d say not.

Is there a market for it? I think so.

Most of the tech site reviews have been neutral at best, or condemning this browser to failure before it’s even open to the public, but I think that’s a symptom of who has been given access to review it. Naturally, the techies are going to be the ones with the first-look. In fact, they’re normally the only ones that care about a first-look. And techies are exactly the audience this browser will not fly for. At least not at this point.

But it’s important to remember that there people out there that aren’t as tech savvy – who wouldn’t know a Firefox addon if it bit them in the ass, and have no desire to know more. I look at my biological father, who only recently got an email account and joined Facebook. He doesn’t know or care about computers, and the only reason he finally broke down and got an email account was to stay in touch with my sister and I. As he uses the internet more, I expect him to find more things he likes (pr0n), but he just doesn’t care about how or why it works, and won’t go to great lengths to figure stuff out.

To techies, Facebook may be an aggravation – something we put up with because it’s part of our jobs or because it’s so ubiquitous that it’s hard to leave. But people spend more time on Facebook than on any other site on the web, so clearly, there are plenty of folks (and by plenty, I mean *millions*) that love it and use it constantly.

RockMelt’s tagline is “Your browser. Re-imagined.” So far, it’s more like “Your browser. With some integration that’s already totally possible with plugins, for people not savvy enough to use plugins.” But it’s early yet, and I’m curious to see where it goes.

Also? Dumbest name ever. Seriously guys. WTF.

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Back in the day, it wasn’t uncommon for a website to look and work fine in one browser, and be utterly, horrifically broken in another. These days, if you’re coding to standards, your woes are more likely to be weird (but subtle) padding issues, some javascript issues, etc – not the complete and utter train wreck you’d have seen 10 years ago.

Planning and frequent testing will save your hide

Just because things are better now than they’ve ever been doesn’t mean we can get lazy. Cross-browser testing should be done often, and with gusto. One common pitfall with cross-browser testing is the temptation to leave testing until the very end, once the project has been completed. Problem is, if something is broken, you won’t necessarily have time to fix it, and depending on what’s wrong, the fix might take longer than you’ve allowed for.

You can avoid finding yourself in that kind of situation by testing more frequently throughout your development process. Whenever a large chunk of code or markup gets written, take the 5 minutes to check it on multiple browsers. By addressing these issues during these mini-milestones, you can take care of problems as they arise and avoid finding yourself in a bad situation the day before launch.

If you’re a small design shop, or an independent developer, you may not have access to the complete array of potential browser and OS combinations. I personally have a Mac laptop running Leopard, a Mac desktop running Tiger, four Windows XP machines, and a RedHat box set up, but even that doesn’t cover every possible combination – and you may not have as many machines at your disposal.

Fortunately, you’ve got some options, some better than others. The three primary ways you can test for cross-browser compatibility, short of actually running all of the browser and OS combinations on physical machines, are screenshot generators, browser emulators and virtual terminals. Each serves a slightly different purpose, and you may end up deciding that a combination of the three is most appropriate for your needs.

Screenshot Generators

Services like BrowserShots.Org and Litmus allow you to enter a url, click submit, and use their resources to generate multiple screenshots based on your selection of browser, setting and OS choices. Both have free and paid versions. (For the record, Snipe.Net looks like dog balls in IE4 for Windows… Hah!)

The free version of BrowserShots allows you to run a test on the full spectrum of browser/resolution/OS choices available, but your request will be lower priority than paying customers, so it can take a little while to get your results. Upgrading to a premium processing membership of $30 for one month bumps your job up higher in the queue for faster screenshots. Personally, I don’t think the improvement in speed is worth $30 a month, but you may disagree.

Litmus allows you to sign up for a free account which allows you 50 tests per month, but on only two browsers, both only on Windows, rendering the free version basically useless. If you don’t have access to IE7 and Firefox 2 somewhere, you probably shouldn’t be in this business. So the only useful way to use Litmus is through their paid version. They offer a few different packages, each with increasing features, starting from a day pass at $24, moving up to a monthly subscription of $49 a month for individuals and $199 a month for “team” membership. Once you get into the paid accounts, tests are done on 23 browsers, including Mac and Linux browsers. (A side note, I love how they say you get access to “all 23 browsers”, as if 23 is the final number.)

While their price structure is a bit steep and their browser/OS selection isn’t complete (no Firefox for Mac? Really?), it’s worth noting that Litmus offers HTML email testing across muiltiple email clients in their paid packages – something Browsershots doesn’t do. If you do a lot of email marketing for clients, this service may be worth it for that aspect alone.

Litmus also has a few value added features that may make it worth shelling out the money, depending on your needs.

• Nicer design – more suitable to showing to clients directly if you don’t feel like downloading dozens of screenshots for each iteration of a site.
• Ability to test password-protected areas of a site.
• Automatically checks for validation errors in both HTML and CSS, with a link to the W3C validator pages – so if something doesn’t look right in the screenshots you get, you’ve got a shortcut to start figuring out why.
• Version support, so each time you do a test, it creates a separate instance of that test as a new version for the site. If you test a page 6 times, you’ll see your current test and 5 historical versions in your control panel.

Me personally? I use the free BrowserShots service. They have more browser/OS combinations available and the wait time doesn’t bother me. I might use a paid Litmus account to test emails at some point though, as testing that manually can be a real pain in the ass.

Browser Emulators

The good news is, browser emulators are usually free. The bad news is that they are not available for all scenarios, and Macs seem to be at a real disadvantage here. Of course, Mac users can always use Parallels, WINE, or some other virtual OS that will allow you run Windows on your Mac, but that does require extra work.

If you usually develop on Firefox, the Firefox addon IE View can be very helpful. It simple provides a shortcut to an IE-engine rendered version of the page right in Firefox, that opens in a FF tab. Back when I worked on Windows, I loved this extension, but alas, it is for Windows only.

Also for Windows users, downloadable application DebugBar puts multiple versions of IE at your fingertips, including IE8 beta 2, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE. This one is handy because you can compare displays side by side, within one program.  I have gotten this to successfully install on my Parallels version of Windows on my Mac.

And the third one that comes to mind is Multiple IEs, a small downloadable application (again, Windows only, sorry) that lets you create separate instances of IE in many versions, going back as far as IE3. I managed to get this installed on Parallels, but it crashed every time I tried to use it. I had been using it for years on my native Windows computers though. I cannot speak to whether it works on Vista or Windows 7.

Virtual Terminals

Virtual terminals for cross-browser testing is a relatively new option for web developers, and brings something to the table that the other options cannot. Rather than simply seeing a picture of your site’s layout with screenshots, and rather than just being limited to IE as with the emulators, virtual terminals actually let you physically login to a machine running the OS and browser you’re looking to test. They are created using disk images, so when you logout, the image is destroyed and recreated for the next user.

What makes virtual terminals so unique and advantageous is that you are using the actual OS and browser you’re testing on. You can click around, test out your javascripts, login to protected areas and test functionality such as cookie behavior, and so on. What you end up with is a much more sophisticated test environment that results in a more genuine reflection of what the user will see and experience.

The funny thing is, with the pricey packages of the screenshot services, you’d probably expect to pay dearly for this much more advanced option, but in reality, they’re about the same as the screenshot services, with far more bang for your buck.

CrossBrowserTesting.Com even offers free access, and although the sessions are limited to 5 minutes and based on priority (paying customers come first if there’s a line), the free sessions are not limited in any other way. Their top-level paid package is still quite reasonable, at $29.95 for the first month and $19.95 each month after. For that top-level package, you get unlimited sessions (capped at a total of 40 hours of connected time), with a maximum of 30 minutes per session. They have a huge list of available OS and browser combinations, and for my money, this is the way to go. Check out their pricing structure here.

RealityBoxLabs offers a very similar service with a slightly different pricing structure. Unlike CrossBrowserTesting.Com, they offer a day pass for $5, and then and unlimited membership for $49 a month. They don’t specify which OS/browsers they offer, but they do mention that Linux will be available soon.

Which browsers to test?

The question of which browsers to test for is hotly debated in the web development community, but the realty is, there is no one single right answer. I can’t give you an answer, but here are some tips on coming up with the answer for your own situations.

• Consider existing browser/OS stats for the site, but don’t limit yourself to that if you’re pushing for a large increase in traffic or reaching new demographics, since your browser/OS stats may change once you succeed.
• Consider the browser/OS stats for the media outlets you may be pushing media from (such as Facebook and Facebook ads). If 90% of your traffic is going to come from a media outlet, make sure your site works on their top browsers.

My general rule of thumb, unless the stats indicate otherwise, is to develop and test on all of the major browsers, while still maintaining some level of normalcy for IE6 users. Depending on the project (and the client), I may have to work particularly hard to make sure the display on IE6 looks exactly the same as it does on current browsers, but if that’s not a requirement, I make sure it looks good on IE6. There may be some padding that isn’t quite right, but only the designer and the client would even notice.

For personal projects, it really depends on the audience. Snipe.Net has a user base of over 50% FireFox users, with the remaining large chunk being IE7 users. I made the decision to sacrifice some minor display points on IE in order to optimize for newer browsers. I am never so cavalier with paying clients.

Developing cross-browser compatible sites is easier than ever, both because of improved adherance to sandards, and because of advancing testing technology. Whether you choose to do it the old fasioned way, hopping from one computer to another hitting “refresh”, or whether you use some of these new-fangled, high-tech methods, it is your responsibility to your clients – and to their users – to make sure it works.

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Firefox 3 handles “invalid” and self-signed SSL certificates differently than Firefox 2. In an effort to help the user take control of their own security, Firefox 3 will block the page with an error explaining why the certificate is invalid (“The certificate is not trusted because it is self signed.  Error code: sec_error_ca_cert_invalid”) – and provides a link (albeit a tiny one) that will allow the user to add an exception, allowing that SSL certificate to be accepted and the page to load.

If you have ErrorZilla installed and are running Firefox 3, you’ll actually get stuck and won’t be able to add the exception and therefore won’t be able to load the page. This can be a big problem if you’re running self-signed certificates to encrypt your cpanel/webmin/<other hosting management software> administration areas. Instead, what you see is something like this:

No option to add the exception.

Its unfortunate, since the ErrorZilla developers took the time to update the add-on to “work” with Firefox 3 (meaning it is able to be installed and doesn’t throw a version error), but I’m going to have to disable it until they have the SSL exceptions stuff sorted out.

On the plus side, Jay Baldwin posts to his blog (dated June 30, 2008) that he grok’s why it’s not working:

The main concern is that the error page is not considered trusted, so it has no ability to access resource:// script files, the local file system, chrome:// script files, direct to chrome:// pages, or the like, which means it is on the same security level as a foreign “public” website — it has no access to read from a config file in your Firefox profile or from the Preferences Service (about:config).

I’m still working on finding a way around this . . .  Hit me up in the comments if any of you could suggest a solution. 

Which does, in fact, make sense.The site isn’t trusted, so its not allowed to access the styles used by ErrorZilla.

So – hit him up if you have any thoughts.

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I was heartbroken to discover that Google had effectively abandoned the project around the time that Firefox 3 came out – so much so that I delayed upgrading Firefox for a while.  I was hoping they’d change their mind, or get around to updating it – but eventually I realized that Google Browser Sync has been discontinued, and the download has been replaced with the following text:

Google Browser Sync is no longer available for download. Instead, to get similar functionality, we suggest using Mozilla Weave, Google Toolbar for Firefox, or Foxmarks. Support for current Google Browser Sync users will continue through 2008. We’ve also posted the code to Google Code in hopes that someone will use it to develop something cool.

As such, it will not be updated for Firefox 3. However, the code has been made available to the public

Fortunately, the folks at Mozilla Labs came to the rescue, with their new project, Mozilla Weave. Mozilla Weave syncs forms, history, cookies, passwords, tabs and bookmarks – and even has support for Weave add-ins. Plus, you can mount your storage slot using WebDAV – although Mozilla strongly warns against using this space for general storage, as they may delete the contents at any time.

I’ve installed it so far on Win XP and Mac OSX (Leopard), and it’s working smashingly. Learn more about the Weave project, including the basics of how it works and the fundamental principles, at the Mozilla Labs Weave page, or try it out by downloading it today!

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I had originally found it while trying to remember how to tweak my Firefox so that when I type in a keyword string into the address bar, it would send me to Google search results, instead of Google’s “I’m feeling lucky”. And sure enough, I found exactly what I was looking for – and tons more – in this article:

You may have noticed that if you type something into Firefox’s address bar that’s not an address (a “keyword”), Firefox typically passes it on to Google as an “I’m Feeling Lucky” search term. The exact search engine string to use is defined in the string preference keyword.URL; if you want to change it to something else, you can simply edit this string.

So I changed it to a normal Google search results string, and voila.

Even though this article was written in 2007, most of the info still applies, so its still a worthwhile article to check out. Computer World: Hacking Firefox: The Secrets of about:config

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Get it free at tredoft.com.

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