Browser wars… 2008-style

So, Firefox 3.0 and Opera 9.50 were released within 5 days of each other (June 12 and June 17 respectively). It’s good to see both browsers being progressive and targetting bragging rights such as Acid3, even if they only score 70 and 83 respectively. I notice neither of them pays due attention to deferred scripts, but I guess everyone is using AJAX nowadays instead?

As for the other browsers… I’ve got no problems with Safari. It’s a competent browser, but doesn’t have Opera’s cache/connection leverage or FF’s dev features. I doubt MSIE will even display this post and I don’t care. So, there’s the state of the art.

The firefox upgrade was weird because the RC3 “Check for Updates…” function assured me that I had the latest version. This was further confused by the lack of any RC markings or build numbers in the “About Mozilla Firefox” dialog. It became apparent that I had silent upgrades on, but I don’t recall ever being informed that FF had patched itself.

One thing I’ve noticed is that the DOM Inspector still doesn’t conform to the LnF of the updated Firefox interface. I’d assumed this was a detail that would get polished before the final.

While we’re in a browser-technologies-mood: here’s my rdb opensearch definition for rolldabeats. For all your DnB discography needs.

Opera have munged the keyboard shortcuts. The change seems to be for the better as it’s unified the Windows/UNIX/Mac sets by using guard conditions like Platform Mac. They’ve also deprecated single-key shortcuts, which is fair enough because if you had a textbox focused then they were useless and confusing.

One thing that tripped me up was the Feature ExtendedShortcuts guard, which is activated by the “Enable single-key shortcuts” checkbox in the preferences. The shift+I shortcut for toggling images between cached, all and none was under this guard—but it’s two keys, right?

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