Today Apple rolled out Safari 3.1, and Matt Mullenwag did an official preview post on WordPress 2.5 (RC 1). Maybe it was the double espresso and two green teas I had between breakfast and lunch, but I’m about as giddy as a school girl (who swoons when presented with sexy new tech stuff).
While the Firefox (FF) is the staple browser for almost all web devs, I was able to declare Safari as my primary browser of choice until my job at Scripps. Maybe I should have switched earlier, but I got by just fine. The Activity window is miles ahead of FF’s “page info” menu, and for browsing purposes, Safari is hands down faster. Some have accused Apple of withholding parts of the API from developers so that Safari would feel zippier than its competitors, but that’s no excuse for the massive memory holes and overall instability of Mac FF. That excuse becomes even more implausible when you consider that Flock (mac only), which is built on top of FF technology, isn’t plagued by any of those issues.
A couple days ago I installed FF3 (beta 4) on my personal computer and have been loving every minute of it. While the navigation cluster lacks some serious UI thought, it demonstrates a significant increase in Mac understanding. It is zippy, and even passes the Acid2 test. Cheers to their dev team. They even achieved what I consider to be an “Apple-level” attention to detail change: instead of halting your entire form submission flow to ask if you want to save a password, FF now quietly places the message at the top of the screen for you to deal with at your leisure. And what do you know? I’m actually using that feature now.
That said, betas are fun, but Safari 3.1 is out in the wild, and is beautiful. Do yourself a favor and install the update. The new “Inspect Element” developer tools rival those provided by Firebug as far as I’m concerned, although I haven’t been able to get “edit css” to work yet. Also in place are local databases, full support for CSS3, HTML5, and “getElementbyClass.” The latter probably doesn’t mean much for CSS people, but it is revolutionary on the JavaScript front. Because most sites are coded for optimal viewing in as many browsers as possible, you probably won’t be seeing a new wave of “Safari3-ready” sites tomorrow, but this has HUGE implications for the iPhone/iPod Touch. HUGE. Just you wait.
As if that weren’t enough, Ma.tt graced us with a walk through of the new backend of WordPress 2.5. Somehow I managed to be completely oblivious to the fact that Happy Cog was working with Automattic to re-envision the admin panel for my blogging platform of choice. It wasn’t until I listened to Michael Heilemann rant about the WP UI that I realized just how redundant as ass-backwards parts of it are. The dashboard as it has existed for as long as -I- can remember is completely superfluous. The navigation is inefficient and archaic. All of this is out the door with 2.5. I installed Release Candidate 1 during my lunch break on dev.elihorne and it appears that they didn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater, if you will.
I’m planning to write a longer post once I’ve had a chance to full explore and break in the new system, but one new feature I’m particularly excited about is automatically updating your plugins. WordPress 2.3 ushered in automatic version checking and presented a nice little note that there was a newer version of your installed plugins available, but other than that it was the same as before: go to the plugin author’s site, find the download link, click it, unpack, fire up your FTP client, navigate to wp-content/plugins and upload. Then back to your browser to activate. Gone. After you’ve configured your FTP settings within wp-admin, this is all handled for you. Obviously for some plugins you will still want to do this manually, instead of possibly overwriting some personalized settings, but for the most part, this is a a godsend.
Obviously I’m frothing at the mouth for these new features, but keep in mind that being on the cutting edge isn’t the right choice for everyone. With 2.5 comes the inevitable question of plugin compatibility, possible database corruption (backup, backup, backup!!), and other unforseeables. If you have a sandbox (like I do), plunge in and see what everyone is talking about. Otherwise, you probably shouldn’t upgrade your public facing blog or personal site until 2.5 is out of beta.
Caveat aside, Hoorah! I know what I’m going to be nosing around with tonight.
Yeah, but if you believe in what Spolsky says, the world is ending.
@Sean: IE8 does break a lot of the standards compliant world because of IE hacks. We are probably going to have lots of cross-browser growing pains for the next few years.
IE6 may have sucked a lot, but one thing you could say about it was that its suck was consistent for a long time.
@Chaz: it’s inexcusable that 8 versions, or 9 or 10 for that matter, we should still have anything that doesn’t settle down and just get married. smells queer to me.
i was thinking about the inevitable data breaches that universities and credit card companies and DOE labs all have and decided that the only way to get around that is to build code that only runs on custom hardware (dynamic instruction sets I guess), and if you think about it, if they’re really going to fragment the internet, then browsers will do the same thing. There’s not a fantastic reason why one browser should be able to look at the entire internet. For that matter, there’s no reason why the entire internet should present itself in the same way. Flash is one tiny, worn out step in that direction, but Apple’s current, flimsy insistence that code can not invoke other code on the iPhone might, if anyone takes it seriously, invoke new solutions customary to the quirky things that Apple is known for pushing, like the CD ROM.
:rant: and furthermore, the fatter our pipes get, the more a browser seems like a really pitiful runtime environment that needlessly abstracts things one layer too many out of something that seemed to be working perfectly fine. there’s no goddamned reason why an application shouldn’t just go out and do the work of looking at a document just like it does behind the firewall. hyperlinking is not so fucking complicated that you can’t get the OSes to agree on something like an IPv6 address and let everything else be handled by very small, very modular bits and pieces that sort of accompany the content and are left to the business cycle to work themselves out. this is google’s OS, in essence. and come to think of it, why not just let the “browser” take over the front end all together? why not log into google and run their apps, or log into comcast and watch whatever crap their running, or log into NORAD and run a counterstrike from your cabana on the beach?
Tim O’Reilly, publisher of the O’Reilly Radar blog and an organizer of the Web 2.0 Summit, says that these “three-tiered systems” — that blend hardware, installed software, and proprietary Web applications — represent the future of the Net. As consumers increasingly access the Web using scaled-down appliances like mobile phones and Kindle readers, they will demand applications that are tailored to work with those devices. True, such systems could theoretically be open, with any developer allowed to throw its own applications and services into the mix. But for now, the best three-tier systems are closed. And Apple, O’Reilly says, is the only company that “really understands how to build apps for a three-tiered system.”
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-04/bz_apple?currentPage=5