If you make regular use of the Internet (the Web in particular) you would be forgiven for thinking that there’s an amazing amount of stuff that’s completely free. It would seem that you can do almost anything on the Internet without spending any of your hard earned cash.
This is, of course, merely a false perception. We all know there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Yet the perception is very compelling. We can search the Web (for free), we can send and receive emails (for free), have voice and video calls (for free), arrange meetings and events (for free), read the news (for free), show our photos and videos (for free), compare retail prices [click title to read more…]
June has been an interesting month for Internet technology. We kicked off with the big IPv6 experiment, which thankfully seems to have been successful. IPv6 is available as standard in most personal computers, servers and recent network equipment. It’s not so prevalent in home routers, and it’s anyone’s guess how much support there is in mobile devices. Around the same time, Apple announced iCloud as somewhere to store your stuff. It would seem that Apple are getting a lot of traction with their technology and service announcements, though there are also some emerging trends to counter this, such as the growing adoption of HTML5 to create applications, as the recent Financial Times application demonstrates (see below). There’s still plenty of [click title to read more…]
Firefox 4 is a memory hog. Over a period of a few hours, its memory consumption rose to approx 2Gb, at which point it became completely unresponsive. Since I needed to maintain a session for testing, it was very annoying that I had to kill the Firefox process. If this keeps up, I might have to use a different browser for testing.
With the task manager running, and Firefox active but doing absolutely nothing, the memory consumption grows by a few K every second. Such a pity. FF4 had a lot of promise, but I think we are going to see lots of complaints from users over the next few weeks. All of these issues should have been spotted and [click title to read more…]
It would seem that someone in the browser community had the “brilliant” idea of disabling JavaScript Alert() boxes on pages that have a “lot” of these (i.e. more than a handful). Crazy. The Alert() mechanism is there for a very good reason, to alert the user to something of importance.
Like “Please confirm that you have read the terms and conditions before proceeding”
Or “Warning: this combination of medication is not advised for pregnant women”
So, the Web-based service keeps popping up these alerts and suddenly there’s a “helpful” checkbox on the alert that says “prevent this page from creating additional dialogs”. Tempting, isn’t it? You click it, and bye-bye alerts.
And possibly bye-bye your safety, your security, your failsafe, [click title to read more…]
Bandwagons seem to be increasingly popular. The latest surrounds the fact that Apple is intentionally slowing Web applications to make native applications from the App Store more appealing.
Only it’s not a fact.
First we had suggestions that Apple were slowing HTML5 in mobile Safari.
Citing a conversation with Apple, one developer told us earlier this week that the company did not intend to add all of Safari’s optimizations to the embedded web viewer. “Apple is basically using subtle defects to make web apps appear to be low quality – even when they claim HTML5 is a fully supported platform,” the developer said.