google chrome – Fiendish Master Plan

Firefox 4, RC2 overwrites Firefox 3.6. Gee, thanks.

The Firefox betas, all 12 of them, used to nicely install alongside the production version of Firefox, version 3.6.x. When I installed Firefox 4 RC2, this is no longer the case: Firefox overwrites the old version.

So far, installing Firefox 3.6.15 to its own directory (after installing FF 4) and making a shortcut by hand seems to be working, although FF 3.6 can’t be run at the same time as FF 4: it just runs Firefox 4 again instead. Although Firefox users seem to upgrade faster than Internet Explorer users, I still have to keep an eye on Firefox 3.6 for a while. For instance, although FF 3.6 does CSS3 gradients, it does not support SVG backgrounds, which Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) does support. IE9 of course, does not support CSS3 backgrounds, but does support SVG backgrounds.

I’ve already switched my loyalties to the lightning fast Google Chrome a while ago. For a while, I was using Firefox just for Firebug, but now the Google Chrome Web Inspector is getting pretty competitive: it shows declarations it doesn’t consider valid and marks them with a little exclamation point icon, so you can see you -moz-box-shadow declarations (or even your -webkit properties where you do something silly like rgb(0,0,0,0.5) instead of rgba(0,0,0,.5). This is my new favorite mistake, by the way.

Frankly, despite some differences like the SVG versus CSS3 gradients, the whole browser area is headed in the right direction after many years of languishing in IE6 limbo, so I don’t care nearly as much whether IE9 or Firefox 4 comes out on top as I once might have. Despite the progress, there’s still going to be jobs for CSS3 and HTML wranglers: now with mobile, it makes even more sense to have someone focus entirely on the front end, even without a large team.

Speaking of which, I’m currently available to add all sorts of CSS3 and HTML5 goodness to your favorite website.

Census 2010 Data Site Has All the Latest in Fail

The 2010 data is finally starting to come out, and is available at the new website, American Factfinder, version 2.

Problems:

Using Google chrome (version 9), the ability to add a geographic filter fails silently. This is incredibly annoying.
Many things (including clicking on what should be normal web pages) on the website require JavaScript. This is not fancy things like scooting data from one area of the page to another. For some reason, this is one area where accessibility seems to be taking giant strides backwards.
Once I use Firefox with JavaScript on, the filter works, and I start looking at the data. Then I receive a really irritating error message that seems to be blaming me for its random failure. This occurs several times.

So maybe I want to complain about their annoying lack of working with Google Chrome or their bogus error message. Well, I would, except it’s a state secret who to contact about any website issues. No webmaster email is in sight upon clicking on the tiny “Contact Us” button. After a long and fruitless search, I give up on trying to send an email.

Maybe the Census bureau folks don’t want email. Maybe they got too much hate mail when the story broke that Census data was helpful in rounding up Japanese Americans for placement in internment camps in World Ward II. Whoops. I have to say, if I were a Muslim, I wouldn’t get a real warm feeling about that whole incident and giving my information to the Census bureau.

Update: I finally found a “Feedback” button on the site. But it’s too small, and in a weird place – the top bar area where ads usually go. Feedback links should be at the bottom!

Google Chrome 7

Dammit Google, fix the text-shadow bug I mentioned in my last post. Do you guys have version number envy? Do You want to have Chrome version number higher than Internet Explorer 9?

Why am I using Google Chrome? It’s fast as hell. I did a cold start test – ie, right after a reboot, and it was about 3 seconds for Chrome 6, 14 seconds for Firefox in safe mode. I used the highly scientific one-one-thousand method of timing). Safe mode means no extensions. I also tried turning off the automatic update checks, but that didn’t help either. Chrome is also very fast and robust when you ask it do something like open 20 tabs all at once.

However, having said that, I am still using Google chrome as my default browser at home and at work. I still use Firefox for web development (gotta have my Firebug). What can I say? Apparently, the extra 11 seconds Firefox takes to start up is in loading the text-shadow rendering.

And last, and certainly not least, it’s the browser that has the most CSS3 and HTML5 goodies to play with that isn’t from Apple.

Google Chrome 6 text-shadow is full of fail

I was upgrading Fiendish Master Plan to use HTML5 and CSS3, after being all fired up after attending An Event Apart in Washington D.C. when I encountered a major annoyance.

I have my custom embedded font working (IM Fell Great Primer) and then I wanted to add a text-shadow to the site headline. There’s only one minor problem – Google 6 chrome text-shadow handling is horribly, horribly broken. The headline, which should read “Fiendish Master Plan,” reads “Fiendish.” See the screen shot below.

Doh! Apparently, it’s been a known issue since version 4 of Google Chrome. If you use a custom font and put a text-shadow on it, hilarity ensues: some or all of the text vanishes. Talk about a glaring bug.

Come on Google, stop gratuitously ratcheting version numbers up every six weeks and fix the bug already. For the record, I have commented out the text-shadow line for now.