Archive for the ‘browser compliance’ Category

Adobe flash vs HTML 5

Saturday, July 3rd, 2010

When Apple launched the iPad , its lack of support for the flash browser plug-in started  the HTML5 vs. Flash discussions. Does HTML5 really beat flash? HTML5: could it kill flash and silverlight? Will HTML5 replace flash? And so on…

As developers who work with the Flash platform, we like to point out a few of our observations.

HTML5 promises to bring rich interactive web in the future. Object animation, tweening effects, and video that have long been the domain of Flash. One of the upcoming features of HTML5 which is considered as  a Flash killer is the new video tag. You can view the videos without a flash player plug-in !!

But there is a  formidable hurdle to cross.  Browser vendors cannot get to agree on which codec the video tag will support. “Ogg Theora” was the recommended standard video format in HTML5 and now will support H.264 video codec.

Firefox, Opera and Chrome support the Ogg Theora/On2 VP3codec. Safari, IE 9 and Chrome supports the newer H.264. All major browsers support either of the two codec. YouTube is already showing some videos in HTML5.

Ogg Theora is an open and royalty-free codec, but it is not as efficient as H.264. Google’s Chris DiBona stated that if Youtube were to use Theora as its codec, it would take up most of the available bandwidth on the internet.

Mozilla has also problem with H.264 codec because it would violate the principles of free software.

And there are few questions; Do we have facility to videoconferencing in HTML5? Do we have facility to live audio/video recording in HTML5? Are we able to add dynamic objects over the video? Can one add captions for the video?

HTML5 standards are yet to finalize and formulating them would take time. This would mean a lot of pain for the web designer / programmer over browser compliance.

HTML 5 is a programming language which needs to be interpreted by the browser. It is up to the browser to interpret that language and display the content. If the browser can't render the code, strange things start to happen in the display. Different browsers on different platforms interpret the code differently and browsers display the content as they see fit. Until HTML 5 gets standardized, each browser will interpret it differently.

Here are some lines from Lee Brimelow’s blog

“Now this is not to say that in the future, maybe they will all agree on an implementation. If that happens and it performs better than Flash, then that is how I will be delivering my videos as well. But another thing to point out is that Flash video is used for a lot of things beyond basic playback. Flash supports embedded cue points and alpha channels and is often used in ways beyond the traditional YouTube playback scenario. So while HTML 5 video looks promising, it is clearly way too early for people to be writing an eulogy for Flash video. Remember also that while the browsers get their acts together, Flash video will continue to evolve as well.”

Let us look through the flash gaming industry. Sony has sold 33.5 million playstation 3 units, Microsoft moved 40 million X-box 360 units, Nintendo 70 million and Farmville alone has 80 million active users.

Flash has so many attributes which cannot be easily replicated in HTML5.

Speed – ActionScript 3 Flash is so much faster than current Javascript implementations with the use of new Action script Virtual Machine 2.

Preloading – In flash it is byte-level preloading but in HTML5 it is object-level preloading.

Tweening and timeline animation – It is not easy to create time animations and tweening in HTML5.

Flash games can easily distribute as a single swf file and converted in to desktop applications using Adobe AIR.

Testing Flash and HTML5

Jan Ozer, an expert in video encoding technologies recently put HTML5 up against Flash in a series of tests that pitted the two  against  each other on both the Mac and PC and on web browsers including Internet Explorer 8, Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox.

Mac Tests

With Safari, HTML5 was the most efficient and consumed less CPU than Flash using only 12.39% CPU. With Flash 10.0, CPU utilization was at 37.41% and with Flash 10.1, it dropped to 32.07%

With Google Chrome, Flash and HTML5 were both equally inefficient (both are around 50%)

With Firefox, Flash was only slightly less efficient than in Safari, but better than in Chrome

Windows Tests

Safari wouldn't play HTML5 videos, so there was no way to test that. However, Flash 10.0 used 23.22% CPU but Flash 10.1 only used 7.43% CPU

Google Chrome was more efficient on Windows than Mac. Playback with Flash Player 10.0 was about 24% more efficient than HTML5, while Flash Player 10.1 was 58% more efficient than HTML5.

On Firefox, Flash 10.1 dropped CPU utilization to 6% from 22% in Flash 10.0

In IE8, Flash 10.0 used 22.41% CPU and Flash 10.1 used 14.62% CPU

References:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/does_html5_really_beat_flash_surprising_results_of_new_tests.php

http://theflashblog.com/?p=1698

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    Posted in Adobe, Flash, browser compliance, research | No Comments »

    Browser statistics over the year

    Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

    The stats from w3schools for Jan 2009 throws some interesting facts on browser usage.

    Good news is that Mac market share is improving – the king of usability and innovation Linux has been steady as always (What Novell used to be and what Microsoft wants to be)
     

    2009 WinXP W2000   Vista W2003 Linux Mac
    January 69.8% 1.6%   16.5% 1.6% 3.9% 5.8%
                   
    2008 WinXP W2000 Win98 Vista W2003 Linux Mac
    December 71.4% 1.7% 0.1% 15.6% 1.7% 3.8% 5.3%
    November 72.0% 1.8% 0.1% 15.1% 1.6% 3.8% 5.3%
    October 72.2% 1.9% 0.2% 14.4% 1.7% 3.8% 5.5%
    September 73.3% 2.2% 0.2% 13.2% 1.8% 3.8% 5.2%
    August 73.9% 2.4% 0.2% 12.5% 1.9% 3.9% 4.9%
    July 74.7% 2.6% 0.2% 11.5% 2.0% 3.9% 4.8%
    June 74.6% 2.6% 0.2% 10.0% 1.9% 3.7% 4.8%
    May 74.0% 2.9% 0.3% 9.3% 1.8% 3.6% 4.7%
    April 73.3% 3.3% 0.5% 8.8% 1.9% 3.7% 4.6%
    March 72.7% 3.7% 0.6% 8.5% 1.9% 3.9% 4.4%
    February 72.4% 4.0% 0.8% 7.8% 1.8% 3.8% 4.3%
    January 73.6% 4.0% 0.8% 7.3% 1.9% 3.6% 4.4%

    Safari and Opera have a loyal band of followers.
    There is quite a lot of users still on IE 6 – Slow move to Vista could be the reason.
    Firefox dominates the market – Mix of 2.x and 3.x
    Chrome is catching up – Gears would help improve on that score. Disappearing links and download hassles need to be fixed.

    There is always the need to build browser compatible websites

    2009 IE7 IE6 IE8 Fx Chrome S O
    January 25.7% 18.5% 0.6% 45.4% 3.8% 2.9% 2.3%
                   
    2008 IE7 IE6 IE5 Fx Chrome S O
    December 26.1% 19.6%   44.4% 3.6% 2.7% 2.4%
    November 26.6% 20.0%   44.2% 3.1% 2.7% 2.3%
    October 26.9% 20.2%   44.0% 3.0% 2.8% 2.2%
    September 26.3% 22.3%   42.6% 3.1% 2.7% 2.0%
    August 26.0% 24.5%   43.7%   2.6% 2.1%
    July 26.4% 25.3%   42.6%   2.5% 1.9%
    June 27.0% 26.5% 0.5% 41.0%   2.6% 1.7%
    May 26.5% 27.3% 0.7% 39.8%   2.4% 1.5%
    April 24.9% 28.9% 1.0% 39.1%   2.2% 1.4%
    March 23.3% 29.5% 1.1% 37.0%   2.1% 1.4%
    February 22.7% 30.7% 1.3% 36.5%   2.0% 1.4%
    January 21.2% 32.0% 1.5% 36.4%   1.9% 1.4%

      Posted in Browsers, Mac, browser compliance | No Comments »

      Drupal – content management made easy

      Thursday, January 8th, 2009

      Drupal is an open source content management platform, written in the programming language PHP. Originally written by Dries Buytaert as a message board, Drupal became an open source project in 2001.

      Drupal was also designed to allow new features and custom behavior to be added by third parties. For this reason, Drupal is sometimes described as a "Content Management Framework". Although Drupal offers a sophisticated programming interface for developers, no programming skills are required for basic web site installation and administration. You can power many different types of websites with it without knowing any coding languages.

      Read about our Drupal competencies here

      Key reasons to choose Drupal as CMS platform:

      • Fast! – Out of the box, Drupal is small in space and memory requirements, which this is the key to its speed. When it comes to web development, less is always more.
      • Portable! – Drupal is built with standard technologies so it can be implemented on just about any server, and accessible from anywhere.
      • Scalable! – Drupal supports the owner and website’s users, now and as the business grows.
      • Modular! – Drupal is flexible. Limitless options and add-on functionality allow it to change seamlessly with the business.
      • It's Popular (with the developers)! – Drupal is supported by a huge community of dedicated programmers who are constantly building new functionality.

      General features

      • Collaborative Book – The unique collaborative book feature lets you setup a "book" and then authorize other individuals to contribute content.
         
      • Friendly URLs – Drupal uses Apache's mod_rewrite to enable customizable URLs that are both user and search engine friendly.
         
      • Modules – The Drupal community has contributed many modules which provide functionality that extend Drupal core.
         
      • Online help – Like many Open Source projects Drupal provides online help system built into the core help text.
         
      • Open source – The source code of Drupal is freely available under the terms of the GNU General
         
      • Public License 2 (GPL). Unlike proprietary blogging or content management systems, Drupal's feature set is fully available to extend or customize as needed.
         
      • Personalization – A robust personalization environment is at the core of Drupal. Both the content and the presentation can be individualized based on user-defined preferences.
         
      • Role based permission system – Drupal administrators don't have to tediously setup permissions for each user. Instead, they assign permissions to roles and then group like users into a role group.
         
      • Searching – All content in Drupal is fully indexed and searchable at all times if you take advantage of the built in search module.

      Content management

      • Polls – Drupal comes with a poll module which enables admins and/or users to create polls and show them on various pages.
      • Templating – Drupal's theme system separates content from presentation allowing you to control the look and feel of your
      • Drupal site. Templates are created from standard HTML and PHP coding meaning that you don't have to learn a proprietary templating language.
         
      • Threaded comments – Drupal provides a powerful threaded comment model for enabling discussion on published content. Comments are hierarchical as in a newsgroup or forum

      Platform

      • Apache or IIS, Unix / Linux / BSD / Solaris / Windows / Mac OS X support – Drupal was designed from the start to be multi-platform. Not only can you use it with either Apache or Microsoft IIS but we also have Drupal running on Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows, and Mac OS X platforms
      • Database independence Drupal is built on top of a database abstraction layer that enables to use Drupal with MySQL and PostgreSQL. Other SQL databases can be supported by writing a supporting database backend containing fourteen functions and creating a matching SQL database scheme.
      • Multi-language – Drupal is designed to meet the requirements of an international audience and provides a full framework to create a multi-lingual website, blog, content management system or community application. All text can be translated using a graphical user interface, by importing existing translations, or by integrating with other translation tools such as the GNU gettext administration and analysis
         
      • Analysis, tracking and statistics – Drupal can print browser-based reports with information about referrals, content popularity and how visitors navigate your site.
         
      • Logging and reporting – All important activities and system events are captured in an event log to be reviewed by an administrator at a later time.
         
      • Web based administration – Drupal can be administered entirely using a web browser, making it possible to access it from around the world and requires no additional software to be installed on your computer.

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        Posted in browser compliance, cms, drupal, lamp, linux, mysql, opensource | Comments Off

        Browser compliant CMS development

        Sunday, March 9th, 2008

        Bespoke enterprise content management systems which enables users create, update and delete pages and content of a website themselves without any formal knowledge of HTML and programming. This ranges from simple product carts to complex versioning and approval cycle enabled web applications that use browser compliant WYSIWYG tools. The content can be cut and paste from industry standard word processors such as Microsoft Word, pcsuite and open office. All administrative areas are password protected and logged for your security.

        Drupal configuration and customisation

        Drupal allows users to easily publish, manage and organise a great variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of organisations have used Drupal to set up scores of different kinds of web sites including community web portals, discussion sites, corporate web sites , intranet portals,e-commerce applications, secure captcha logins, and resource directories. We have the expertise in creating browser compliant HTML (PC/Mac), PSD to HTML conversion, Drupal installation,Drupal configuration and complex customisation of Drupal based content management system.

        Wordpress installation and customisation

        • Wordpress / Wordpress MU Installation and configuration
        • Payment integration with Wordpress blog
        • Wordpress themes, development and integration
        • Wordpress as a Content Management System (CMS)
        • Wordpress plugin for SEO,Google sitemaps and WYSIWYG editor
        • Wordpress Google analytics configuration
        • Wordpress Cache configuration for faster downloads
        • Wordpress configuration in deutsch and french
        • Wordpress blog with simple Press forum integration
        • Buddypress installation

          Posted in browser compliance | No Comments »

          Cross browser compatible Websites

          Sunday, March 9th, 2008

          The latest w3 webstats indicate that Firefox and Safari constitute over 40% of the browser population. 24% of the users have wide screens supporting beyond 1024 x 768 pixels, Which implies that your non compliant website could turn away a large percentage of potential business !!

          Browser compliance : We offer cross browser compliant HTML building and web standards testing services for your static and dynamic web sites. Our expertise here is in building hand coded HTML pages that are uniform in appearance and functionality across the largest number of browsers as possible (IE 6, IE 7, IE 8 Beta, Firefox, Safari, Mac IE 5.2, Opera and Netscape). This means making pages that follow web standards so that your potential customers are not turned away whether they are in London, Brighton, Seattle or Singapore. Our clients for standards based HTML development includes leading names such as Guardian, BBC and Duke's.

          Web standards : We use framework driven Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) design (Zeldman) extensively for static XHTML pages to provide your web site higher retention through reduced size of web pages, hence faster downloads. CSS design also helps to lower bandwidth metering from hosting services. The pages would also adhere to w3c accessibility, AAA, WCAG , Bobby and section 508 compliance.

          Web printing : Our HTML designs are capable of printing the web pages in what you see mode.

          Sharepoint : PSD to HTML conversion with cross browser compatibility support for Microsoft Sharepoint 2007 and Drupal.

          Small screen : We build static and dynamic HTML pages that can support small screen browsers for Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) and similar Handheld devices.

          Firefox browser

          Firefox is a lightweight, free open-source browser that has been gaining in popularity throughout 2004. Like all Mozilla applications, it runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux computers.

          Mac browser compliance – Safari / IE

          Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5.2 – A problem for most web pages, will be the last version it will develop for the Mac except for two minor upgrades.

          Safari – The Mac mini (Tiger OS) default web browser offers superior web experience with outstanding performance as even the most complex of pages load very fast. The Safari browser is now also available for the Windows platform.

          Chrome – Browser from google which is said to change the way desktops are used..

          Enquire about our portfolio

          Web application development with Microsoft aspnet architecture

            Posted in browser compliance | 4 Comments »

            Mac and IE7

            Wednesday, December 19th, 2007

            There has been cross talk about Microsoft releasing IE 7 for Mac.

            IE 5.2 for Mac is every web developers nightmare when it comes to browser compliance and web standards. Microsoft itself recommends Apple Safari

              Posted in IE, Mac, Web standards, browser compliance | No Comments »

              Browser compliance and Safari Mobile

              Thursday, September 20th, 2007

              We have been using web standards to hand code HTML websites for clients so that it works on all browsers just as you expect. Safari Mobile uses the same Web Kit rendering engine as Safari
              on the desktop, it supports—with a few exceptions—the latest versions of HTML/XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, and the W3C DOM.

              Does your website work under all browsers including lynx ? It might be worth checking out in the following

              Firefox 1.x and 2.x
              IE 5.x
              IE 6.x
              IE 7.x
              IE 5.2 for Macintosh
              Safari for Mac
              Safari for Windows
              Lynx
              Opera
              Netscape 4.7

                Posted in HTML, Hand coded, Safari, Web standards, browser compliance | No Comments »