soaked and soaped

Apple already announced that MobileMe is not compatible with IE6.
When I dug into MobileMe’s source of the login page, I found this – for me a bit surprising – chunk of text:

Internet Explorer 7 is not fully supported

Internet Explorer 7 has known compatibility issues with modern web standards which affect Web 2.0 applications such as MobileMe.

You can use Internet Explorer 7, but you will not have access to all MobileMe features and will experience slower performance.

For the best MobileMe experience, please use Firefox 3 or Safari 3

Either Apple had time problems making things also work perfectly for IE7 or they really want to get users switching over
to a real browser.

Internet Explorer 7 and MobileMe Screenshot

Firefox 3 will have a feature which specifically could improve the usability of webapps.
It allows developers to register handlers for protocols for their apps. Example: Gmail could register a handler for mailto://-links which then would open the email compose site with the recipient prefilled when an email link is clicked, instead of opening the local email application.

For this, Firefox 3 will provide the registerProtocolHandler method.

Resources

• DOM:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler
• Bugzilla #372441
• http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/releases/trunk-for-firefox-3.html

I think this is one of most interesting and coolest new features for developers in Firefox 3: Access to file input fields via Javascript.

You can access the contents of a file input via the files attribute and it’s items. Each of the items have the following attributes and methods:

Attributes: fileSize and fileName

Methods: getAsDataURL, getAsBinary and getAsText

Then all that’s left is to throw the data into the parameters of an ajax request and send it to your server — no hacks with iframes anymore.

The following demo shows you these amazing new capabilities.
Go crazy.

Demo: Access the contents of a text file

Demo: Display an image

Code

 1 
 2 function writeText() {
 3   var data = $('text').files.item(0).getAsBinary();
 4   $('result').update(data);
 5   $('textsize').update($('text').files.item(0).fileSize);
 6 }
 7 
 8 function writeImage() {
 9   var data = $('image').files.item(0).getAsDataURL();
10   $('imageresult').src = 'data:' + data;
11   $('imagesize').update($('image').files.item(0).fileSize);
12 }

Resources

• Bugzilla #371432
• W3C Working Draft
• http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/releases/trunk-for-firefox-3.html
• http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/nsIDOMFile

As I wrote in a previous post I’m using testing versions of Firefox 3 for a while now.

With the final release coming nearer, I want to highlight features and improvements which–in my opinion–deserve more attention than just having their bug marked “VERIFIED FIXED” in bugzilla.

The search engine keywords are a new convenient way in Firefox 3 to use the search engines from the list in the top right, but without the hassle of switching to the right engine before searching. This makes the OpenSearch plugins much more attractive.

To set a keyword, click the search bar dropdown and select “Manage Search Engines…”.
If you set w as the keyword for Wikipedia, you can just type w something into the address bar and it will redirect you to the Wikipedia search results for something.

Ressources

Thanks to Jesse Ruderman for collecting a bunch of important improvements.
Also see Bugzilla #378553.

I just switched my default browser to Firefox Beta 5 from WebKit nightly. I’ve already used the previous 2 betas and was pretty impressed by it’s speed, the new location bar and the new password saving mechanism. So I give it a try as my default browser.

My must-have plugins, which currently make FF3 win over Safari3 are:

• the “GrApple Yummy” theme
• latest Firebug 1.2 Alpha

Though there are some interface issues, none of them is currently a blocker for me.

Update

The plugin now also can be installed for Firefox 3.
If you want to contribute or donate, visit the development site.

In consequence of some obscurities which occurred related to the last article, here’s a little guide on how to install the WebMailCompose Plugin for Firefox 2.0.

Recently I came across WebmailCompose. It makes mailto: links load your webmail’s compose page and adds a Compose link to the context menu. It’s a simple, but useful tool.
The problem is, that originally it isn’t compatible with Firefox 2 and later.


But with a little hack (discribed on the pluginpage) it also works with Firefox 2.0+.