CSSquirrel

I’m not normally one to be reposting machima videos, but this is one of the better ones that I’ve seen in a long time, mainly because of all the custom skeletal animations being done (most WoW machimas use the standard animations throughout). It’s a great action scene focusing on the fight between two rogues. The creator (user percula on Vimeo) plans to do one showcasing each of the classes in WoW. I’m hoping she gets around to them all.

Over at the Mindfly blog I’ve posted The Curious Case of Inline Block, a mini-tutorial meant to help reacquaint people with display: inline-block, an incredibly useful CSS 2.1 display property value that wasn’t as convenient to make use of in the past due to faulty IE implementation and no Firefox 2 support.  But with Firefox 3 out and Internet Explorer 8 on the horizon, it’s going back into my toolkit of invaluable styles.

Go check out the post if you need a refresher course on how to make inline-block work out in all major browsers with little fuss.

I don’t believe that Google Chrome is going to kill Firefox as today’s comic implies (with a Portal-inspired twist), but I do believe that if there’s a non-Microsoft browser that stands a chance of overtaking Firefox’s #2 position in the browser usage market, I see Chrome as the most likely candidate.

The reasons seem pretty straightforward to me, but I’ll enumerate them for those that think I’m off my rocker:

1. Safari is too Apple-centric to ever catch Firefox, with the possible exception of a far future where Mac OS is in the market position Windows is. Of course, it won’t ever be, because Mac OS is tied exclusively to Apple hardware, and I don’t foresee Apple computers reaching the price point where they’ll take such a commanding lead in sales. Then, if Apple reached that point, they’d probably be sued for monolopy-related software bundling just like the challenges IE/Window is always receiving.

2. Opera is too preachy to ever escape its small market share. They don’t want to build the software that people want. They’d rather build the software that they think is best and then try to evangelize to the masses until they convert to Opera’s way of thinking. One example of what I mean here: addons. It’s more than clear at this point that end-users want to customize their browser with any doodad they can dream up. Opera’s adamantly against that. It’s a shame, because they have a GREAT browser.

3. Google’s a verb of the 21st century. It’s gone past being a product, or a web app, or a service. It’s something you do to find something on the Internet. And with their main portal and their other big sites like YouTube quietly recommending Chrome, it’s going to get exposure to hundreds of millions of “average” web surfers who’ve never even heard of Opera or Firefox.

4. So far, Google appears to be positioned to making Chrome into the kind of browser people want. It’s fast and streamlined, but at the same time they plan to make it capable of supporting addons and other features that will let people make of it what they will. Give someone a car, and they’ll drive it. Give someone a fast car and a garage to tinker in, and they’ll obsess over it their entire life.

Take into account all that and the fact that many major hardware vendors are talking about making Chrome the default installed browser on machines they ship, and you’ve got a good reason to claim that Chrome could rapidly rise in the ranks.

To me, the question isn’t whether Chrome will overtake Safari and Opera. It will (and as it finally gets Apple and Linux versions that should accelerate adoption). The question will be whether Firefox’s head start, existing community of users and addon-makers, and equal devotion to constantly improving standard compliance and JavaScript speed increases will be enough to keep the lead.

Frankly, whichever keeps ahead in standards support, speed, and expandibility (addons, etc) will be the one that I make my browser of choice. Regardless of which wins, I hope they collectively continue to chip away at the undeserved lead of clunky, slow Internet Explorer.

I like blogging. I do. However, I have a problem. I’ve got a Twitter account. There’s something about the 140-character limit micro-blog tool that makes it incredibly difficult to hold onto a concept long enough to form it into a five-paragraph essay, let alone a multi-page diatribe about how browser X’s implementation of CSS property Y is wrong.

It’s been an observed impact of the Internet that people generally are much more impatient when it comes to searching for data. If you can’t Google it or Wikipedia it in under five minutes, then the information doesn’t exist or isn’t worth knowing.

It seems to me at the very least that Twitter is doing the exact same thing to my ability to write at length about any topic. I could devise a narrative about my recent exploration of the topic of RDFa and talk at length of my conclusions regarding its impact on future web development… or I could come up with 140 characters or less to the effect of “RDFa is sort of like XFN. But not. At what point is extra semantic markup too much bloat?”

The trick is staving off the need for instant gratification in exchange for the fulfillment I get from a more carefully considered writing that covers the topic in more depth. I think that sums up Internet use in general these days.

Alright, fess up. How do you fight your Twitter addictions?

This morning my apartment’s Comcast Internet connection was down. For whatever vile reason, I was also unable to access the web via my iPhone’s 3G network.

My very first thought? “Dude, I should tweet this.”

I then proceeded to try to access Twitter, first from my computer, then next from my iPhone.

A few moments later my brain kicked in just a bit “Oh… right.”

Where do you post complaints, snarky comments, or short hilarious thoughts when you’ve got no web access? The fridge?

Sometimes I think that any thoroughly web-integrated person is like a wireless cyborg, incapable of functioning properly without web access. If you put me in Amish country, I’d probably lose the ability to speak coherently.