Five by Five

Rounded corners are the bane of a web develope’s existance, a seemingly innocent splash of design flair responsible for countless tears and tantrums. It seems laughable that such a group of hotshot professionals would be phased by something as simple as rounded corners, but there’s an undeniable truth belying this source of heartache - the web is made from boxes - big, ugly, right-angled boxes and softening up the corners requires a disproportionately large amount of time and effort for your average lazy developer, not to mention the internal demons that developers have to wrestle with as divitis, extraneous images and javascript hacks creep their infectious way in to otherwise perfect Web pages.

Thankfully help is at hand courtesy of the W3C, an organisation of egg-heads responsible for standarising the Web. The specification for the next version of CSS, the de-facto choice for styling webpages, includes a module outlining a wonderful new property known as ‘border-radius’, to keep things simple I won’t go in to the details, suffice to say that this one-liner will magically soften the hard edges of the Web and wow us all with it’s possibilities.

Of course nothing ever goes to plan quite how it should, and as the W3C drag their heels over ratifying this new specification the browser vendors have taken it upon themselves to introduce their own mechanisms for creating rounded corners using CSS, and of course in the spirit of competition each do it differently (or not at all, Microsoft I’m looking at you). The end result is that we’ve gone from having no easy way to create rounded corners to having three different ways which means that for maximum rounding value all three ways must be implemented.

This shocking echo back to the browser wars of the nineties is an excellent example of why it’s important to have Web standards and browser vendors to implement them, if only to avoid the games of oneupmanship that the browser vendors played in the past. Unfortunately the huge scale of the CSS 3 specification and the glacial pace at which the W3C moves means that the threat of another browser war within our lifetimes is very real.

I’ve tried to resist the urge to write a post on the latest flavour of the month Google’s venture into the Browser market Chrome, guess my resistance isn’t that great. Being hailed by some as a market changer I have a somewhat more sceptical view of what impact Chrome will have on the market. Whilst there are obviously some good innovations in the browser, the one process per tab thing being in my mind the most notable, what impact will Chrome really have? This has been quite a point of debate here in the Five by Five Tech Team. I decided to give it some time (well 3 weeks!) and have a look at some of the stats I have available to me. Taking a sample of a few sites with widely different audiences I thought I’d take a look at the impact Chrome has had.

Using a UK based consumer site, a European based consumer site, and a Global based product site to give a relatively wide spectrum of sites, here are the last three weeks stats:

So what does this tell us? Well not a lot really, its still early days and the stats are from a very narrow time frame. The most interesting thing I can see is when you factor in the type of audience. The UK based consumer site is not for a very tech savvy crowd, nearly 90% of users are using IE, here Chrome has made little difference to the browser share, 0.3% which users these were previously is hard to tell, they could have been IE or Firefox. However if you switch over to the Global site which is very tech savvy, high percentages of Firefox and Opera, Chrome is already at 3.2%, however it would seem that most of these users were previously Firefox users, perhaps a worrying sign for Mozilla?

I can’t say I am surprised by these stats and to be honest, it’s what I’d expect given that the only users of Chrome will more than likely be the tech savvy early adopters. Google’s challenge will be to get the browser out to the masses, and if anyone is going to succeed in this it’s them. What impact overall they have remains to be seen, as I’ve said before, one of the keys to breaking Microsoft’s dominance of the browser market is if they can also get into the enterprise market, something which Mozilla is probably still failing to do.

Even if Chrome doesn’t manage to become a mainstream browser, hopefully at least it will help drive innovation further in the browser market, something which has been a very hot topic this year.

In the first of my weekly “final thoughts” on why the internet is rubbish, I look at the phenomenon of “anti-new-look-Facebook” groups.

Ever since Facebook redesigned it’s Web site to be wider, faster, slicker, and generally just a bit better all round, I’ve been inundated with countless “requests” to join various “anti-new-look-Facebook” groups. It would seem that the “kidz” (a group I’m generally “down with”) weren’t too happy to log on to the social network to discover their garish profile boxes, personality tests and aquariums had been unceremoniously dumped in to their own tab, destined now only to gather cyber-dust. The way to fight back? Set up Facebook Groups of course! The biggest of these “anti-new-look-Facebook” groups is alarmingly titled 1,000,000 AGAINST THE NEW FACEBOOK LAYOUT!!1 and boasts a mind-numbing 65,000 “Wall” posts, comprised mostly of childish insults, threats to migrate en-masse to MySpace, thinly-veiled links to viruses and scripts which promise to revert your profile back to the old layout, and lots and lots of CAPITAL LETTERS.

I’m probably not the only one to notice the irony in using Facebook’s powerful Group communication tools to protest against the huge improvements that Facebook have been making in recent months, and in fact I actually welcome our new AJAX overlords who are forging impressive new user interface developments throughout the Web site. I never really had much need to visit Facebook to find out which Disney Princess I am, to send a delicious pie to my secret love, or to zombie attack my mother, so if the cost of removing this rubbish from my profile is a few million upset should-be-MySpace users then it’s a price I’m happy to pay.