superdavid

IE8 on Windows 7. The shape and colouring of the tabs gives it away.

Worked for me, but too buggy to be considered more convenient than using the phone itself.

That too, but more specifically: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

In that article, he talks about Netscape's biggest mistake being the decision to rebuild from scratch for version 5 (which went on to become the Mozilla suite).

Very reminiscent of a Joel on Software article

I've always used Chrome because it has the least browser chrome when maximised: tabs, address line with 4 icons, no status or frame or anything else.

If IE9 is refined to the point where it only has tabs, address bar and a few icons all in one row, it could be a winner from an interface perspective.

It's worth noting that if you do resort to pushing the company into bankruptcy, at best you'll get nothing, and at worst you'll make things even more difficult for the founders than they already are.

They're still there, but not a very hot topic.

For new concepts, the web is a much more attractive platform - quicker development, fewer (but not no) compatibility issues between platforms, etc.

A trimmed-down mobile app usually means that the desktop app is unnecessarily bloated - the "get to the right information quickly" goal is just as appropriate on the desktop as on a mobile.

Even where other jurisdictions have made laws, often very little has been done.

For instance the European Union was due to be fully compliant by 2010, but not a single government is likely to make the deadline: http://www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=441

The equivalent of an app store fee is a pay-wall to the application. It would probably drive away more customers than the equivalent app store fee, but I don't think it is defeating the point at all.

Offline access is a problem.

Are there likely to be the same lowest-common-denominator problems as you get with cross-platform development of console games, or those seen with Java apps like OpenOffice.org?

Use what you're good at. If you're good at neither, it's time to find another day job.

It is a very strange middle child between WinMo 6.5 and Windows Phone 7. Who knows who thought it would've been a good idea...

Most companies that try to do something about accessibility seem eager just to find a checklist they can go through. If access keys somehow turned up there, then they go into the website!

So many "new interface" ideas seem to forget that a large percentage of what people use computers for is in offices, producing documentation. Using your voice, or spinning 3D interfaces around with your hands, just isn't practical in an office environment with dozens of people working, where you are essentially outputting text.

Until that basic reality changes, I don't think mainstream computing needs will change. Along the same lines, I don't think the reverse is feasible, with computing interface changes bringing about social changes. The shifts we've seen from hand-writing to type-writing to computer-based word-processing has been happening in roughly the same environment for a very long time.

I think the idea that users that need/advocate these features can contribute fixes to an open source project is one of the unfortunate myths (for want of a better word) of the FOSS movement. The idea is noble, but, as with Mozilla, the items that project sponsors want fixed/sorted get fixed/sorted, while other "unsexy" features/bugs/components just get left behind for years.

Despite all the flack that Microsoft gets, its browser is far and away the strongest for accessibility, with Mozilla a close second. Sadly Opera, Apple and Google almost need not bother...

Very few sites actually make use of <abbr> and <acronym> tags, when they would be handy for people without any disabilities, much of time.

We can only assume their own tweets won't be blocked by any content filter...

It's amazing that only in 2010 are we reaching the point where the vast amounts of information that are inherently made public (like SSIDs) are actually sensitive information.

Long gone are the days when public policy could be dictated by what people specifically made public or private by opting to publish it (in a newspaper, for example) or not.

As a society, I don't think we quite know how to handle this. Technically, this information is public by definition, but having it used like this by a corporation just doesn't "feel right" to most people.

I get the feeling a lot of developers pick Ruby because it's cool, while businesses latch onto .Net because it's Microsoft. There really seems to be little more to it than that, most of the time.

Plenty of companies still have them, mainly when designers insist that a website needs to be compared to a magazine or print brochure. They're typically the same websites that have music playing on every page (and that can't be turned off).

Probably because Mozilla and Opera aren't easy targets for lawsuits from disability groups and governments in the same way that Microsoft has a bullseye painted on it.

They don't seem to want to admit that the problem is not how complicated it is to set privacy levels, but that there are things you just can't control any more. For example, whether your profile picture gets shown to people outside your network, or whether what pages you join get shown to people outside your network. These options left long ago, and show no signs of coming back.

Two major problems I see with people straight out of their course:

1. They've never heard of source control, let alone understand why or how it should be used.

2. They know exactly the frameworks they've been shown during their courses, and think that anything else is either completely foreign and useless, or needs to be dived into head-first, rather than seeing any framework as just another tool to be used based on first principles. (Replace "framework" with "language" and you get the same idea on a different scale.)

Maybe these comments are specific to Australian courses?

The slides note that the new HTML5 doctype works in current browsers. Does it trigger quirks mode in older browsers (e.g. pre-2010 releases)? If so, that essentially makes it a lot less usable that the slides would suggest.

The problem with canvas, as correctly identified on the IE blog, is that no-one has yet worked out what to do with it from an accessibility perspective. Other browsers just report it to screen-readers (and other similar technologies) as a graphical block, whereas it obviously contains a lot more crucial information than that, and there's no standard for how that should be represented.

That would be for the initial release, but not for the service packs unfortunately. IE6 was still standard (and had some security enhancements) in XP SP2.

Even if IE9 catches up 100%, it will still be frozen in time at its point of release until IE10 is released several years later, where other browsers will be regularly releasing new versions every few weeks/months (with almost 90% take-up).

You can see they're between a rock and a hard place - they don't want to annoy business customers by cutting off support for XP, but they don't want to spend significant resources bringing new software to an incredibly old platform.