this ball is tracked bouncing across windows. Yeah, I bet you love my Firefox theme too huh?

Ignore my awesome Firefox theme (or download here) and check out this cool little tech test. It’s extremely basic and simply let’s you bounce a beach ball. The interesting part is that you can bounce the ball across multiple windows. It’s interesting. Not sure right now how this is going to develop but there is definitely something in this.

It’s these little fun/ interesting/ weird/ quirky links that we find and post on our twitter feed so make sure you follow and stay in the loop.

Before we start, a little introduction to what I am talking about:

What is HTML5? the proposed next major revision of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), the core markup language of the World Wide Web. Or in layman’s terms, it’s the code we write to structure the web pages you see in your browser.

What is CSS3? the latest version of the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) standard, a presentational language which we use to make the HTML we wrote look like the design we created.

In short, HTML and CSS are the standards used to build the webpages you browse every day, and HTML5 and CSS3 are the future of those standards. Exciting eh?

Before you can take part in this round of future gazing, your going to need a modern browser, so no Internet Explorer people. Try the latest version of Firefox (download), Opera (download) or Safari (buy a mac). Make sure you update to the latest versions.

If you want to know what exciting new stuff your browser can handle, you can get loads of great info at http://www.findmebyip.com/ just navigate to that page and find out all about your browser. If you see lots of red crosses, it may be time to upgrade!

Alternatively you could check out Deep Blue Sky’s handy guide to HTML5 and CSS3 support – http://www.deepbluesky.com/blog/-/browser-support-for-css3-and-html5_72/

and now some examples:

Pure CSS Coke Can – http://www.romancortes.com/blog/pure-css-coke-can/
See what you can achieve without even needing the new standards!

CSS3 Examples and Progressive Enhancement – http://csswizardry.com/css3/
A number of examples of great additions to the CSS standard.

Create an animated pile of photographs using only HTML and CSS3 – http://media.24ways.org/2009/14/3/index.html

A whole bunch of HTML5 examples to check out – http://html5demos.com/

YouTube – http://www.youtube.com/html5
Try out YouTube without any Flash player, using the new embedded video tag in HTML5

HTML5 Graphs – http://www.rgraph.net/
Draw straight onto the canvas in HTML5. Get dynamically created graphs directly from your data, no images!

Star Wars Opening Crawl – http://www.gesteves.com/experiments/starwars.html
This only works in WebKit browsers (safari) at the moment, but it’s worth downloading the browser just for this.

That’s it for now. Happy Clicking Geeks, and see you in the Future!

So Google have signaled intent with the launch of their new internet browser that will take the fight to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer [yuk] and Mozilla’s FireFox [yay]. Here with his 2 cents (or pence, depending on your geo-code) is one our team developers, Wojciech…

Will Google chrome change anything in already overcrowded market? Does it delivers any better web experience? Will anyone still use it after driven by curiosity people will give it try? Hordes of bloggers trying to answer for those questions, here is one more attempt

Feature set delivered by Chrome compared to Opera and Firefox seems to be quite limited – you will not find integrated email client or RSS reader, but it would be against Google philosophy – it encourages us to use web based gmail and reader, fine. Chrome doesn’t exactly show us any features we haven’t seen before, but it adds at least one important thing: most of you probably heard about Google gears but only small minority actually bothered to test this technology – to use it with IE or Firefox you need to download and install chunk of software and do we really want to clutter our machines even more in exchange of hypothetical benefits of gears? But chrome has this technology onboard – now when you open your Google Docs or Reader in chrome you might notice new small “offline” link in the top nav bar. Click it and chrome will cache your docs or RSS stories, then enjoy Slashdot, BBC Sport, Engadget or “Invoices pending payment” (whatever is your personal preference) in the cosy Jubilee Line train on your way home

Will this feature will be enough to beat Firefox? In my opinion: no. Real power of Firefox are tons of plug-ins and add-ons, even if (”if” is the keyword here – waiting for someone to benchmark Chrome vs. others) Firefox is slightly slower or has larger memory footprint we will still use it as we love AdBlock, Live HTTP Headers or Firebug (OK, if you’re a not web developer your life might be complete without the latter two, and to be fair Chrome contains quite useful Element Inspector which covers part of features of Firebug).

Life goes on, masses of Windows users will stay (un)happy with IE, unless Google marketing department will persuade hardware manufactures to natively install Chrome and make it default browser. And users who can actually tell the difference between web browsers will continue love-hate relationship with Firefox.

This is beta version of Chrome – will we see update and Mac/Linux version anytime soon? Or will it stay in beta stage for years, as quite a few Google products we’ve seen?

After reading Benn’s tweet about mystarbucksidea , I headed over to investigate. The first thing I noticed was that Benn had got the URL wrong – it’s actually http://mystarbucksidea.com/ (with an s after starbuck). The second thing I noticed was that the site, at first glance, looks great! It’s simple, clean and clear. It looks like it accomplishes its goal well.

It’s interesting to dig into the list of ideas. It appears that most of the users of the site are vegans demanding more vegan products. “zschmidl” even goes so far as to complain “it kind of grosses us vegans out to see dead pig on your counter”. I can only imagine Starbucks is very different in the US, as I’ve never seen a dead pig in the Leicester Square Starbucks. I’m not 100% convinced by the genius of any of these ideas; whether or not they will help to put Starbucks back into the black remains to be seen (Starbucks has just posted its first ever quarterly loss).

The idea for the Starbucks forum apparently came from Dell’s Ideas Storm website (interesting blog on the subject) – aimed to put the company in touch with what its customers actually want. Both of these sites are built using the SalesForce.com platform. And this, for me, is where the story gets even more interesting than the dead pig line.

The first sign of trouble (on my FF3 browser) was on the homepage. For some reason (unknown probably even to SalesForce), there are 1150 pixels of white space between the bottom of the content and the footer. It then dawned on me that all the sub headings on the site are separate Flash movies. At first, this seemed impossible. Surely no one would want to use a Flash movie for all the sub headings! Surely!

There are other oddities too. When the site loads, the page title is “Portal Header”, replaced (via Javascript) with “My Starbucks Idea”. Look at the source and you realise that the SalesForce platform is obviously built to be generic, to the point where bloated code is used in abundance. A single post (the pig post), which conveys the following information (totalling 649 characters):

Ends up as the following (4,598 characters) with markup:

That means that this single post is 4.4kb in size, and only 14% of this is actual content; the rest is bloated markup.

My personal favourite is the IDs that are given to nearly evey element, for example the date of this idea is contained within a span which has the ID:

thePage:mainLayout:pbIdeaList:incIdeaList:ideaListStd:ideaList:0:createdDate

So does any of this actually matter? I would say YES! I imagine that the Flash movies are used for headings to allow for a custom font. But this is madness. Similarly, requiring Javascript to populate the page title also seems slightly insane, and leads to the amusing situation where Google indexes the site with the title “Portal Header”.

I’m a fairly strong believer in web standards, and in particular the idea of good, symantically relevant, HTML markup. It would be fairly straightforward to implement this site and stick to the standards, and this would benefit the end user by offering better accessibility, faster loading times and overall a better experience.

Overall I do like the idea of www.mystarbucksidea.com, I just don’t like the implementation.

I tried to use www.browsershots.org to show you how the site breaks on some browsers, but browsershots can’t even handle the site! Click here to see its attempt!

See below for a screenshot when viewed in IE6.

Now you can also have your music added to your message signatures so everyone can see what you are listening too – and even click through to listen themselves. It’s a nice interaction with FoxyTunes – which is one of the best Firefox extensions ever. Not tested if it ties in with Last FM. I love it when technology starts to ‘connect the dots’ like this as it enriches dialog between consumers and makes a richer environment for digital marketing at large.

- Loving the tune? Facebook message with song signature

While on the subject of Firefox, why not help them set a new world record for most software downloads in a day. At the time of writing this, there are still 11 hours to go and currently the UK is third in the world, just behind Canada and way off the US (of course). Interestingly, the UK has delivered more downloads than Russia, Brazil and China!

– Firefox download day world record attempt

Firefox’s true aim is to step up from number two to number one in the browser market, but their current 10-15% of market share is dwarfed by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer at 80-85%. Slowly people are seeing the light and making the switch but Microsoft’s monopoly deal with PC manufacturers means that a huge percentage of users still us the browser that came with their PC. Which sucks for us digital marketing people as Internet Explorer, particularly IE7 is a pile of horse sh*t and requires additional resources to deliver the same display as Firefox.

LinkedIn have just announced the upgrade of their FireFox toolbar. And this weekend, they also announced the deployment of their Mobile version of the site. This will allow all mobile device users access to the LinkedIn, including Blackberry and iPhone users – Benn can confirm it looks great on his iPhone

To ensure your compatibility with your device, simply log in to m.linkedin.com.

The new Mobile LinkedIn also includes improved support for non-English languages, including French, German, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese. A LinkedIn engineer, Jerry Luk gives a demo of the new mobile service with this YouTube video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xy1cTWXlF0c

AOL has announced that from the 1st March 2008, Netscape Navigator will be no more. The once omnipresent browser of choice through most of the 1990s will still be around for those of you who still want to use it, but not as a fully-supported browser option.

Athough AOL announced the end of Netscape Navigator at the end of 2007, and then extended it, this time it is really real. The recent small update for Netscape 9 was released in order to help transition users to other browsers. AOL’s alternative browser of choice? Firefox, reports Ars Technica. The open-source browser has gained a lot of steam in the past few years, and AOL has turned much of its browser-centric attention to integrating with the Firefox browser as much as possible, which certainly makes my life easier as a Firefox user.

So for all of you who were once young teens knowing of nothing but the Netscape browser, just see how times have changed. And make sure you switch over to Firefox!

If you think LinkedIn is for kids and Facebook is for grandkids, perhaps you should consider Financial Times’ new social network, aimed at top level execs who can afford 1700 pounds (3,340 dollars) per year, because that’s how much (at the very least) membership costs.

The details about the network itself are sparse; it’s being described as a forum with a ‘user-friendly, simple, efficient and secure system’ for online networking. I’m guessing that the high price point will mostly relate to the exclusivity of the club and much less to the actual technical and other accomplishments offered within the network (see bottom of this article for proof). However, it’s partially redeemed with the fact that membership in the forum includes free attendance to one of Financial Times‘ Global Conferences and Events, as well as a 20% discount on other events in the series, as well as 12-month subscription to the newspaper itself. Not bad, but 3,3k bucks? Ouch.

This particular forum is aimed at professionals in the digital, new media, mobile and telecoms sectors, but Financial Times plans to launch several more exclusive forums later this year, aimed at execs who deal with luxury goods and property.

The actual site, located at www.ftexecutiveforums.com, is completely garbled in Firefox. Thus, it’s obvious that $3,300 can’t even buy you basic browser compatibility. I’ll stick with LinkedIn, thank you.

One of our dev guys Dave G found the following link today, which shows how rubbish Internet Explorer really is:

http://www.tylerm.info/this_page_crashes_ie.html

He thought it was cool, so I thought I’d post it up for you to see another reason why we always recommend that you use Firefox!