We’ve been using Chrome 16 since December 13, 2011. That’s almost two months — positively ancient for Google’s rapidly-updating browser! Like most releases, Chrome 17 provides a number of tweaks. There are fewer major new features than Firefox 10 but some would argue Chrome requires less polishing.

Let’s look at what Chrome 17 has to offer…

Omnibox Pre-loading

Type a search term into Chrome’s address bar (sorry Google — I still think “Omnibox” is a stupid name) and you’ll notice various suggestions and possible sites. If Chrome’s confident it’s read your mind correctly, it’ll start pre-loading your chosen page. Popular places such Facebook will then appear almost instantaneously although I had less success with other sites.

User opinion will be mixed. It makes Chrome seem faster but it’ll sap your bandwidth and could make sites slower by hitting them with unnecessary pre-load requests. I suspect Google has judged it about right — Chrome only pre-loads when it’s absolutely certain of your intentions. However, you can switch it off by unchecking “Predict network actions to improve page load performance” in Options > Under the Hood.

Malicious File Alerts

Chrome will now alert you when a download appears to be malware or some other nasty file. It’s important to note that Chrome doesn’t actually scan the file; it verifies the originating server against blacklists and looks for suspicious activity.

Override the User Agent

It’s now possible to set a different browser user agent without an add-on. Open the webkit inspector, click the settings cog and check “Override User Agent”. It offers various flavors of IE, Firefox, iPhone, iPad and Android or you can enter your own browser string.

Add-on Panels

Panels are small windows which pop-out to reveal applications which are running all the time but don’t require their own tab, e.g. music players, chat applications, stock checkers etc. Panels are only available to add-ons and the API has been updated accordingly.

Miscellaneous Updates

There are a number of smaller changes you may — or may not — like:

• Page zooming has been improved; it goes up to 500% and is more consistent with other browsers.
• Print Preview now appears in a modal dialog rather than its own tab.
• The History tab, chrome://history/, has been redesigned. You can filter and remove specific domains.
• A new chrome://profiler/ page provides task profiling and debugging information which could be useful for process-intensive web applications and add-ons.
• HTTP pipelining has been enabled. This permits multiple HTTP requests on a single TCP connection and has been in other browsers for a while.
• There have been a few dozen security fixes and the V8 JavaScript engine has been updated.
• New tab has lost its ‘+’ icon. I’m not convinced that’s a step forward though?

Chrome Arrives on Android

Perhaps the biggest news is Google’s release of Chrome on their Android OS. It’s a beta application available for Android 4.0 smartphones and tablets. Like Firefox mobile, the browser allows you to seamlessly synchronize your settings, bookmarks and open tabs on all devices. For more information, refer to Google’s Introducing Chrome for Android blog post.

Google claims they aren’t interested in dominating the browser market. It makes you wonder how far Chrome could have gone had they made more effort!

I expected last month’s browser statistics to be a little unusual. With a large proportion of the western world on vacation, the ratio of home to business usage rises. Typically, IE usage would drop and the other browsers would rise. You’d expect IE fluctuations to stop following the return to business in January. So let’s look at the latest worldwide StatCounter statistics to see if that happened:

The table shows market share estimates for desktop browsers. The ‘change’ column shows the absolute increase or decrease in market share. The ‘relative’ column indicates the proportional change, i.e. another 12.4% of IE6 users abandoned the browser last month. Party time! There are several caveats so I recommend you read How Browser Market Share is Calculated.

I previously reported that, despite widespread reports, Chrome 15′s victory as the world’s most-used browser version was short-lived. The release of Chrome 16 on December 13 2011 split the user base so IE8 quickly retained its lead.

However, we’re now at the end of Chrome 16′s life. In fact, Chrome 17 is around a week overdue so the vast majority of Chrome users — 25.79% — are using version 16 (I was tempted to refer to it as ‘old’ but it’s hardly past its prime at seven weeks of age!) The next release will split Chrome’s user base again, but IE8 is losing ground too rapidly to keep up. It lost another 1.3% in January after a 1.88% drop the month before. The browser looks likely to dip below 20% during the next few weeks.

Although IE9 had a good month, overall, IE dropped 1.19%. Firefox also lost half a percent. While most of those users switched to Chrome, Safari also received a surprise boost. Did you receive a new Mac or iPad during the holidays? If so, perhaps you’re partially responsible for that half-percent jump.

Chrome is looking unbeatable. It’s monthly 1% rise is holding firm and it’s likely to overtake IE by the middle of the year.

Mobile Browser Usage

The mobile market remained busy during January and usage accounted for 8.49% of all web activity.

The primary mobile browsing applications are:

1. Opera Mini/Mobile — 23.34% (down 0.88%)
2. Android — 21.39% (up 1.17%)
3. iPhone — 19.51% (up 1.10%)
4. Nokia browser — 11.82% (down 1.10%)
5. Blackberry — 6.68% (down 0.85%)

There’s little point reading too much into these figures; there are too many handset harlots switching phones more frequently than their underwear! The only obvious trend is Blackberry’s continuing misfortunes; but you don’t need browser statistics to see that.

We’re only three weeks into 2012 and what an enormous year it’s already been on the Web.

SOPA has been proposed by the United States Congress, with big internet names such as Wikipedia and Reddit observing a 12 hour blackout in protest. Apple, now well known for revolutionizing industries far and wide are expected to launch their new “Bliss” education initiative in an event in the next 24 hours. But what’s happening at SitePoint this year?

We’ve been very busy, working on some exciting new projects. One I want to introduce you to is DealFuel.com. We’ll bring you super cool savings on tech products, books, and tools from SitePoint and others. Sign-up to receive all the details on the first deal.

We’ve also got some exciting new book launches lined up on topics like CoffeScript, jQuery, and UX … to name just a few. So it’s going to be a BIG year. But enough about what’s happening here at SitePoint!

What do you think will happen in the tech world in 2012?

• Is Android going to maintain it’s diminishing lead over iOS?
• What new releases are Apple going to give us in 2012?
• How will Facebook’s IPO pan out?

It was such a cliche of a title, I just had to use it. I’m sure you have heard of the great BDD tool Cucumber , but what you may not know about is how smelly cukes can be. I have recently been revising and refactoring my cucumber features in absolute disgust. In my defense, I started writing cucumber in earnest 6-7 months ago

See more here:
RubySource: Smelly Cucumbers

CloudSpring: Apparently 90% of the data in the world was produced in the last two years – which should give you some idea of just exactly how much data is being accumulated the world around, especially by large companies like Google. The data field is so enormous that traditional methods of linking, searching and retrieving data don’t work any more. This is Big Data. Big Data The term “Big Data” was popularized by Roger Magoulas from O’Reilly in 2005, although avid net trawlers have found evidence of the term being used occasionally as far back as 2001

Continued here:
Hadoop 1.0 Release – Big Data for everyone

Welcome to 2012! The web has reached its third decade and it’s changing more rapidly than ever. I’m no Nostradamus but, unlike him, I’m prepared to make ten prophecies without resorting to ambiguous language or tenuous explanations. I do not claim to have mystical predictive powers but you’re welcome to gaze at my crystal ball … the mists are clearing …

1. Chrome Will Overtake Internet Explorer

If current growth rates continue, Chrome will become the world’s most popular browser by the middle of 2012 and end IE’s 13-year reign. There will be much rejoicing followed by a sickly hangover when everyone realizes just how powerful Google has become.

2. But IE10 Will be Better Than You Expect

In response to Google’s dominance, Microsoft will release IE10 during the spring. It’ll be a wonderful browser with a slick interface, amazing speed and excellent W3C standards support. It’ll receive glowing reviews and everyone will humbly acknowledge the fine job Microsoft is doing.

We’ll subsequently return to our default browsers once we realize two-thirds of the world can’t install IE10.

3. Windows 8 and Windows Phone May Surprise You Too

Painful experiences of Windows Vista will be a distant memory by the time Windows 8 appears in the fall. It’ll be applauded by businesses, home users, gamers and developers alike. It’ll sell well even though the western economies are in meltdown. Web developers will also be able to leverage their skills and write native Windows applications using HTML5, CSS and JavaScript.

Similarly, devices running Windows Phone will become a viable alternative. Not everyone wants the geek of Android, the Apple-knows-what’s-best-for-you chic of the iPhone, or the best-for-business BS of Blackberry.

4. Tablets and Mobiles Will Begin to Influence Web Design

Everyone will be taking tablets in 2012. The Apple iPad and Kindle Fire are increasingly popular and, within a few months, tablets will be de rigueur for anyone attending a high-powered business meeting. They won’t be used or required, but they’ll make you look cool and important. Thousands of CEOs will consider tablets to be the future of IT and insist that all company web sites and applications are compatible. On their device. In portrait mode. At 480×800.

Perhaps that’s a slight exaggeration, but web designers will almost certainly need to consider small screen devices. Mobiles currently account for 8% of all web access and it’s rising rapidly.

5. Responsive Design Will Go Mainstream

With the exception of a few major companies, media queries have mostly been used for technical websites and demonstrations. That will change in 2012 and everyone will want their site to work on desktops, tablets and smartphones.

My only reservation: is the industry ready for responsive layouts? I’ve worked with many graphic artists over the years but very few could make the psychological leap beyond fixed-width design. Fluid layouts have been with us since day one but the majority of the web remains steadfastly rigid. If you only have time to learn one skill in 2012, make sure it’s CSS3 media queries.

6. Many Mobile App Developers Will Switch to HTML5

The mobile market has become increasingly fragmented with differing versions of iOS, Android, Symbian, Blackberry OS, webOS, bada, Windows Phone, etc. Many companies make a good living producing apps for a single platform but it’s increasingly difficult to support multiple devices.

The sophistication of mobile browsers and APIs make HTML5 web apps an attractive cross-device proposition. It’s still possible to take advantage of app store advertising, distribution and monetization by creating small native wrappers which link to your online application.

7. Advertisers Will Discover HTML5

If you consider web advertising to be ugly and intrusive now, think how bad it’ll be when advertisers adopt HTML5! The advantages (for them) include:

• Adverts can adapt to different devices and screen sizes using media queries and similar technologies.
• File sizes can be reduced so advertisements appear faster.
• An advert can interact with any part of the page — not just its own box.
• HTML5 adverts will be more difficult to block.

HTML5 development tools may not be as sophisticated, but the supremacy of Flash advertising is beginning to wane.

8. But Flash Will Survive. Just.

Despite a rapidly-expanding market, Adobe has abandoned Flash on mobile devices. But the technology is far from dead. The main reason: HTML5 and its development tools are relatively new whereas designers have been using Flash for more than 15 years.

I won’t pretend that the future is rosy for Flash, Silverlight or any other plugin technology. They evolved to overcome the inherent omissions and slow progress of web standards, but HTML5 is catching up and legacy browsers will become less of an issue…

9. IE6 and IE7 Will Finally Die

In January 2012, the worldwide market share for IE6 was 1.8% and IE7 was 4.0% — and they’re dropping fast. In many cases, the development cost for supporting those browsers cannot be justified.

However, 5.8% of the market is a lot of people and they remain the default browsers for many large organizations and government departments. The web is device agnostic; there may be few economic reasons to test legacy browsers, but active prejudice against specific sectors of the community is a different matter.

Ideally, websites should remain operational in IE6, IE7 or any other web browser. The design need not be pixel-perfect — it can be downright ugly. It does not necessarily require all the graphics, effects, animation or media. You may even choose to disable all CSS and JavaScript. But there’s no reason why your content should not be available to all.

10. Average Page Sizes Will Reach 1MB

I hope this doesn’t come true but, if current trends continue, the average total weight for a single web page — including all CSS, JavaScript and media files — will be 1MB by the end of 2012. It’s ridiculous since HTML5 and CSS3 reduce the need for images and JavaScript. That won’t stop it happening, though.

If your pages are becoming bloated, do everyone a favor with a 2012 detox. Make it your New Year resolution. Who am I trying to fool? We’ll be stuffing our pages with tasty treats by February.

Do you agree with my mystic predictions? Have you experienced premonitions of what’s to come in 2012? Happy New Year!

Chef is billed as “A systems integration framework, built to bring the benefits of configuration management to your entire infrastructure”. It doesn’t matter how many times I read that, I still hear a ‘whoosh’ over my head. Put simply, we can manage server configurations through good old familiar Ruby. The gist of Chef is we create cookbooks, these cookbooks use the Chef DSL to install and configure packages we require for our servers

Read the article:
RubySource: Cooking with Chef Solo

If you expected December to be a quiet month in the browser market the results below will surprise you. Every vendor made a gain — except one. Let’s look at the latest worldwide StatCounter statistics:

The table shows market share estimates for desktop browsers. The ‘change’ column shows the absolute increase or decrease in market share. The ‘relative’ column indicates the proportional change, i.e. another 20.2% of IE6 users abandoned the browser last month. Happy days! There are several caveats so I recommend you read How Browser Market Share is Calculated.

Last month’s main story was Chrome overtaking Firefox to become the world’s second favorite browser. Several technical sites also reported that, if you examine individual browser versions, Chrome 15 had overtaken IE8. That victory was short-lived. Google released Chrome 16 on December 13 2011 which split the user base. IE8 retains the browser crown with 22.12% followed by Firefox 8 (15.35%), Chrome 15 (13.34%) and Chrome 16 (11.73%). Analyzing Chrome and Firefox by version number has become futile; a new release appears every six weeks.

Chrome rose by 0.69% in November — impressive, but less than it’s usual 1% increase. December’s overall gain was 1.59% which more than made up for the shortfall. Rumors of Chrome reaching growth saturation point appear premature.

December 2011 was also kind to Mozilla, Apple and Opera who all experienced modest gains. Safari edged above 6%, Opera is poised to break its 2% barrier and Firefox 4+ is gaining users at a healthy rate following a slightly wobbly period.

But not every vendor can be a winner. Microsoft lost almost 2% in December with IE6, 7 and 8 taking a large hit. However, remember that December is an unusual month; a large proportion of the world is on vacation so the ratio of home to business usage rises. In addition, many people will have received new PCs, laptops and tablets as gifts which could cause minor fluctuations. It’s back to business in January and business is Microsoft’s domain.

Mobile Browser Usage

December’s impact on the mobile market was also evident and usage accounted for 8.04% of all web activity during the month. That’s a rise of almost 1% but, again, vacations and gifts are likely to have a short-term effect.

The primary mobile browsing applications are:

1. Opera Mini/Mobile — 24.22% (up 1.73%)
2. Android — 20.22% (down 0.19%)
3. iPhone — 18.41% (down 1.12%)
4. Nokia browser — 12.92% (up 0.98%)
5. Blackberry — 7.53% (down 0.67%)

Perhaps it’s not surprising to see the iPhone and Blackberry drop; they’re popular devices for business users. That said, I’ve given up trying to understand the mobile browser market; it’s far too erratic.

Happy New Year!

PHP has a vast selection of built-in string handling functions that allow you to easily manipulate strings in almost any possible way. However, learning all these functions, remembering what they do, and when they might come in handy can be a bit daunting, especially for new developers. There is no way I can cover every string function in one article, and besides, that is what the PHP manual is for! But what I will do is show how to work with some of the most commonly used string handling functions that you should know. After this, you’ll be working with strings as well as any concert violinist! On the Case PHP offers several functions that enable you to manipulate the case of characters within a string without having to edit the string character by character

Read More:
PHPMaster: String Handling Functions

PHP has a vast selection of built-in string handling functions that allow you to easily manipulate strings in almost any possible way. However, learning all these functions, remembering what they do, and when they might come in handy can be a bit daunting, especially for new developers. There is no way I can cover every string function in one article, and besides, that is what the PHP manual is for! But what I will do is show how to work with some of the most commonly used string handling functions that you should know. After this, you’ll be working with strings as well as any concert violinist! On the Case PHP offers several functions that enable you to manipulate the case of characters within a string without having to edit the string character by character

Read More:
PHPMaster: String Handling Functions

Firefox 9.0 is out? Seriously? I suppose it’s been six weeks since version 8.0 was released on November 8, 2011. If you’ve not received an automatic update yet, select Help > About Firefox and hit the Check for Updates button. If all else fails, head over to getfirefox.com and download it manually.

The add-on compatibility issue appears to have improved significantly. None of my extensions were disabled but I can’t promise you’ll have the same experience.

On the surface, little appears to have changed. Mozilla is claiming improved HTML5, CSS and MathML support. They have also published a long list of bug and security fixes to illustrate how busy they’ve been. Mac OS users may notice improved theme integration and two finger swipe navigation but, for the rest of us, the main changes are under the hood…

Improved JavaScript Performance

Mozilla are claiming a 20-30% performance boost for JavaScript in Firefox 9.0. It’s primarily been achieved using Type Inference (TI); a feature in the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine which analyzes statements and variable values as a program executes to determine types. The information is used during JIT compilation to generate more efficient code.

It’s impressive. While I doubt you’ll experience a 30% speed increase in the wild, the early benchmarks show promise. Mozilla has certainly closed the gap on competitors, if not overtaken them.

New CSS3 font-stretch property

The new font-stretch property selects a normal, condensed, or extended face from a font family:

• font-stretch: ultra-condensed
• font-stretch: extra-condensed
• font-stretch: condensed
• font-stretch: semi-condensed
• font-stretch: normal
• font-stretch: semi-expanded
• font-stretch: expanded
• font-stretch: extra-expanded
• font-stretch: ultra-expanded

Typefaces will only appear differently if you have a specific font type installed. Remember that many fonts don’t offer condensed or expanded types.

Improved CSS3 text-overflow Support

Firefox has supported text-overflow: ellipses since version 7 was released in September. The property shows ‘…’ at the right-most end of a text string which overflows its container.

Firefox 9.0 allows you to truncate either end of the text with a hard clip, ellipses or a custom string. For example, if “12345678″ was centered in an element which was too small;

text-overflow: ',' ellipsis;

could result in “,3456…”

For more information, refer to the text-overflow reference at MDN.

A More Promising Future?

Mozilla has been losing ground to Google’s Chrome browser but Firefox 9.0 feels fast, stable and has fewer of the compatibility issues which held back earlier versions.

The organization has also announced a three-year extension to its search partnership with Google. The original deal — worth $100 million per year and 84% of Mozilla’s total revenues — ended earlier this month. Neither company has revealed the financial details; Google is certain to have renegotiated the terms, but it was hardly likely to ignore the preferred browser of one in four web users.

It’s also evident that Mozilla is trying to differentiate itself from the others — view their Firefox 9.0 video. While it’s a stomach-churning set of moralistic cliches (independently spirited people, we value values, we believe in you, etc), it’s true that Mozilla is the only browser vendor without ulterior business motives or commercial interests to protect. The web would be a lesser place without them.

If you’re considering the Firefox 9.0 update, it’s best to do so now. Firefox 10.0 is due on January 31, 2012.

While focus of recent core PHP development has been on new language features, a growing concern in recent years has centered around performance. While it’s sufficient for many users, as PHP sees increased use by large sites like Wikipedia and Facebook, the ability to serve more requests on fewer servers becomes increasingly important. Some efforts have been made in this area in the last few years, both within and outside the PHP internals team. However, understanding exactly what’s going on requires a bit of background both in history and concepts.

Visit link:
PHPMaster: PHP’s Quest for Performance: From C to hhvm

While focus of recent core PHP development has been on new language features, a growing concern in recent years has centered around performance. While it’s sufficient for many users, as PHP sees increased use by large sites like Wikipedia and Facebook, the ability to serve more requests on fewer servers becomes increasingly important. Some efforts have been made in this area in the last few years, both within and outside the PHP internals team.

View post:
PHPMaster: PHP’s Quest for Performance: From C to hhvm

Have you or your business sent out your Holiday or Christmas cards for the year yet?? 99designs asked their amazing design community to create several unique and professional cards for the upcoming festive season, and are offering these designs to you completely FREE to download and use! Simply choose whether you would like a Happy Holidays card or Christmas card design . You can then print them out (or get them professionally printed through our partner, Printing for Less ) and then write your own personal messages on them for all you friends, family, business contacts and loved ones.

More:
DesignFestival: Getting Festive: Free Holiday Card Giveaway From 99designs