The main problem is that the site has a Javascript heavy interface, which relies on a fairly non-standard click & drag model. Mobile Safari has fantastic support for web standards, but because it’s not a mouse & keyboard kind of device, a lot of the desktop interface model doesn’t seem to apply. Thus a lot of the more funky functionality in this site simply won’t work.

As I don’t have an iPhone myself (and don’t plan on buying a bunch of assorted handsets to test sites on,) I went in search of the next best thing; the iPhone simulator in the SDK. The main problem is that the SDK itself costs up to $300 per seat and only runs on the Mac. That’s a little bit steep considering all I want to do it run the browser emulator so I can get this site working nicely in Mobile Safari. I’ve been corrected by Tate that the SDK only costs if you want to publish software for the iPhone.

Some other web devs have touted desktop Safari as an appropriate tool for testing iPhone sites in, but aside sharing a base rendering engine they’ve got almost nothing in common. There’s a large number of curious quirks in the mobile version that simply don’t exist in any other browser, and patching them without having access to a handset seems highly improbable.

Essentially non-Mac developers are stuck with guesswork and contortionist tricks until Apple either releases a mobile mode for Desktop Safari, or opens up the SDK. Neither of these things are overly likely considering that most Apple products heavily apply the principle of vendor lock-in.

I’m hoping I will be able to fix the issues on this site without resorting to buying myself a second hand iPhone, but in the future it may not be so simple. For one of the most prevalent mobile Internet devices on the planet, it has a very high barrier to entry for development.

Fonts were plugged as one such example of improved rendering, although if the IE developer team is worth their money (they have certainly been doing a good job with IE8 so far,) they’ll be looking into squeezing as much performance out of DirectX as they can.

Internet Explorer for the uninitiated has traditionally been slow. The effect has been exacerbated by the latest versions 7 and 8 by a large memory-hungry interface that chugs even on moderate systems. Gone are the days where Internet Explorer was the “fastest” browser, because even when it’s preloaded into RAM, rival browsers like Chrome are orders of magnitude more nimble.

While the cost of processing has been steadily decreasing, the so too has the complexity of rendering for the web. While it’s fine to wait a few seconds for the browser to launch, having to wait repeatedly for pages to load or Javascript animations to complete can become frustrating. Especially with libraries like jQuery and Prototype putting the power of animation into the hands of people who would never previously have considered such effects feasible, we’re starting to see a lot of swooshing and fading that Internet Explorer quite honestly seems to choke on.

Sunspider shows remarkable improvements in Javascript rendering for Internet Explorer 9. It's still the slowest browser, but is now at least comparable to the others.

Hardware rendering will help alleviate this considerably, and I’m surprised it hasn’t taken off before now. Using a recent Opera build, I recently remarked that scrolling was so smooth, it had to be hardware rendered. It wasn’t, but my point is that it’s unusual to find the smoothness of say, iPhone browser scrolling on Firefox or especially Internet Explorer.

It will be interesting to see whether other browsers follow suit, and whether this will have such drastic performance improvements as can be noted in the graph halfway down the IEBlog write-up. It’s fantastic to watch the innovation coming from the different browser camps, and I’m anticipating IE9 will finally be the browser that we won’t tear out hair out trying to use.

Where We’re At

The browser has matured considerably since its first incarnation, to the point that it’s now stable enough for production use.

Climbing steadily in usage since it was released, it’s now reached up to 7% of the market share in technical circles. This is more than both Opera and Apple Safari combined, which is quite astounding. It’s reached incredible inroads in such a short time, and there’s no denying it’s now a big player in the market.

It’s difficult to tell where these users have come from, but with Internet Explorer 7 and six both haemorrhaging users, it’s a pretty fair bet a lot of these people are skipping the upgrade to IE8. Aggressive marketing also plays a part in this gain, with viral videos achieving success overseas and the Google homepage offering Chrome as an upgrade path to IE6 visitors.

What to Expect

Introducing friends and family members to the new browser has had mixed results. It still has quirks I haven’t worked out.

One such issue is the proprietary interface not matching the OS. On the ageing Windows XP, the iconic blue Chrome interface is a breath of fresh air even if it is unusual. On Vista it’s purportedly quite nice with Aero enabled. Conversely on Windows seven it’s terribly out of place.

• The official Linux build of Chrome 3 suffers the unfortunate interface unkindly. The default colour is a stark contrast to any native Ubuntu application, and the native compatibility mode is a cheap mimic of the native GTK (GTK is the native UI toolkit.) The only consolation is an option to use the native title bar, which is a band-aid solution as the widgets are still unusual.
• Chrome on Windows 7 looks terrible. I couldn’t get it to use the Aero effects, rather it stayed repugnantly blue and insolent. The Chrome icon also seems stuck in the Windows XP era, and won’t scale bigger than 48*48. This means it shows up on the desktop as a smaller icon bounded by a box.

While these problems may be overcome in the future, it’s a keen demonstration as to why effort should have gone into an intelligent cross-platform interface instead of hooking directly into the Windows-only “WPF.”

Multi-user Quirks

While Chrome is a great power-user browser, it’s still not suited to multi-user Windows environments.

I’ll freely admit it’s been a few months since I last tried this, but installing Chrome on a shared system for multiple users simply doesn’t work. You can set it as the default browser, but none of the shortcuts show up for anyone else other than the account you installed it with.

This is obviously a barrier that’s going to need sorting out.

Chrome in the Enterprise

There’s also been mixed reviews on Chrome in the enterprise.

As Internet Explorer becomes gratuitously more bloated and difficult to use, Google’s in an ideal position to push Chrome for enterprise use. Enterprise Chrome doesn’t seem to be gaining much ground, mostly because it’s still not easy enough to support.

The sticking factor is the large enterprises using ActiveX and primarily Microsoft technology. Chrome offers few to no incentives for this kind of large-scale corporate environment, because it’s tied to Google services, not configurable through group policy and otherwise offers no tools for mass-rollouts.

The redeeming factor is the “Google Apps Desktop Features” which will integrate Gmail, Calendar, Docs and other hosted offerings with Windows. This is an interesting move to make Google’s hosted offerings as integrated as standard desktop applications, but it’s still a manual install, which makes unattended roll-outs difficult or impossible.

At this point Chrome looks to be a boon to small businesses relying on the Google platform, but it doesn’t offer anything compelling for larger businesses running on Microsoft platforms.

What’s next?

It’s entirely to be expected that Chrome will mature further, and judging by the innovation and intelligence that’s been focused on it already, it’s bound to solve a lot of these problems I’ve presented here.

It’s already a strong competitor on the desktop, and the closest competition seems slow and bloated by comparison. It looks like Firefox — the old favourite “faster browser” — has been well and truly de-throned in the speed department, and Chrome holds the new title for overall user experience even if it still has some market share left to pick up.

That came as a bit of a shock, because we’d tested it in everything we could think of. I’d even installed a copy of Netscape 4 for the occasion. Nevertheless, whatever we did resulted in half of our “white on black” form elements having white text on a pale yellow background.

One of of the clients with the problem brought in their laptop to show us what was happening, and we spent a grand total of five minutes searching in vain for what was causing the problem. There was nothing hexadecimal, RGB or otherwise specifying that pale yellow background colour on our forms, so we took a different tact.

The conclusion was slightly anti-climatic and simple to fix, but the cause was the strange part: We isolated the problem to Google Toolbar and its form completion functionality. Whenever it offered to auto-complete a form for you, it would change the background colour of a form element to this sickly pale yellow colour, but leave the foreground colour whatever was specified in the style sheet. We’d found the source of our “white on yellow” forms.

After that, it was a simple matter of giving the background and foreground colours an !important declaration, which stopped the toolbar from changing the colours. Everything was fixed.

We would have been fine leaving the toolbar to change the colour scheme if it had done it properly. Nevertheless, this is an important lesson to everyone looking to dabble in accessibility: If you’re going to set one colour, set them all.

Internet Explorer 7, despite my hopeless optimism turned out to be little more than a new interface on top of the joke that is IE6. They also removed a few quirks that don’t actually make designing for the web any easier, but wholeheartedly screw it up.

IE6 is something I can deal with. I can install it under Linux, and that’s fine. IE7 is completely unpredictable, and sufficiently different from IE6 to be concerned about. It can’t run on anything other than a validated copy of Windows XP. Not on Windows 2000, not under WINE. The only way to get it running under Linux is to buy another Windows XP license and use a virtual machine.

That is what I call irresponsible, and from a major corporation like Microsoft, I expected better. I probably shouldn’t have, but that’s beside the point.

If I release code under the BSD license, you can do almost anything you want with it as long as I’m credited for my part of the work. That’s all fine and dandy. With the GPL the authors that contributed before you have a lot more control over your subsequent contributions — it sounds a little like a pyramid scheme if you don’t agree with the GNU philosophy.

There’s another thing I can’t stand in the world of licensing: Thoughtless phrases like “free for non-commercial use.” Why should I be allowed to use a piece of software at home, in the park, at school, but not at the office? What is the difference? There’s none, but because it’s been the standard tagline of proprietary software for so many years now, it’s become ingrained into the way people think.

Considering this, I’d like to point you over to the GPU page on sourceforge where the developers have modified the GPL to include Asimov’s first law of robotics. It’s a seemingly innocent thing to do, but at the same time it’s caused an uproar for all kinds of reasons.

My primary thought regarding changing a well-known and accepted license to include a seemingly trivial addition is this: Why bother? Aside the fact that it will give you a little thrill every time you read it (“Hey, aren’t we funny, look!”) what purpose does it really serve?

People have said it’s a good idea: This way the armies of the world can’t use the software to kill and maim. My take on the issue is that even if the righteous American war lords respect a software license, there’s always going to be people who don’t. There’s no way you can shame someone into respecting your intellectual property if they’re pointing a superweapon toward your face.

So when it comes to issues like this, there’s a need for software, the software exists, and no license is going to stop anyone who’s really intent on using it. I know that if I had a battalion of troops at my front door hungry for my blood, I’d use all the help I could get to get away. In addition, there’s no point taking away one more freedom from a license that’s designed entirely to hinder your right to modify and redistribute in the first place.

I don’t disagree with the GPL as I don’t see the overwhelming need for it in my line of work. Pascal has a somewhat less inflammatory coverage.