At last, the new layout is ready and deployed. Codename “Dorset2” was completed some days ago but I spent additional time figuring out ways to make a few parts work with Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6. Yes, I know those browsers are obsolete, but IE 6 is the last version that can be installed on Windows NT 4.0, Windows 98 and later (wikipedia) — yes, I know nobody should use anything older than Windows XP for Internet browsing nowadays, hush.

I also had to work around a couple of bugs in Mozilla Firefox 3.5, of all things. Webkit and KHTML-based browsers (Google Chrome understands some KHTML extensions for some odd reason) also displayed some quirks of their own.

Here's a few of screenshots that should display the overall differences between Dorset and Dorset2 (big files ahead!):

• Dorset
• Dorset2
• Dorset2 on Internet Explorer 6 SP1

Naturally, this site is no longer very compatible with IE 5, 6 and 7 because it's using some CSS 2.1 characteristics that are not implemented correctly or at all by those versions. IE 8 works like a charm except for a minor problem with the pre element height rules — which I could fix with a small work-around if I cared enough — but there are also some CSS 3 techniques and/or vendor-specific extensions in use for round borders and text shadows. Nonetheless. I made sure that the site's functionality would not differ between IE 5, 6 and 7, so even if the appearance differs, nothing should work incorrectly.

VirtualBox was very helpful when testing all this stuff. It'd been very hard to run Debian lenny and squeeze at the same time otherwise!

Opera 10.00 showed problems handling multiple children elements with transparent background images. That's a real pity and I hope that newer versions don't have this problem.

The bottom-left corner is not round. There's a good reason for this, and I hope to fix it in the next iteration, some day. For now, Dorset2 is here to brighten and soften your day!

I have recently discovered that the color scheme and overall “look and feel” of an user interface, including web sites, can do a lot with my mood. Two days ago, someone on freenode.net's social channel (#defocus) linked to her blog, which has a black background — that's not bad or unusual, but I noticed that the dark scheme affected my mood making me feel slightly upset for a few minutes. I have no idea if this is just another quirk in my brain's functionality, or normal.

Nevertheless, it does sound like something I could use to my advantage, and to please my somewhat loyal reader (hi Espreon!).

Codename “Dorset2” has been a work in progress since last November. I had experimented with round shapes, box shadows and gradients, using CSS 2.1 and background image tricks, but I didn't get very far due to Dorset's inflexibility and design flaws at the PHP level; basically, I'd have had to edit every single page to adapt them to the new scheme, and that'd be boring and tedious. However, a few days ago, “Poison Ivy” was completed, enabling me to share the basic and simple functional code with three websites, or document sets, so to speak:

• The Wesnoth-UMC-Dev website, (now codename “Kalari”);
• This website (codename “Dorset”); and
• Dorset2, not yet online.

Ivy's design allows me to simply “flip the switch” to convert every web page in my laptop's test Apache instance to use the new scheme, thanks to a extremely primitive, yet effective template and configuration system. A couple of lines of code:

define('DORSET2_ENABLED', TRUE);
define('SKEL_BASE_PATH', DORSET2_ENABLED ? '/dorset2' : '/dorset');

By toggling DORSET2_ENABLED, I can test my code with the old and new templates and stylesheets as necessary, without editing any of the actual pages!

I deployed “Poison Ivy” on the online site last night, so this is already theoretically possible in here... except that the Dorset2 files are not finished or online yet. I did resume my work on it some days ago after finishing Kalari, though.

If a dark scheme can have negative effects on my psyche, what could bright (but not too bright), soft colors and shapes do for me? Basically, Dorset2 aims for a relatively simplistic look, with soft shapes and colors using gradients and round corners for some elements. The color scheme is also slightly brighter than Dorset for some elements; but the shapes are what matters here. A box with round corners and no solid border makes the contents look soft to me; compare current Dorset which uses (way too many) rectangular boxes with solid and dark borders everywhere, inside and outside the main body.

Here's a (rather big) screenshot of Dorset2. Apologies for the admittedly awful rendering of Verdana Bold; that must be freetype's fault.

• Dorset2 (PNG screenshot)

Since it's a work in progress, I have not gotten around to tweaking the CSS to make it work as best as it's possible with Internet Explorer. It doesn't look too bad at first glance, but it gets worse at the bottom (not pictured) thanks a gradient background trick that makes some text disappear at random in IE 6 SP 1 — and for whatever reason, this doesn't affect IE 5.5 or IE 6 SP 2 and later. I figured that I'll make my work easier for now if I write rules to disable certain decoration elements with these broken browsers.

Hopefully this gets finished soon.

Long, long ago, I talked about several issues I had with Mozilla Failfox Firefox 3.0 and openSUSE 10.3 for the AMD64/EM64T architecture.

Ever since then, I have learned several things:

1. Debian's Iceweasel fork doesn't seem to be much ahead of mainline Firefox in terms of bugfixes, as far as I can see. This might be not true for security fixes and such; I admit I haven't done any actual research on this and I'm basing this statement on my user experience.
2. The Download Day was a trap.
3. Other people who I have talked to regarding Firefox's stability on Linux claim that is never/rarely crashes, but all of them use x86 kernels and userspace.
4. Iceweasel 3.0 taints the Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 Lenny distribution on the AMD64/EM64T architecture, with no differences in either of my laptops. This Linux distribution is remarkably stable otherwise, and lived up to my expectatives since I originally switched to it when it was the Testing distribution — this is, comparing it to the released openSUSE 10.3.
5. Off-line browsing is truly, horribly underestimated, to the point that one of the major web browsers does not support it at all; probably in favor of simplicity and ease of use, and “permanently connected people”. But, STILL...
6. It's not a good idea to leave a chainsaw and a newspaper near the reach of a cow.

I recently switched to Debian Squeeze, which is still under development (e.g. Testing) as of this writing. Originally, I just got a newer revision of Iceweasel 3.0 with the set. Some weeks ago, I got upgraded to 3.5.

As I mentioned in my previous post in this series, the status bar does still glitch a lot — no, wait — the status bar glitches even more than in 3.0. Scrolling is less laggy but only with smooth scrolling disabled, although I am not exactly using a well-supported video configuration at the moment and I probably should not complain about performance issues with any 2D application unless I'm willing to use the unaccelerated X.org VESA driver for benchmarking or shut up.

The Live Bookmarks feature stopped working after the upgrade until I went and manually reloaded every single Atom/RSS feed I had linked in a neat folder in the bookmarks toolbar. It took me a while to realize that nobody posting anything near Christmas was a bad sign — I didn't miss much anyway, since my feed sources aren't really chatty. Yes, I know I'd be better using an actual feeds reader, but I'm just that lazy, which is also why I don't use Opera as much as I want.

However, this version of Firefox is much, much more stable than 3.0 — as far as this AMD64/EM64T architecture user is concerned, that is. Firefox just got better, really. But it's still rather odd because I've heard comments on IRC of people claiming that it got more unstable instead. Hmm... Well, maybe Windows or x86 Linux users are less lucky this time?

Firefox 3.5 also supports the CSS text-shadow property, which was introduced in the CSS level 2 specification, removed in revision 1 (CSS 2.1), and seems to have been picked up again for CSS 3. No version of Internet Explorer before and including 8.0 supports this (although ISTR that they support a shadow filter using a custom extension to CSS that didn't even follow the specification for naming vendor-specific properties), and current Opera, Safari and Chrome support this property well. That means that I must make more use of it in this site's stylesheets from now on.

Some days ago, I was told that Google had released a beta version of their Chrome browser for the GNU/Linux operating systems, all in middle of a discussion about how much Failbox sucked — er, I mean Firefox.

So, I downloaded a Debian package, installed, ran the application, and it crashed on my face right after trying to show the first-run page. That's not a very good start; not even Firefox does that. Then I try to run it again, it worked, okay.

Google Chrome seems to be rather nice, and reminds me of Apple's Safari in appearance. It's fairly quick to start compared to Firefox/Iceweasel 3.0 and 3.5 (which I now got from the Debian testing distribution), and its simplicity feels generally comfortable. I could quickly find an extension for hiding ads and browse some web pages afterwards.

It's pretty nice for testing web pages and even has some neat web development features. However, I'm probably not using it for regular browsing since it lacks an off-line browsing mode option as far as I can see. I have very good reasons for requiring that feature that Opera, Firefox and even Internet Explorer provide. Also, it doesn't respect some fontconfig settings in Debian Squeeze for some reason.

Besides that, I got switched to Iceweasel 3.5 as a consequence of running aptitude full-upgrade blindly. It does appear to be more stable than Iceweasel and Mozilla Firefox 3.0, although I should wait some more time before assuming this to be true; the 3.0 bugs on amd64 Linux were pretty random and sometimes I could run the browser for days without crashing, and in other occasions it would crash after running for a few seconds, while trying to contact a web server for the first time in the session.

There are no visible UI changes in 3.5 as far as I'm concerned (besides the tab bar, and some menu icons which got some hue changes), and some glitches remain — for example, scrolling pages is less laggy now, but only if smooth scrolling is disabled; and the status bar still glitches for the current web site if one clicks on a single link a lot. However, I've heard rumors that many security vulnerabilities were fixed in this version, so I guess it's a reasonable trade-off; not that I'd visit suspicious websites, or worse, run a web browser on Windows.

So, for now, I still use Opera when I need reliability, and Firefox when I forget that I'm supposed to use Opera.

openSUSE 10.3 ships with Firefox 2. I switched to Firefox 3 from the "Mozilla" repository a few weeks after it came out (missed the download day/party). So far so good. Most user interface changes are nifty, except for the change of the History menu layout - the history sidebar cannot be enabled from there unlike in previous versions. CTRL-H or the View menu must be used instead. Awkward, but I can live with it thanks to keyboard shortcuts.

Flash-embedding pages (YouTube amongst others) good. No crashes when watching Flash videos although I use a crashy X.org display adapter driver ('radeon'... don't even ask about 'fglrx').

The problem goes when I use seemingly simpler features that I have known since at least Firefox 1.0. I am a laptop user, and I'm often disconnected from the Internet. I use the browser's cache to read pages that I had already skimmed since I can't be bothered to keep zillions of HTML downloads in my home dir. Then problems arise.

Seemingly this version Firefox crashes at random, specially when its session has run for long (t > 30 min.) time and one does stuff in the page view area such as scrolling or clicking on text while the sidebar is active. What a pity, because I like the history sidebar much better than this new separate "Full History" window. More pity is that the cache gets invalidated after a session crash and its contents get wiped out. Of course... I'm not the best person to judge whether this is a bug or a feature, since I don't know much computer security; but I can tell it annoys me to the point I have to be doing backups of the cache et al after closing Firefox successfully:

$ rm -rf ~/.mozilla2 && cp -rf ~/.mozilla ~/.mozilla2

Then if Firefox 3 crashes, I restart it, close it again, and restore the Cache directory from .mozilla2/firefox/SeeminglyHashedSessionId so I can continue reading from it when I'm offline.

By the way, the offline cache (for any browser) seems to be often underestimated. Some time ago, after the www.wesnoth.org server crash, I got some forum pages from Firefox's cache and uploaded them to this website in a hidden directory to serve as a partial, temporary mirror for people for having a guide to get back to work after the 2-months roll back of the forum's database.

The cache issues apart, the fact that Firefox gets crashy for nothing disturbs me. Wasn't this version supposed to be more stable than 2.0 according to the announcements? The rendering also got some performance regressions. Some pages take longer to be *rendered* than downloaded, specially those with heavy use of scripts. Those affected pages usually are also sluggish to scroll up/down, no matter if I disable "smooth" scrolling. I never experienced anything of this with the same pages on the same OS (openSUSE 10.3), the same architecture (x86_64) and earlier version (2.0.0.x) of Firefox.

Perhaps this whole download-day thing was just a trap. Or they put more attention to the Windows and MacOS X ports rather than the GNU/Linux one. Or I am cursed to have bad luck for the rest of my life. Whatever it is, I don't like it, and I'm seriously considering switching to a better open source browser for Linux; IceWeasel may be it if it is a fork that is being developed on its own. I have yet to do the switch to Debian.