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Nov
02

Why I Hate Internet Explorer

By | Development, Focus

5 Comments

It’s everywhere!

No, that’s not really it.

It’s slow!

That’s more like it.

I’m in the process of building and debugging a large interactive data grid on a website for work.  By “large” I mean several hundred records displayed at once.  By “interactive” mean fully indexed, sortable, and filterable.  I usually develop in Chrome and Firefox, so things have been working just fine.

But last week I got a call from a co-worker.  ”Why’s the site so slow?”

I was confused.  It’s lightning fast on my machine.  So I asked what browser they were using … you guessed it … Internet Explorer.

The past week has involved me delving deep into the differences between the various browser’s rendering engines and JavaScript cores.  Each browser is subtly different, and something that runs quickly in one might be slow as molasses in another.

Today, I worked with a couple of other developers to determine which would be faster – using a JavaScript array as an index or using a JavaScript object as a hash table.

JavaScript question: Which performs loopup[5] faster? lookup = [] or lookup = {}?
November 2, 2011 10:05 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@EricMann
Eric Mann

Another developer wrote a couple of quick scripts that iterate through such a lookup a billion times.  I ran the scripts in each browser to see what the results might be … and was shocked! [Read more...]

Sep
23

Shortcuts in Chrome

By | Development, Focus

3 Comments

tabtosearch

Yesterday, we were bouncing ideas back and forth on Twitter regarding a specific ticket on WordPress’ Trac system.  At one point, a developer lamented the fact that Twitter didn’t automatically link “#18149″ to http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/18149. 1

I jokingly commented that someone should come up with a Chrome extension to do just that.  Apparently, something that does that already exists.

@ @ Does Chrome have keywords like Firefox does? I have one that's wptrac %s and then it punts me over to the ticket
September 22, 2011 12:57 pm via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite
@helenhousandi
Helen Hou-Sandi

I’ve never used Firefox keywords, so I had to do a bit of Googling just to figure out what we were all talking about.  But apparently, Chrome supports custom search engines and shortcuts in the address bar.

You’ve probably noticed that sites you search the most end up being auto-loaded as search engines.  Whenever I type “amazon.com” I see a hint:

If you hit the tab key, the address bar will change to a search form and automatically perform your search on Amazon.com.  This is exactly the kind of functionality I wanted for Trac, and there’s an easy way to add it!

  1. Right click on the address bar
  2. Select “Edit Search Engines”
  3. Set up a custom search enging

Since I wanted to work with Trac, I set up a custom search engine that keys off the keyword “wptrac” and automatically searches for a Ticket specifically (rather than searching milestones, changesets, etc).

Now, whenever I type “wptrac” into the address bar, I’m prompted to “Press Tab to search WP Core Trac” and can automatically jump right to tickets.  Pretty nifty, huh?

 

Notes:

  1. If you are talking about Trac tickets in any WordPress-related IRC channel, a bot will automatically fetch the ticket’s title and URL for you.  It’s quite handy. ↩
Jan
06

Freedom of Choice

By | Development, Focus

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As a web developer, I’m faced with clients who use all sorts of technology.  There are people who use outdated version of Internet Explorer, people who demand their site be compatible with Windows 98, and people who still use Netscape Navigator.  I’ve always been a proponent of using up-to-date technologies, and I build things for them as often as I can. [Read more...]