JQuery, probably one of the best libraries for JavaScript development, is being adopted by Microsoft and Nokia.

Microsoft is going to include JQuery in the future versions of its Visual Studio developer tools. According to C|NET News, the library will continue to adhere to the MIT license. On the other hand, Nokia will be adopting JQuery for use within their WebKit based Web Run-time, a simplified browser rendering engine that makes application development a lot easier.

Both companies will continue to contribute to JQuery through patches, bug reports, and will not actually change the library for implementation within their products.

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Finally got some time to post this. I’ve been using Chrome for about two weeks, so here are my observations (subjective, yes).

First of all, it is very fast. It loads faster, pages load faster (when burdened with lots of JS), things simply work faster. Great, but there are glitches and plenty of them:

- when bookmarks bar is disabled I can’t access my own bookmarks any other way except to re-enable the bar again
- first exploit? (via Dave Naylor’s site)
- erratic behavior especially when quickly closing a few tabs; page goes blank, even though previously loaded the content at the URL given in the address bar; once clicked on the address bar, page loads again
- opening multiple tabs can cause it to freeze temporarily (5 tabs seem to do it for me)
- appears to be faster, but mostly on applications that are JS intensive; not that much difference on “normal” pages
- browser tab switching hangs for a while current tab is still loading (similar to FF behavior)
- mouse scrolling and click-scrolling doesn’t work occasionally, while page is loading (cause probably similar to tab switching behavior)

Then there are page layout rendering differences (mostly regarding CSS), like here (on one of the sites I frequently visit):

These guys found a rendering difference in WordPress 2.6.

Security issues are unavoidable, and Chrome is not immune to them it seems.

Here are a couple of “official” resources, in case you didn’t catch all the introductory info about the new browser initially:

Google Chrome Forum
Google Chrome Developers
Google Chrome Features

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It’s amazing what can be done with SVG and VML. Raphaël is a great example of what can be done with graphics in modern browsers. It’s a JavaScript library that enables users to view vector graphics in their browsers, using SVG and VML as base for graphics creation. This way, every created object is a DOM object which means events and handlers can be attached to them, and the objects themselves modified. Right now the library supports Firefox 3.0+, Safari 3.0+, Opera 9.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+, which pretty much covers the largest portion of internet users, except for Google Chrome (already number 4 browser in the world) which has a little trouble rendering the effects (for example Text Rotation). Nevertheless, a great advancement in web graphics.

They’ve got some very cool demos so check them out - Reflection, Image Rotation, Text Rotation (this doesn’t work very well in Google Chrome).

[Via: SitePoint]

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Google is releasing its browser Google Chrome to the public. Starting today, the browser should be available in more than 100 countries. Its an early launch, but like they pointed out on the official G blog - they like to “launch early and iterate.”

The download should be available from this address.

Google has released a document explaining the Chrome browser from top to bottom, and they’ve done it, in their fashion, through a cartoon slide show, which is available here. Basically, among other things, it’s about tabs as separate processes which enables the browser to do parallel processing, reducing memory consumption, and improving reliability of the browser, which is especially important during time, money or communication sensitive activities on the web (browser failure during online payment, or email editing, etc). The interface is meant to be as simple as possible. What’s also interesting is the approach Google has taken on testing the new browser against different pages and content available on the web. Basically, they are using their own search index to access pages that are ranked well, which should produce test results against content that is most viewed by web users everywhere. Chrome will make use of Gears to give it local storage capabilities. The rendering engine used in Chrome is Webkit, and there is advanced support for JavaScript, through the so called V8 Java Virtual Machine.

There is much more about it, so take a look at the Chrome cartoon.

It will be interesting to see how many people will actually use Chrome in the months to come. Apart from Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox (ok, and Safari), it’s good news another browser is available as an alternative, possibly with improvements that will make web browsing a better experience. Google certainly has a large user base, so I expect many people will download and use the new browser. Regarding standards, I expect at least a FF level of standards compliance, if not better.

Update: screenshots and demo videos on TechCrunch.

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Another great example of taking javascript to its limits. It’s a game called Spacius! A Space Adventure (a port of the original game from ages ago), which has been made using only Javascript, except for the sound effects for which the author used Flash. Best of all the game works in all major browsers.

The whole game has been made using DIVs to house animated objects, which deserves a big WOW! Gameplay is very good, no hang-ups and glitches.

Play it here in smaller resolution, or here in 800×600.

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Just saw this on Ajaxian - Google has released the AJAX Libaries API which allows developers to load the appropriate AJAX library or libraries directly from Google servers. This will be a great improvement as there is only one place you load the files from, rather than calling them from various different places as is the case so far.

There are basically two ways to load a library - directly or indirectly (using the AJAX Libraries API), as shown in the examples below:

<script language=”javascript” src=”http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.2.6/jquery.js”>
</script>

or

<script src=”http://www.google.com/jsapi”>
</script>
<script>
// Load jQuery
google.load(”jquery”, “1″);
</script>

Thus far, developers can access Prototype, JQuery, Scriptaculous, MooTools and Dojo, but other libraries will be included over time. The idea is to create a big repository of all the major AJAX libraries used in web development. Plenty more in depth information on Ajaxian and the official Google AJAX Library page.

I am working on a small project right now that actually relies on JQuery quite heavily, so I’ll give this a go. Given the power and reliability of Google’s infrastructure, I expect things to go quite smoothly.

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This is a great example of how JavaScript can be used to render graphics and games in browsers, at only 14 Kb of code (compressed). The demo is playable, using arrow keys, although it features only one (incomplete) level. No external images or files are used. Sprites are made using canvas or div-making tactics (for IE), and sound is embedded as base64 encoded data (URIs). All sprites have only 4 colors, which helps keep things small (40-60 bytes per sprite).

As the guys at Nihilogic said, this was a proof-of-concept exercise, but it’s impressive how much was achieved with a single 14 Kb javascript file.

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Opera has been a good student, studied a lot lately, and passed the Acid 3 test! The Acid 3 test proved to be a mouthfull for every major browser release until now.

This is a screenshot of WinGogi (Windows version of reference builds used for the internal testing of Opera’s platform independent Core) after having successfully rendered the Acid 3 test page. According to Opera Desktop team blog, the Opera development team have reached the 100% pass grade for the first time, after having worked hard on fixing bugs. There are still some things to fix, but they will be sorted out soon. A technical preview version will be released on labs.opera.com soon.

Now, if they could only get Opera Mini on my P1i to do the same, that would be great

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The new YouTube API allows even further integration of the YouTube service into all kinds of online projects. So far online applications could provide users with ways to upload and view videos, on various different devices, as well as comment and vote on video content.

The new API features include the following:

• Upload videos and video responses to YouTube
• Add/Edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc)
• Fetch localized standard feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locales
• Perform custom queries optimized for 18 international locales
• Customize player UI and control video playback (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software

YouTube now gives developers a way to produce applications that include uploading, managing, searching, and playing back video content and metadata, all available in the YouTube “cloud” (managed by YouTube). Sounds great, and having read some case studies they gave, some interesting ideas are springing into mind already…

Read in more detail on YouTube Blog.

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“I became Acid 3, the destroyer of browsers.”

The Web Standards Project released the Acid 3 test, and all the browsers failed big time. DrunkenFist posted screen shots of various browsers and scores - IE 6 and 7, FF 2 and 3, Opera, Camino, Safari… This is what the properly rendered test is supposed to look like:

Damn, and it seemed like it was yesterday that IE 8 passed the Acid 2 test.

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