Category Archives: Software & Scripts

Internet Explorer 9 to Render Pages with WebKit

Apr 1, 2010 by Matt | Posted in Software & Scripts One Comment

In a surprising turn of events, Microsoft announced that the upcoming Internet Explorer 9 would render pages with WebKit, the open source rendering engine developed initially by Apple. (Google’s Chrome browser uses WebKit, as does Safari.)

CEO Steve Ballmer declared the move to be “a wonderful strategy that will finally place Internet Explorer solidly ahead of the competition.”

The change was unexpected, given the company’s long history of less-than-perfect support for web standards and general disapproval of open source software, though the move to WebKit may be the start of a new, friendlier Microsoft.

Web designers have been voicing their approval, though surprisingly there have been a few opposed to the change of rendering engine. One company in particular, a design firm known as Plaid Mango Design, claims that the move to WebKit will cost them 40% of their income, which is made primarily from the extra fees they charge to develop CSS hacks to enable Internet Explorer to render their designs properly.

Bazinga! April Fools!

Dayta: The One Week App

Mar 9

Developer Sahil Lavingia built a high-quality iPhone app in only one week, and blogged about it on the One Week App blog. The resulting application is called Dayta. Dayta is designed to help you log any sort of data set that you wish to…

MacHeist nanoBundle 2 is Here

Mar 5

Mac users: do you want to get over $260 worth of software for less than twenty dollars? The second Macheist nanoBundle is here, and it’s worth a close look, at least. The applications included aren’t necessarily as impressive as those from previous bundles, but…

YOURLS: Your Own URL Shortener

Feb 17

I have been noticing an interesting trend on Twitter and other social media sites. Larger online publications are starting to set up their own private URL shorteners for their content. Ars Technica has arst.ch, TechCrunch has tcrn.ch, and Oneforty has 14t.me, for example. Oh,…

Notify 2: Better Email Notifications for Webmail Users

Feb 5

Until recently I used Google Notifier to monitor my primary Google Apps inbox for new messages, and I used Apple’s Mail application to check my other accounts. Then I found Notify 2, a neat little Mac application that works even better. Notify sits in…

Change Firefox 3.6’s Tab Behavior

Feb 2

Firefox 3.6 was released at the end of last month, bringing with it speed and RAM usage improvements and the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. However, it also brought a small UI change that some people may not like. When opening opening a link in…

Is Firefox Losing its Focus?

Jan 28

Firefox is a great web browser, certainly the most extendable. In the beginning, one of Firefox’s strong points was how lightweight it was. It wasn’t full of extraneous features, it was pretty snappy. It did one thing, web browsing, and it did it well.…

Internet Explorer Should be Powered by WebKit

Dec 23

There, I said it. If Microsoft were to switch from their proprietary “Trident” rendering engine to an open source solution such as WebKit or Mozilla’s Gecko, it would do far more than simply save designers headaches. It would save Microsoft money and development time,…

Showcase Your Images with WebAssist’s PowerGallery

Dec 16

Looking for a PHP photo gallery package that’s super easy to use? Look no further than WebAssist’s PowerGallery. It has a slick interface that far surpasses any I’ve seen in similar scripts. It looks good, it’s clean and simple, and it feels polished, which…

Google Chrome Arrives for Mac

Dec 9

The Mac version of Google’s Chrome web browser has arrived as a beta. The search giant has deemed it stable enough for the general public’s consumption, but a few features are still under development. One notable feature missing is the bookmark manager. I’ve tried…