I must admit that I have never been a great fan of JavaScript. For one thing, its need to interact with browser objects places you at the mercy of the purveyors of such pieces of software. Debugging is another fine art that can seem opaque to the the uninitiated since the amount and quality of the logging is determined an interpreter that isn’t provided by the language’s overseers. All in all, it seems to present a steep and obstacle-strewn learning curve to newcomers. As it happens, I have always found server side scripting languages like PHP and Perl to be more to my taste and I have no aversion at all to writing SQL.

In the late 1990’s when I was still using free web hosting, JavaScript probably was the best option for my then new online photo gallery. Whatever was the truth, it certainly was the way that I went. Learning Java or Flash might have been useful but I never managed to devote sufficient time to the task so JavaScript turned out to be the way forward until I got a taste of server side scripting. Moving to paid hosting allowed for that to develop and the JavaScript option took a back seat.

Based on my experience of the browser wars and working with JavaScript throughout their existence, I was more than a little surprised at the buzz surrounding AJAX. Ploughing part of the way through WROX’s Beginning AJAX did nothing to sell the technology to me; it came across as a very dry jargon-blighted read. Nevertheless, I do see the advantages of web applications being as responsive as their desktop equivalents but AJAX doesn’t always guarantee this; as someone that has seen such applications crawling on IE6, I can certainly vouch for this. In fact, I suspect that may be behind the appearance of technologies such as AIR and Silverlight so JavaScript may get usurped yet again, just like my move to a photo gallery powered on the server side.

Even with these concerns, using JavaScript to add a spot more interactivity is never a bad thing even if it can be overdone, hence the speed problems that I have witnessed. In fact, I have been known to use DOM scripting but I need to have the use in mind before I can experiment with a technology; I cannot do it the other way around. Nevertheless, I am keen to see what JavaScript libraries such as jQuery and Prototype might have to offer (both have been used in WordPress). I have happened on their respective websites so they might make good places to start and who knows where my curiosity might take me?

One of the unexpected features of VMware is that you are left to set the virtual machine to use resolutions above and beyond that allowed by your own monitor and graphics card combinations. From a web development or design point of view, this is incredibly useful when you consider the sizes of the screens that come with PC’s these days: some of them make my 17′ Iiyama ProLite E431S take on the appearance of having proportions close to that of a postage stamp. While getting a bigger screen sounds a very nice idea and 24′ models are supposed to allow for excellent productivity, I plan to stick with what I have and VMware facilitates this with a top resolution of 2360 pixels by 1770 pixels when you get VMware tools set up on your guest OS; Windows XP is what I have been using with these higher resolutions. You do have to pan about a bit because you can only see part of the screen when the resolutions climb beyond your own monitor settings and it does exercise your hardware but being able to see how things look in resolutions larger than anything that you can access (1600 by 1200 is as high as it goes for me for a real machine and that belongs to my workplace) is very much worth it. It certainly allowed me to fine tune my online photo gallery, something that makes me relax a little more now that I have done the required optimisation for different screen heights.

Keeping an eye on future browser releases helps to avoid any shocks when maintaining publicly available websites. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that I have been giving Firefox 3 a whirl. As it happens, I have had it going on both Windows and Ubuntu. With the former, I have not encountered any obvious problems but am wondering if the new bookmarking system will mean anything to me. For installation on Ubuntu, I used the following command (I think that I culled it from Tombuntu but can’t remember off hand…):

wget -P ~ ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/3.0b3/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-3.0b3.tar.bz2 && tar xjf ~/firefox-3.0b3.tar.bz2 -C ~

The nice thing about the above is that it places the test installation in your home directory and away from Firefox 2. It also works regardless of what Linux distribution you have. The profiles get shared between versions so a backup would be a good idea before you start to tinker. As with the Windows version, page loading and rendering is faster in the new version but I found a problem with printing that I hope will get sorted before the final release. Another area for attention is font rendering: it could sharper for sans serif fonts on Ubuntu and serif fonts on Windows. Otherwise, it works well on both platforms and I like the way that open windows are saved on exit, a very good idea carried over from Opera.

No sooner have we received Firefox 2.0.0.10 than they have already started talking about 2.0.0.11. Apparently, the latest update broke support for a tag that I have never used: canvas. This is stuff that makes you wonder about their quality control.

Because the 2.0.0.10 was a security update, Ubuntu volunteered it to me without any effort on my part. However, I am using Ubuntuzilla so I didn’t get the update coming through to my browsing world without further intervention. Launching Firefox using the gksu command allowed me to update the thing like I have been doing on Windows: Help > Check for Updates… I have got a more permanent check set up now thanks to my issuing the following command:

ubuntuzilla.py -a installupdater -p firefox

One of the things that I have been sorting out on this blog is how the fonts appear in Firefox running on Ubuntu. Even with the same fonts and the same browser, serif fonts were being displayed smaller and appeared more fuzzy in Linux than in Windows. And that’s even with the font sharpening that comes with turning on Ubuntu’s visual effects. So, there was a spot of swapping between Ubuntu and Windows (running on VMware) while I was increasing font sizes to make legibility better on the Linux side without things going all Blue Peter on Windows. Along the way, I added a mention of the Ubuntu font ae_AlArabiya in the CSS to further spruce up things. In my earlier web building efforts, I was having to make serif fonts bigger because of those serifs. From the on-screen legibility point of view, there’s a lot to be said for sans serif fonts and I may yet alter this blog’s theme to use them instead but I’ll ponder the idea a bit more before taking the plunge.

On Ubuntu, I made a move to using Ubuntuzilla’s deployment of Firefox. Because Firefox’s Gecko engine is used by other parts of Ubuntu, any Firefox updates issued by Mozilla don’t come through straight away. The idea of using Ubuntuzilla is that you get Mozilla’s latest, be it Firefox, Thunderbird or Seamonkey, without having an impact on the rest of the Linux installation; Ubuntu’s Firefox is left in place but you are now presented with the vanilla Firefox for all your web surfing needs. Visually, there’s not much change but for the built-in Firefox application fonts coming through in the new instance, a strange sight when you see Ubuntu’s more subtle alternatives everywhere else. I tried the new tack to see if picked up RealPlayer in place of Xine but that sadly has not been the case. Nevertheless, I now have 2.0.0.9 and the latest improvements this side of version 3.