Author: yuval

Categories
Computing Web Development

Google Chrome: First Impressions

I am proud to put my happy fanboy glasses on and say that I installed Google Chrome on its first day. Better yet, I am writing now using it. Can you believe Firefox is no longer the cool kids’ browser. So sad. So what do I think of it having used it for precisely 10 minutes:

Yay:

  • Wicked Fast
  • Sorta cute looking
  • Search in the address bar works very well
  • Design outside of Mozilla’s reach
  • Process-based design is interesting, maybe it can actually work, hey think outside the box, yo
  • Download manager looks like the Firefox Download Bar extension, only looks waaaaay better
  • No Mac version. Please talk to the genius at the genius bar. I am bitter.

Nay:

  • No ad blocking. Yeah, Google – the ad people – will let you f- with that. I bet that is like, motivation #1 for this whole adventure
  • A remarkably sad day for web developers. Not only are companies going to want to test for another browser like Safari or god have mercy, Opera, you really need another pain in the but in the form of Chrome. And yeah, it renders like Safari, but its JavaScript is all new. Wheee
  • No integration yet with del.icio.us and web developer tools that make Firefox sing
  • Google needing to support users on Windows. Welcome to hell.
  • Only god know which nameless, oh-so-private stats are being collected on us when we use a product from a company that makes money off of that. Yeah, it’s open source, but did you read a million lines lately?
  • Facebook not like, 100% with Chrome: The next/previous links in the Facebook image gallery don’t work; the comment on news feed stories do not work; photo tagging is a fail too; the more I try the list gets longer – in short, FB is shafted in Chrome. Petty, I know, but I am sharing. Doubt Facebook, on the Microsoft side and a Google wannabe anti-Christ, wants to care.

Regardless, I root for Google. Another ballsy, way beyond uber-cool idea. Seems to be running. Was a pain to download because apparently they are so deluged with requests it hurt their servers.

How’s this for low-to-lowest brow review?

Share
Categories
Computing Web Development

How browsers detect whether the URL points to a file or a directory

Suppose you are a browser and you get a URL like:
https://www.enavigo.com/awesome
How do you know if awesome is a directory or a file?
A really nice hint you’d be nice to give is to append a slash to the URL whenever you denote a directory.

So how *can* you find that out?
The only way I found out had to do with headers. It appears that when web servers are sent a URL like https://www.enavigo.com/awesome and awesome *is* a directory, the response header will redirect the browser (or requestor for that matter) to the properly specified URL
https://www.enavigo.com/awesome/ which has the trailing slash character. I am sure that has to do with server setup.

Need to research this issue more…

Share
Categories
Web Development

What browsers do when we ../ too much

Part of my thesis work touches on the way web browsers behave and how they process the code that the almighty developers throw at them. Most browsers do not scoff at crappy code, they do try to make sense of it and try to put lipstick on a pig. While testing my code on my own family website, I noticed an interesting behavior: the PHP header file I was including in all pages, had a reference to an image

<img src="../images/imageName.jpg" />
Continue reading “What browsers do when we ../ too much”
Share
Share