Linux for Designers

After knowing that all my Firefox extensions i installed are runing now on Firefox 3.5 too and reading the post on Tombuntu about Ubuntuzilla i'm much happier with the Firefox browser. Today i found another really nice goody at the t3n tips: A nearly complete guide tuning Firefox 3.5! Sorry it is completly written in german.

End of last year i wrote a post about BlueGriffon a new WYSIWYG web editor and a successor of Kompozer and NVU.
Meanwhile the development goes on and BlueGriffon offers more CSS support, a project manager and a template manager. Besides that builds for Ubuntu are available too.

A while NVU and the unofficial further development branch Kompozer seems to be the only real WYSIWYG web editors on Linux. With BlueGriffon the company Disruptive Innovations (a W3C member too) brings fresh blood into this area. Disruptive Innovations are the developers of the older NVU too. Against the older WYSIWYG web editors BlueGriffon is based on Firefox. At the moment it is only available via SVN or as nightly for Windows.

Besides Sifr, which is based an JavaScript and Flash, a new method embeding custom on websites poped up: typeface.js. Basically this method rendering text with Javascript, <canvas> and SVG/ VML. Check out the examples too. The bad thing about this method is that you can't select and copy text in a easy way
Myslef dreaming about the upcoming @font-face support included in Firefox 3.1 (and still available in Opera or Webkit (Safari)). May M$ get it ready in IE8 too.

For me one of the best features of the upcoming Firefox 3.1 is the support for @font-face. This will bring real typos into the web and let web designers create more cool sites. So now we have @font-face support in Webkit (Safari), Gecko (Firefox) and Opera. That's great!
All about the new features of Firefox 3.1 can be found at the Mozilla Developer Center.

After we getting the Beta2 of the Internet Explorer 8 and Googles Chrome Beta now the fight about the fastes browser is opened again. This Time it is now about rendering HTML, this time it is all about JavaScript. 2 Day's Chrome take the throne of speed but the new build of Firefox 3.1 with TracMonkey is very close. Check out that stats:
http://scr3.golem.de/?d=0809/Firefox_TraceMonkey&a=62200

Some older performance tests:
http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-performance-rundown/
http://scr3.golem.de/?d=0809/Google_Chrome&a=62163

Ok you notice the difference between 17866ms of the IE 7 and 1209 of Google Chrome, but can you notice the difference of 200ms? In fact that Google collects so many data, i didn't like the vision that Google collect any step i make at the web.

Firebug is, besides Web Developer, one of the best extensions for web development on Firefox. A week ago Firebug raised from the death and this week another beta update of the 1.2 brunch shipped. A lot of potentials developers formed now the Firebug Working Group. They got a new member too: Azer Koçulu.
Azer Koçulu is the developer of the JavaScript tool pi.debugger. He startet now bringing Firebug to The Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera. This port called Firebug Lite and is now available for download.

Adobe released a second beta of the Flash Player 10. This version brings a lot of improvements to the Linux platform:
* optimized sound sound API and sound buffer
* windowless overlay mode now working (Firefox 3 required)
* new embedding modes (explained by the developer Tinic Uro)
* support for the Video4Linux 2
Older details about Flash Player 10 can be found in my older post or at the release notes. And of course the beta 2 is available for Linux too.
Download it and copy the binaries as root to "/usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree". Shutdown your browswer and restart it, open the url "about:plugins" to make sure it's available.

Looking around the web about an update for my Linux-Mac-Windows CSS font matching list i found the interesting post "Are Vista Fonts Ready for the Web?". Windows Vista shipped with new screen optimized fonts that are only available there and it seems at the moment there aren't equal fonts on the other platforms available.

Besides ySlow and Firebug another good addon for web development in Firefox ist Web Developer. Version 1.1.6 is now working with Firefox 3. A german version is available at erweiterungen.de other languages are available on the website of Web Developer.
Happy coding!