Linux for Designers

After end of August Microsoft barely offers the secound beta of the Internet Explorer 8 now they answered to the question about "What’s After Beta 2". The answer is "We will release one more public update of IE8 in the first quarter of 2009". Wow thats really slow! I believe at this time we will have Firefox 3.1, Opera 9.7 (may with a better GUI) and a much improved Webkit/ Safari (and IE 8 is just another beta or RC).
What will be available when IE 8 reaching the final state?

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.

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.

After we getting Firefox 3, Opera 9.5, Safari 3.1.x and in far future we will get Internet Explorer 8 a lot of tests poped up. So check out all the tests about Acid3, JavaScript performance and various speed tests:
http://www.zimbrablog.com/blog/archives/2008/06/and-the-winner-is.html
http://www.zdnet.de/news/software/0,39023144,39192354,00.htm
http://lifehacker.com/396048/speed-testing-the-latest-web-browsers
http://webstandard.kulando.de/post/2008/06/23/ladezeiten-von-firefox-3-ie7-safari-3.1.2-und-opera-9.5-im-test
http://webstandard.kulando.de/post/2008/06/25/firefox-3-safari-3.1.2-opera-9.5-und-co.-im-acid3-test

Well the different Internet Explorer versions and their interpretation of the CSS standards can drive you crazy. So this overview at MSDN about the CSS compatibility may help you staying cool IE 5 up to IE 8 are listed.

There are a lot of sites presenting you funny or horrible pictures - no deal. But to find something interesting and inspiring is quite hard. Two days ago i sit together with Nic in front of the screen and discovering two hours long FFFFOUND! - deal!

I found several posts about font comparsion for web development and cascading stylesheets. But most are incomplete or didn't compare all three major systems Linux, MacOS X and Windows.
Based on my own experience and a list of websites (Linux font equivalents, Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 font list, MacOS X Safari, iPhone fonts and Microsoft products and fonts) i created my own list.
Most users have Windows installed and Microsoft has once startet a webfont project. So i use typical Windows fonts as the base of my list. Another rule of the selection was that the alternative font faces didn't have a larger width then the the original has:
* Arial,Helvetica,FreeSans,"Liberation Sans","Nimbus Sans L",sans-serif
* "Courier New",Courier,FreeMono,"Nimbus Mono L","Liberation Mono",monospace
* Georgia,"Bitstream Charter","Century Schoolbook L","Liberation Serif",Times,serif
* "Lucida Sans","Lucida Sans Unicode","Lucida Grande",Lucida,sans-serif
* "Lucida Console",Monaco,"DejaVu Sans Mono","Bitstream Vera Sans Mono","Liberation Mono",monospace
* Palatino,"Palatino Linotype",Palladio,"URW Palladio L","Book Antiqua","Liberation Serif",Times,serif
* Tahoma,Geneva,"DejaVu Sans Condensed",sans-serif
* "Times New Roman",Times,"Nimbus Roman No9 L","FreeSerif","Liberation Serif",serif
* Verdana,"Bitstream Vera Sans","DejaVu Sans","Liberation Sans",Geneva,sans-serif

Some newer Vista fonts are still uncompared. An update will follow soon