I visited the zoo, brought my camera, shot a parrot (Don’t worry he is still living, I don’t go back to the petshop to reclaim.)
I reduced colors in Gimp, saved as PNG, did a bit tracing in Inkscape with Potrace and here is the SVG Parrot from Amsterdam!
Format is SVGZ, weight ca 60kb.
Opera can show svg as IMG src, I dunno about other browers, but it would be nice if they can. It’s easy to upload and insert in a WordPress blog that way.
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Opera claims that a alpha or beta version will not interfere with a standard installation, but that’s mainly true for Windows. For Linux you have to be a bit more carefull, but still it’s easy.
How do you install the latest Opera Alpha/beta version on a Linux/ Ubuntu box? The download page doesn’t offer the dedicated Ubuntu versions like it does for main versions. But don’t worry, it is easy.
Opera 10 Alpha in action
There a several version for download, for AMD64 bits for 64 bits systems or intel-linux for 32bits setups. Make your choice.
Then you have to choose for different GCC and QT versions. GCC stands for GNU Compiler Collection the standard compiler for most Linux systems. QT refers to the LIBQT libraries. Qt is a cross-platform C++ application framework. Qt’s primary feature is its rich set of widgets that provide standard GUI functionality. You can check your versions in the Synaptic Package Manager and choose.
I took the easy way: I simply downloaded the bundled version with the latest versions, and it worked.
Don’t take the RPM or DEB’s packjages. They will be installed with installers like dpkg and interfere with your existing Opera browser. Choose the gz or bz2 packages instead.
Download the packages to your home folder, extract, and run!
To extract the bz2:
tar -xvjf opera-10.00-4102.gcc4-bundled-qt4.i386.tar.bz2
Then:
cd opera-10.00-4102.gcc4-bundled-qt4.i386/
And run:
./opera
That’s all! Opera runs just fine. And the new rendering speed is fast, really fast. I noticed that scrolling is not always smooth on complicated SVG pages, but hey, it’s a alpha. Webfonts are cool. Expect a demo here soon.
The new HTML5 CANVAS element gives the developer pixel-poking magic. Poke and peek are functions from the good old days that offered the only geeky way to set and read-out individual bytes in the (graphic) memory.
Sure things are better nowadays. To understand how canvas works, imagine an IMG element, of which every pixel can be set individually or loaded from a IMG source.
Opera screenshot canvas element
This means you can filter images, copy them, translate, rotate, scale, in short: a lot. It can also add drop-shadow, although at the moment this is only fully supported by Safari and partially by Opera. Probably Firefox will add support in the upcoming 3.1.
Rendering is best in Opera and Firefox. Safari and Chrome look awful. Webkits’ canvas seems designed to work only with integers while Opera and Firefox translates floats into some anti-alias rendering. Better but probably slower. Opera’s rendering is quite slow.
Rendering time screen:
Chrome 9 : 50 msec
Opera 11.01: 667 msec
Firefox 3.613: 2829 msec
Opera and Firefox look fine, Chrome’s rendering is jagged.
Most SEO (Search Engine Optimization) experts claim they can offer services to any webmaster by helping pushing more traffic to their websites. Not necessarily the PageRank, which is an importance ranking of Google, but the position in Google result pages will be the goal most people are targeting.
Inbound links help, but most traffic to ordinary sites will come from search engine result pages. Even my aunt simply types everything in Google, including URL’s.
The power of Google is that they made their homepage so simple, and the searchbox is so centered, that newbies automatically start typing in there. Addressbar, what’s that? Even the technically smart and userfriendly way of making the addressbar a super searchfield, which was introduced years ago by Opera – and stole my heart immediately – and that is now copied by Firefox and Chrome, and now known as Omnibox – is too difficult for computer illiterates
I’m getting of topic. For generated traffic it does make a difference if your website is listed 7th or 68th. I prefer to have the default amount of results changed to 100. Sometimes it’s a bit hard to see, their is no explicit numbering in Google or Yahoo, so I’ve created a little CSS file that adds a that number: Search Engine Counter CSS
For Opera users just save this file in the User CSS directory, normally in the profile/css/user path. The you can simply select it in the dropdown menu.
An alternative way of operating is a bookmarklet powered by Javascript. Drawback: it doesn’t work, when javascript is disabled.
To install it: drag the bookmarklet to your Bookmarks Toolbar, Links Bar or Personal Bar or whatever it’s called.
Result-counter
A bookmarklet is a little javascript helper to execute some small automated tasks in your web browser
Use: push the button on a Google or Yahoo result page.
This post shows some surprising differences in rendering quality from various browsers.
As you can see the Google Chrome screen-shot is simply ugly. Google Chrome is fast in javascript calculations, but that seems to have a price.
Opera | Safari | Firefox | Chrome
It looks like Chrome is simply skipping some pixels and the rendering doesn’t seemed to be aliased.
You can run the example demo in your own browser to see the results.
Cookie settings can be confusing sometimes. Most browsers offer a setting `Don’t accept third party cookies` (Firefox) or `Accept only cookies from the site I visit` (Opera 9.5), `Accept only cookies from the sites I visit` (Safari). Although stated a bit differently this setting seems to have the same functionality.
Not so!
I’m not going into Microsoft Explorer, because I think internet-users that do care about internet, security and privacy should leave Explorer aside. Microsoft’s privacy and security record is historically below par, as well as their support for open standards. And they don’t like internet: they don’t wanna connect people, they want people to use Microsoft products. Later more!
First of all the settings aren’t stated very well in all dialogs. Don’t accept means don’t send as well, both in Firefox and Opera and that’s a good thing, because sending (untrusted) cookies is the `bad` thing.
What’s the difference in these settings. Try it yourself. Open a Google page in another tab, login with your account or login to gmail, and refresh this page.
If you have accept all cookies selected, you will see a personalized Google page in the iframe, recognisable with your gmail-address somewhere on top. That’s the same in Firefox and Opera and Safari.
Now try the other setting: Don’t accept third party cookies.
Reload the page, and the iframe will not show a personalized Google page. The same behaviour in Opera and Firefox, but Safari does show a personalized page.
That’s remarkable, I don’t expect browsers to send cookies to third party iframes, when you have explicitly forbidden them.
But now comes an interesting point. Click the search button in the iframe. Google will carry out the same search as before and Firefox will not show a personalized page, meaning it’s not sending a cookie, but Opera will! Opera is sending a cookie, although the cookie setting is Only accept cookies from the domain I visit.
Strange again? Yes and no.
Yes, because you would expect it won’t send a cookie to the different domain.
No, because clicking on the iframe means in a way visiting the iframe, so the iframe is not a different domain anymore.
It’s debatable which policy is best. I think Safari sucks here. The privacy mode doesn’t work here and the cookie setting doesn’t do what it should do.
I would choose Firefox’s way as best. If I want to visit an iframed Google page as a user I can do that in a new tab or window.
Bottom-line: Third part cookie settings are differently implemented by browser vendors, that’s confusing. Cookies are to easely send to third parties, even with advanced security settings.
Does the strict settings have a side-effect for redirects. I’m not sure. What do you think?
