Cross-browser testing is time-consuming and laborious. This, in turn, makes it expensive and prone to human error… so, naturally, we want to do as little of it as possible. This is not a statement we should be ashamed of. Developers are lazy by nature: adhering to the DRY principle, writing scripts to automate things we’d otherwise have to do by hand, making use of third-party libraries —... Read More
If you do any kind of development for the web, then you know how important tools are, and you like finding tools that make your life easier. Developing and testing new browser features, however, takes time. Between the time a useful tool first appears in an experimental nightly build and the time it’s available for everyone to use in Firefox, a while has passed.
That’s one of the reasons... Read More
It’s 2015 and your choice of browser has proven to be as important as your choice of operating system. Dedicated apps may be competing against browsers on mobile devices, but that is hardly the case in the desktop environment. On the contrary, each year more desktop browsers appear, and some of them can change the way you browse the Internet for the better.
Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox,... Read More
The lowly form input. It’s been a part of HTML for as long as HTML has had a formal specification; but before HTML5, developers were hamstrung by its limited types and attributes. As the use of smartphones and their on-screen keyboards has flourished, however, inputs have taken on a new and incredibly important role — but they’re also riddled with browser and device inconsistencies. The eight... Read More
Last week, Microsoft made its biggest announcement for the web since it first introduced Internet Explorer in 1995: a new browser, codenamed “Project Spartan.” So, what does this mean for us as designers and developers? What rendering engine will Spartan be using, and how will it affect our work? We spoke with Jacob Rossi, the senior engineer at Microsoft's web platform team, about the new... Read More
Print continues to be treated somewhat cursorily by most Web designers, who tend to be obsessed with pixels rather than printers. In the real world, a significant portion of people rely on pages printed from websites for reference: there’s still something about having a physical sheet of paper in one’s hands, even in this age of digital saturation.
Web developers can take several steps... Read More
Using templates in the browser is becoming more and more widespread. Moving application logic from the server to the client, and the increasing usage of MVC-like patterns (model–view–controller) inspired templates to embrace the browser.
This used to be a server-side only affair, but templates are actually very powerful and expressive in client-side development as well. In general,... Read More
Earlier this week we published two articles by Louis Lazaris: one on why old browsers are holding back the Web and another encouraging Web users to upgrade their browsers and use modern browsers other than IE. This article presents another perspective on this issue. Nicholas C. Zakas, a well-respected member of the developer community, goes into specifics of why we should focus on the good... Read More
Shopping. Social networking. Emailing. Reading. Finding directions. Banking. Researching. Those are some of the most common tasks people perform on the World Wide Web. You've probably done all of these things yourself at some point. So if you're like many people, you probably do these things every single week (and many of them even every day).
This blog you're reading now, Smashing... Read More
