Symphonious

Monsieur Scoble asks:

Finally, I’m gonna ask a provocative business question of Opera (and other browser manufacturers): What’s your business again? If all the browsers have the same underlying features, and they should only add things that are standards, what differentiation are you offering your customers and investors? Are you saying Firefox’s developers can’t propose anything new that’d push the Web forward? Hey, how about some linking technologies like Greasemonkey? Is Firefox not allowed to add anything like that that the W3C didn’t propose and that the WaSP didn’t approve of?

They don’t have to innovate in how they render content, there’s a whole heap of stuff that can be done in the user interface realm.  That’s how tabs came about and they’ve been a raging success - without any need for or repercussions on standards.

Then they can compete on speed and how standards compliant they are.  Maybe start implementing more standards - RSS, Atom, MathML, SVG, XSLT, tons of ways to be a better browser in the rendering department.

Then they can compete on security and stability.  Plenty of work to be done there in all browsers.

To get you started, how about coming up with a way to reflect the fact that my browsing history isn’t just a straight timeline and make it easier to see where I’ve been and navigate through it?

What about making it easier to know which tab I want when some stupid site uses the same title for every page?

What about making printing better?  Printing web pages is pretty awful at the moment, give me the ability to customize how the page prints somehow, maybe start by just letting me go through and delete content that I don’t want to print like ads and navigation bars.  Heck, even just giving me the ability to “crop” the page would be a huge benefit since most navigation elements are at the top, bottom or sides of the page.

I’d also love to see IE come with a recent copy of Java from Sun too - they seem pretty keen to have it included and Microsoft is meant to be targeting compatibility…

Oh and make sure it loads instantly.  That’s the reason I use IE for a heap of what I do - it loads faster than any other browser and still gives me enough of a unique instance that when the code I’m testing crashes the browser the other windows are unaffected.

There you go, off the top of my head I’ve just kept your browser development team busy for the next couple of releases at least.  Call me when you’re ready to put out IE 9 and I’ll give you some more ideas, my mobile number isn’t on my blog but my email and Skype user name is or you can toe the company line and give me a yell on MSN, my username’s AJOfOZ@hotmail.com.

He’s popping up in a few interesting places of late.  He’s been hired by Sun to work on the Swing team and promptly showed up on the WinLAF mailing list to talk about moving their bug fixes to the Windows L&F into the official Swing codebase for release in Mustang (accompanied by talk of how to make it easier for the WinLAF folks to contribute fixes more directly to the Swing codebase.  Then today he turned up on the Mac Java-Dev list asking questions related to making Java apps look right on OS X.  Then of course he’s behind the Flying Saucer pure Java XHTML renderer which is really quite awesome (it was very strict about standards compliance last I checked so should make even Byron happy).

Now I don’t mean to suggest that all these projects are actually Sun related or start unsubstantiated rumors but having followed Joshua’s blog on Java.Net he definitely seems like an excellent addition to the Swing team and I’ll be very interested in seeing how his project of improving the Windows L&F goes.  Hopefully if he keeps asking questions about Mac UIs we won’t see the any more boneheaded assumptions creep into Java like that whole menus go in frames assumption that makes life difficult for Java developers on Mac OS.  Hopefully they’ll be able to use his experience with Flying Saucer to improve the Swing Text APIs HTML support (it’s currently stuck at HTML 3.2).  (Hint: If you’d like to add support for floating DIVs for me that’d save me the trouble…)

That said, there’s already some pretty awesomely talented people on the Swing team and they’ve definitely learnt a lot from the early days of Java so hopefully the new APIs that get added in will be a little more Mac friendly even without Joshua’s help.