Safari 4 like Chrome lets you kill unresponsive windows?

The other day I had some background process taking up a lot of CPU while synchronising some data. I knew it would be slow and so I decide to read some news on the web. One of the pages I opened had some flash in it and after a few seconds a popup appeared asking if I wanted to kill that window. I assume that the background processes PLUS the greedy Flash player were making everything too slow.

It is interesting though that this is clearly a feature that appeared first in Chrome and apparently has propagated to Safari. A good feature, of course!

Apple Safari to support WML?

I was checking the latest changes of the webKit nightly to see if it’s worth updating my current nightly (about 1 month old) to something fresher. While looking at the timeline I noticed how a few commits have been made in the last few days to implement WML card, timer and do tags, some WMLScript and so on. BIG SURPRISE!

You can see for example a few changesets such as [38816], [38833], [38838] and a couple of bugs, #22522 and #22550.

I am definitely among those that think that WML is dead and that everything should be in XHTML by now and surely Apple as a company has been promoting the iPhone and the iPod touch as “full web” devices and in fact Safari Mobile does not even support HTML-MP. The addition of WML seems very strange to me.

OK, the main committer is not an Apple employee, but rather a KDE developer (Nikolas Zimmermann), but we all know that webKit is mostly controlled by Apple and if they are working on WML it means there is some interest. If they are working on WML, why not XHTML-MP?

We’ll see. I’ll keep an eye on this and definitely test a recent nightly!

There isn’t just ONE WebKit

Reporting from Surfin’ Safari Blog:

[W]e have a WebKit detection script that properly checks for the WebKit engine (not just Safari) and properly detects versions.

This script has now been updated to support iPhone and the new iPod touch. You can try a live version to see what kinds of results you’ll get on different browsers and devices.

For all those that believed that mobile devices are the same as desktop PC’s.

Read the full article here: WebKit Detect script updated for iPhone and iPod touch.

Font comparison and thinking about it

A nice post from Joel Spolsky about the different approaches in font rendering between Microsoft and Apple. I like very much the second part in which he talks about the general behaviour of liking something you’re used to and that people generally don’t think about the differences between things, but that one is the one they are used to and the other is just “different”.

Font smoothing, anti-aliasing, and sub-pixel rendering