So it is my birthday today, I am 20 years old now. And because Kilian wanted me and other people to smile, I decided to give away a present that makes you smile, hopefully. Here it is.

How many browser users does it take to change a lightbulb?

• How many Microsoft Internet Explorer users does it take to change a lightbulb?
  None. The IE user just has to call someone who “does something with computers”, and shout “help, it does not work anymore”. That person has to come over to his or her house in order to solve this problem.
• How many Mozilla Firefox users does it take to change a lightbulb?
  There only has to be one smart guy who writes an add-on to change lightbulbs, to solve the problems thousands of other Firefox people have changing lightbulbs.
• How many Opera users does it take to change a lightbulb?
  One. Since Opera has a built in option to change a lightbulb as of version 2.1, he or she only has to navigate to Options->Change lightbulb or use CMD+SHIFT+ALT+L.
• How many Safari users does it take to change a lightbulb?
  Safari users are smart enough to change the lightbulb all by themselves, they don’t need their browser for that.
• How many Google Chrome users does it take to change a lightbulb?
  Google Chrome users can easily close the tab where the lightbulb was opened on, and restore it. They can also use light incognito.
• How many Netscape Navigator users does it take to change a lightbulb?
  Two, one to change the lightbulb, and another to control the switch to make the lightbulb blink.
• How many Flock users does it take to change a lightbulb?
  One plus a few friends, since he or she can easily ask other people how to change a lightbulb with the various community options built in the browser.
• How many Maxthon users does it take to change a lightbulb?
  Every Maxthon user has a custom mouse gesture for changing a lightbulb, it looks pretty much like an lightbulb itself. So the answer is: one.
• How many Konqueror users does it take to change a lightbulb?
  One, to look up a new lightbulb on their hard drive, or download an new one from the Internet.
• How many WorldWideWeb users does it take to change a lightbulb?
  A couple of thousands. They improve the concept of lightbulb by building a tunnel 100 meter underground in Geneva and throw a few elementary particles in there to make one massive source of light, heat and radiation.
• How many Lynx users does it take to change a lightbulb?
  None. They can’t see if the lightbulb is broken, so they don’t know it has to be fixed.

If you have any additions to this list, please comment here and maybe I’ll add them. (I would really like to add one for Mosaic.)

Last week I had to use IE6 for a web shop to work. The total session included the payment via PayPal, and I had a very unsafe feeling about all this.

I know it. Many front-end developers like me don’t really like the browser because of the numerous bugs in its rendering engine. But my feelings were because of the security bugs. Since the release of IE7 over a year ago, Microsoft only fixes the most threatening exploits. The total usage of IE7 is fifty percent, so the other fifty percent is IE6 (and sometimes IE5.5).

However, I think I have a solution to make users aware of browsers. Unlike us as developers, they simply use ‘the Internet’, and not ‘a browser’. And because they’re not aware enough, they simply do not update them.

My solution is as following. I may assume all banks and web services like PayPal care about security. And since they do, it is very important their costumers safely use their online banking. I mean a safe and up to date browser and OS. The ‘client side’ is the only thing they cannot control.

So, what if your bank’s website simply detects if you use a safe browser and OS? The first one can easily be done with a conditional comment. Detecting the last one is impossible (you cannot fetch what updates are installed). If the web service detects an unsafe browser, it can simply display a text including a link with more information. This would work much like the IsItAFuckingIrritatingBrowser web page, made by my Fronteers friend Krijn.

By the way, in The Netherlands we had an awareness campaign a while ago. Some commercials explained that users had to ‘check’ the security, website and payment. However, it was not explained how to do that, and the conversion rate is quite low. It is much more effective if you want to pay 300 Dollar or Euro with your online banking and you see a message that it might be unsafe to do with your current browser (of course not called ‘browser’).

I’m interested if any bank or service does something like this. Links? Screenshots? Anyone?

I came across an web page (I don’t link) that had removed the outline from all links. Why? I don’t know. Maybe because it looks nicer. By removing the outline, however, an accessibility problem occurs.

But first, what are the outlines? And how to remove them? Outlines are the gray dotted borders around links, buttons and input elements that indicate where the focus is. To remove them, the CSS property outline needs to set to none. Example: a:focus {outline:none;}. Some CSS reset methods also remove the outline. Not all browsers support this property, but quite a few do.

The problem you get when you do remove the outline, is quite simple. If you don’t use a mouse to navigate, but instead use the keyboard, you cannot navigate easily. Because you use the tab-key, you don’t know which link you are when you hit tab. As alternative you only can see the URL in the status bar (not ideal, is it?).

It can become even worser when the page uses the tabindex attribute to mess up the default order. I have never believed in the usage of that attribute, since you simply need to place the elements in the order you want in the source. With CSS you can visually place them almost anywhere you want.

Conclusion: just not remove the outline. Your page looks the same, and everybody is happy.

“Apple does it again!”… one of the things I thought when I heard Safari was also available for Windows from now. But after downloading and installing, I saw just this:

Unfortunately it is a bit buggy. So with a bit patience Apples latest action will be very worthwhile for everybody.

As web designers using a PC now also can test and debug their sites within Safari, the web will be a step closer to better performance.

But not only this is good for everybody, Apple itself will be the big winner. With more respect for their browser, but also OS and their media format Quicktime.

Hope to hear more soon on this nice development!

While testing a web page for compatibility when images are turned off, I discovered a handy bug in Firefox.

When I renamed to directory (so the references to images in the HTML and CSS files were broken), and then refreshed, everything went as expected: no images were shown. But when I refreshed for the second time, Firefox displayed the images again. I refreshed again: no images. I refreshed sometimes again, and the images were shown again.

I think that -for some reason- Firefox sometimes shows the images from the cache. But that’s nonetheless useful when testing a website on accessibility.