Progress Dots

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From time to time I need to throw together a small script to do something relatively simple. Today I had to write something that would animate a series of dots. You’ve seen it, those little lines of dots that grow and shrink to give indication that something, somewhere is happening.

It’s a relatively straight forward script, so I’ll just drop it in here with comments:

(function () {

    "use strict";

    // Find #dots, run setDots every 500ms, define your dot, and set size limit
    var dots = document.getElementById("dots"),
        loop = setInterval(setDots, 500),
        _dot = ".",
        size = 3;

    function setDots () {
        // #dots will be truncated when limit is reached, otherwise grows by one
        dots.innerHTML = (dots.innerHTML.length >= size) ? _dot : (dots.innerHTML + _dot);
    }

}());

It’s worth noting that you could probably whip up something similar with CSS alone using pseudo-elements, animation, @keyframes, and content, or even animating a sprite’s location on a background. Of course browser support would be far more limited.

Visualizing :hover Propagation

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The :hover pseudo-class can be tossed into a CSS selector to target the state of the element when the user’s cursor is currently positioned over the element. Due to the hierarchical structure of the DOM, anytime you activate the :hover state of an element, you activate it for all ancestral elements too. Wanting a quick illustration for this, I took to JSFiddle.

http://jsfiddle.net/FwKqq/6/show/

Polyfill for Reversed Attribute on Lists

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Lists in HTML typically appear in decimal fashion, starting from 1 and going to n. Sometimes these are instructed to appear in reversed order via the reversed boolean attribute on the ol element.

<ol reversed>
    <li>I am number two.</li>
    <li>And I am number one.</li>
</ol>

Some browsers don’t understand the reversed attribute, and thus will not reverse the list. Although you cannot reverse the entire list in some browsers with this attribute, you can manually override the value associated with each list item in most browsers via the value attribute.

<ol>
    <li value="2">I am number two.</li>
    <li value="1">And I am number one.</li>
</ol>

Using jQuery, we can quickly create a short polyfill that will give us reversed functionality in browsers where it’s not natively understood.

(function () {
    if ( $("<ol>").prop("reversed") === undefined ) {
        $("ol[reversed]").each(function () {
            var $items = $(this).find("li");
            $items.attr("value", function ( index ) {
                return $items.length - index;
            });
        });
    }
}());

The code should be fairly straight-forward, but let me explain what is going on just to be on the safe side.

We start with an IIFE (Immediately Invoked Function Expression) which runs our code instantly, as well as keeps all declared variables out of the global namespace.

Next we kick things off with a quick feature-test on a freshly-made ol. In browsers that understand the reversed property, the default value is false. In other browsers, the property is undefined.

We then grab a collection of all lists that have the reversed attribute. Next we cycle over this collection of lists, assigning the list items from each iteration to the variable $items.

We then take the $items jQuery collection and begin an implicit loop setting the value attribute of each item in the collection to collection.length - itemIndex. If there are five items in the list, and we’re on index 0 (first item), five will be returned as the value. When we enter the second iteration, and the index is 1, (5-1) will be returned, resulting in a value of 4.

Voila, we have polyfilled reversed. There are some shortcomings; this won’t work on lists created after this code runs. You could however put this logic into a function declaration and call it after the DOM has been updated asynchronously, so as to handle any new lists that might have populated the document.

One very important note when using jQuery as a means to polyfill older browsers, you will have to use jQuery 1.8.3 or below. Around the release of jQuery 1.9, a lot of antiquated code was removed that once propped up older browsers. jQuery 1.9 and forward are meant for modern browsers, and as such they will fail in carrying your polyfilled functionality back to older browsers like Internet Explorer 6, and its contemporaries.

IE10 Gotcha: Animating Pseudo-Elements on Hover

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I came across a question on Stack Overflow today asking about animating pseudo-elements. This is something I have lamented over in the past since it’s been a supported feature in Internet Explorer 10 for a while, but only recently implemented in Chrome version 26. As it turns out, there was a small edge-case surrounding this feature that I had yet to encounter in Internet Explorer 10.

The following code does two things; first it sets the content and transition properties of the ::after pseudo-element for all paragraphs (there’s only one in this demo). Next, in the :hover state (or pseudo-class), it changes the font-size property to 2em. This change will be transitioned over 1 second, per the instruction in the first block.

p::after {
    content: ", World.";
    transition: font-size 1s;
}

p:hover::after {
    font-size: 2em;
}

Although simple and straight forward, this demo (as-is) doesn’t work in Internet Explorer 10. Although IE10 supports :hover on any element, and IE10 supports pseudo-elements, and IE10 supports animating pseudo-elements, it does not support all three, together, out of the box.

If you change your markup from using a paragraph to using an anchor element, the code begins to work. This seems to suggest some type of regression has taken place, causing Internet Explorer 10 behave similar to Internet Explorer 6 where only anchors could be “hovered” — support for :hover on any element was added in version 7.

Upon playing with this a bit, there does appear to be a few work-arounds:

  1. Change your markup
  2. Use sibling combinators in your selector
  3. Buffer a :hover selector on everything

Let’s look at these one at a time.

Change Your Markup

Rather than having a paragraph tag, you could nest a span within the paragraph, or wrap the paragraph in a div. Either way, you’ll be able to modify your selector in such a way so as to break up the :hover and ::after portions. When the user hovers over the outer element, the content of the inner-element’s pseudo-element is changed.

I don’t like this option; it’s far too invasive and demanding.

Use Sibling Combinators in Your Selector

This was an interesting discovery. I found that if you further modify your selector to include consideration for sibling elements, everything is magically repaired. For instance, the following targets our paragraph based on some other sibling paragraph:

p~p:hover::after {
    font-size: 2em;
}

This is interesting; it doesn’t break the connection between :hover and ::after, but it does modify the root of the selector, which somehow causes things to repair themselves.

What I don’t like about this approach is that it requires you to explicitly declare the sibling selector, as well as the element you’re wishing to target. Of course, we could fix this a bit by targeting a class or id, as well as going with a different sibling combinator:

*~.el:hover::after {}

This targets any element with the .el class that is a sibling of any other element. This gets us a little closer, but still, a bit messy. It requires us to modify every single selector that is part of a pseudo-element animation.

Buffering the :hover Selector

Provided with the question on Stack Overflow was one solution to the problem. As it turns out, if you provide an empty set of rules for the hover state, this fixes all subsequent attempts to animate pseudo-element properties. What this looks like follows:

p:hover {}

p::after {
    content: ", World.";
    transition: font-size 1s;
}

p:hover::after {
    font-size: 2em;
}

Oddly enough, this small addition does indeed resolve the issue. Given the nature of CSS, you can even drop the p portion, and just go with the following fixing it for all elements:

:hover{}

This too results in a functioning Internet Explorer 10 when it comes to animating pseudo-element properties.

Experiment: http://jsfiddle.net/jonathansampson/N4kf9/

Creating a (autofocus) Polyfill

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In the ever-changing world of browser topography, every so often there exists an expectation in the community that some feature or API will be available in a browser, and it’s not.

We have an approach to mitigating these types of issues though, and we call it polyfilling. To quote Remy Sharp, “A polyfill, or polyfiller, is a piece of code (or plugin) that provides the technology that you, the developer, expect the browser to provide natively. Flattening the API landscape if you will.”

A question was recently asked on Stack Overflow about automatically applying focus to an input element when the page loads. The first responses suggested using a tool like jQuery to target the element, and invoke its focus method. While this works, it adds additional overhead in environments where it’s not needed.

My initial solution to the question was to use the autofocus boolean attribute on the input element of choice. Shortly after suggesting this, I realized this attribute was only introduced in Internet Explorer at version 10, meaning users of 6, 7, 8, and 9 wouldn’t get the behavior the developer expected – perfect opportunity to author a polyfill.

Our goal in building a solid polyfill is to not make its presence known; we want the web developer to author their markup as they would normally, while we quietly teach the browser to make sense of the unknown autofocus attribute.

So we start with basic HTML:

<input name="name" placeholder="John Doe" autofocus />

In browsers like Internet Explorer 10, Chrome 26, or Firefox 20, focus will be immediately given to this element upon page load. But for Internet Explorer 6-9 and versions of Firefox prior to 4.0, we’ll have to add a bit of assistance.

We start by first performing a feature-detect for the autofocus property in a freshly-created input element. In browsers that support this property, the default value is false:

// Proceed only if new inputs don't have the autofocus property
if ( document.createElement("input").autofocus === undefined ) {

}

This condition will only evaluate to true in browsers that don’t natively understand the autofocus attribute, and as such, this will be our sandbox to play in while constructing our polyfill. We’ll need to go through a few steps for this polyfill, so let’s have a look at what they are:

  1. Cycle over all forms
  2. Cycle over all elements in each form
  3. Check attributes of each element for autofocus
  4. If found, trigger focus, and break out of all loops (only one instance of autofocus should exist on in a document, otherwise you’ll get inconsistent cross-browser results)

Our first step in the above list is to cycle over all the forms. We can use the document.forms collection to find all of the forms on the document. We’ll also create a variable to track our index in the collection of forms. Lastly, we’ll add a label to this loop so that we can break from it later:

// Get a reference to all forms, and an index variable
var forms = document.forms, fIndex = -1;

// Begin cycling over all forms in the document
formloop: while ( ++fIndex < forms.length ) {

}

Next, within our formloop, we need to get a collection of the current form’s elements. Additionally, we will be creating another index variable to help us navigate this new collection:

// Get a reference to all elements in form, and an index variable
var elements = forms[ fIndex ].elements, eIndex = -1;

// Begin cycling over all elements in collection
while ( ++eIndex < elements.length ) {

}

The third step in our process is to check for the autofocus attribute in each element. There are various ways you can do this, and I explored several of them. For instance, you could use the hasAttribute method, but this is only supported in Internet Explorer from version 8 (meaning you’d have to polyfill it in earlier versions).

In the end I wound up checking for the attribute as a key in the element.attributes collection. If not present, the result will be falsey, and the loop will skip to the next element in the nodeList:

// Check for the autofocus attribute
if ( elements[ eIndex ].attributes["autofocus"] ) {

}

Finally, we arrive at our last step. We have found an element that has the attribute we’re looking for, and it’s time to focus on it, break out of the loops, and call it quits.

// If found, trigger focus
elements[ eIndex ].focus();

// And break out of outer loop
break formloop;

This is where the formloop label comes in handy; a simple break would have broken the element loop, but not the forms loop, meaning subsequent form elements (and their children) would be evaluated. Since only one instance of autofocus should appear in a document, this is not the behavior we want.

The final result is wrapped in an IIFE (Immediately Invoking Function Expression) which runs our code immediately, as well as prevents our variables from appearing in the global namespace, potentially causing harm to the rest of the document or application.

(function () {

    // Proceed only if new inputs don't have the autofocus property
    if ( document.createElement("input").autofocus === undefined ) {

        // Get a reference to all forms, and an index variable
        var forms = document.forms, fIndex = -1;

        // Begin cycling over all forms in the document
        formloop: while ( ++fIndex < forms.length ) {

            // Reference all elements in form, and an index variable
            var elements = forms[ fIndex ].elements, eIndex = -1;

            // Begin cycling over all elements in collection
            while ( ++eIndex < elements.length ) {

                // Check for the autofocus attribute
                if ( elements[ eIndex ].attributes["autofocus"] ) {

                    // If found, trigger focus
                    elements[ eIndex ].focus();

                    // And break out of outer loop
                    break formloop;

                }

            }

        }

    }

}());

There you have it, a polyfill that gives autofocus behavior to browsers that don’t natively support it. By dropping this in to your website, you can now carry on your merry way using great features of HTML like this, without worrying what negative effect it might have on your Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8, or even 9 visitors.

IE10 Gotcha: Optgroup Indexes and the Required Attribute

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I came across a rather interesting gotcha in Internet Explorer 10.0.9200.16519 this evening (via @dstorey, who showed me this question). Setting the required attribute on a select element that has various optgroup elements within may result in unexpected warnings upon form submission.


The above form will be “invalid” if the index of the selected option among its siblings matches the index of its parent optgroup among its siblings. So the first optgroup and the first option will trigger the unexpected results when the parent select has the required attribute.

This pattern is consistent with the second, third, and fourth optgroup elements. Selecting the second option in the second optgroup, or the third option in the third optgroup, will cause form submission to fail.

Workarounds

I have found only one way around this, but it may not work in most situations. Adding the multiple attribute to the same select will prevent the confusing behavior, but at the cost of affecting the presentation and behavior of your element. The size attribute could remedy this to some degree, but is not favorable.

Phenomenal Day thanks to jQuery and Windows 8

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Friday, March 29th, 2013, was a phenomenal day in this developer’s life.

In late 2012 my employer, appendTo, began working with Microsoft on an extremely exciting project – preparing a version of the web’s most beloved JavaScript library, jQuery, for Windows RT and use in Windows Store applications. This was particularly exciting for me since jQuery is one of my most active tags on Stack Overflow.

Towards the end of our work in preparing this special version of jQuery, I had the great pleasure of working with Elijah Manor on material that would be presented at //build/ 2012 by one of appendTo’s founders, Mike Hostetler.

We had successfully delivered a version of jQuery that worked with the new security model in Windows Store applications. But this wasn’t the end-goal; none of us wanted to maintain a clone of jQuery that was engineered specifically for Windows Store applications.

The project was a huge success, I was on cloud 9 having gotten to work with such phenomenal developers, and fantastic partners, on such a game-changing project. But again, our work wasn’t done – we merely wet our appetites for far better results. We wanted jQuery itself to work in Windows Store applications, not some sufficiently-similar clone of jQuery.

Our focus was then turned to working more closely with jQuery core contributors, which resulted in me getting to meet even more amazing people, like the President of the jQuery Foundation, Dave Methvin. Dave is one of those old-school hackers that could keep you tuned to his every word for hours on end; such an amazing guy. With guys like him at the helm, it’s easy to see why jQuery is such a success.

Moving forward, I began testing jQuery builds within Windows Store applications. This required forking, cloning, building, authoring and modifying unit tests, and more; it was a smörgåsbord of geek indulgence. At this time jQuery core contributors were working hard on version 2.0, the highly-anticipated version of jQuery that would shed itself of legacy support like a cicada liberated from it’s shell.

The timing couldn’t have been more perfect; Dave and the others were carefully extracting massive chunks of code from jQuery’s core that existed for no other reason than to support over a decade of antiquated browsers. In parallel to their efforts, appendTo was diving into versions of jQuery from 1.8.3 to pre-builds of 2.0, addressing any and all patterns considered “unsafe” in the new non-browser environment.

In the end, it all paid off. jQuery 2.0 appears to be ready for Windows Store applications, and every web-developer looking to try their hands in the lucrative market of Native Windows 8 applications authored in JavaScript (and now jQuery) has a familiar gateway into the new stomping grounds. It’s been an exciting project, and I’m incredibly humbled to have played a role in all of it.

jquery-pagesEverything peeked for me yesterday though, when co-worker Ralph Whitbeck and I had our article Building Windows Store Applications With jQuery 2.0 published on Nettuts+. Immediately following that, I was mentioned on the Interoperability @ Microsoft blog. And soon thereafter, mentioned on none other than TechCrunch, a site with over 1,600,000 tech-loving subscribers.

I imagine this type of thing happens everyday with various different developers. You put your nose down into a project that you are personally excited to be a part of. You work countless hours researching, writing, and testing. You meet a few exciting people along the way, and then one day you lift up your eyes to realize that you just had part in something truly amazing.

The web is such an exciting place, and contributing to open-source projects is an incredibly rewarding thing. Fortunately, for myself and all of my peers, getting your hands dirty with such amazing projects is easier today than it has ever been before thanks to services like GitHub.

As for me, I’m looking forward to seeing how jQuery 2.0 and beyond are used in Windows Store applications, and perhaps be so fortunate enough to contribute further to this amazing project in the future. You can do the same.

Taking the Internet Explorer Challenge

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I’m going to use Internet Explorer 10 as my primary browser for one week. That’s one week without browsing, tweeting, or listening to turntable in Chrome (current “Browser of Choice”). That’s one week deep inside the bowels of the browser that burned me, and so many of my peers, so badly over the last decade. One week in the heart of the beast.

Why? Isn’t Internet Explorer supposed to be a thing of the past? A bad phase in the history of the web that we’re slowly recovering from? The faint image of the broken internet from yesterday, replaced by far more standards-compliant browsers like Firefox and Chrome? Well, yes, and no.

If I’m honest with myself, and everybody else, it’s not the browser that burned me. Internet Explorer dominated the market back in the day when I got excited to see 3kb/sec downloads. It was installed along side Netscape Navigator, but won me over pretty quickly.

The browser won a lot of people over, including corporations who went on to develop internal applications that depended on its implementation of HTML, CSS, and J(ava)Script. And then the world changed around them; around all of us.

Dial-up was becoming a thing of the past, and new browsers were creeping into the scene. Firefox rose like a phoenix from the ashes of Netscape, and then Google got into the game with Chrome. These later browsers took advantage of faster and more consistent connections and offered streamlined updates that happened silently in the background.

Internet Explorer was still dominating in the global market, but these antiquated versions from yesteryear were still in circulation, and still being actively used. While they were once the apple of our eye, we quickly jumped from them to the new breed of browsers. It wasn’t that Internet Explorer 3-8 were bad – they weren’t. It was the fact that the world around them changed, and changed quickly.

Fast forward to Internet Explorer 10; it is new, and has great support for standards. Most importantly though, it hints at having the capacity to auto-upgrade like its competition. So I was curious, do I have any reason to dislike Internet Explorer any longer? Is it just as good as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, or Opera? What better way to find out than to use it as my primary Browser of Choice for one week.

Sunday, Bloody Sunday

It’s really tough retraining my mind to click my Internet Explorer icon instead of my Chrome icon. The icon that was once relegated to testing and debugging my code in yesterday’s browser is now my go-to destination for all casual browsing, tweeting, and more.

So far I’ve been using Internet Explorer for Bootstrap work, blogging from WordPress, Tweeting with TweetDeck, Facebook, and casual browsing online. While I didn’t spend much time in the browser today, I did do some tweeting from @tweetdeck’s web-application, and noticed that the scrollbars are pretty horrible looking – so I fixed them. Left and right for before and after.

ie-tweetdeck-css

Unfortunately it appears Twitter has neglected Internet Explorer when they developed their dark-theme. While they fixed up the styles for the scrollbar in WebKit, they failed to do anything remotely similar in Internet Explorer. I’ve notified them (and might have gotten their attention), so let’s hope they get word and make these changes. You can make similar changes in your applications using scrollbar-face-color and related properties (See the “see also” section on the previous link).

I must admit, it would be awesome if we could control the properties of the scrollbar by setting properties on a pseudo-element instead of on any element that scrolls. It’s worth noting that in this territory, there currently is no w3c-accepted standard.

IE uses a proprietary extension in the form of prefixed-properties, and WebKit uses a proprietary extension in the form of prefixed-pseudo-elements. One can only hope there will be a consensus and convergence in implementation.

No Case of the Mundays

Today was my first actual day of work in Internet Explorer. I mean, I’ve opened it up here and there during work in the past, but today I spent all of my time in Internet Explorer – and it went well. Nothing broke (that I noticed), nothing was complicated, all was well.

I did work on a CSS example for somebody today only to have them say “the antialiasing sucks,” but as it turned out they were viewing in Chrome, and I was viewing in Internet Explorer. Sure enough, if you create a hard-edge on an angled CSS gradient, it looks better in Internet Explorer than it does in Chrome. Here’s a quick comparison between Chrome 25 and Internet Explorer 10.

linear-gradient-aa

This particular gradient is 25deg – oddly enough, Chrome draws a beautifully-smooth line when the gradient is changed to 45deg rather than 25deg. Don’t ask me why – I haven’t the slightest clue.

OMG, Tuesday!

Wow, so today was a big day. When I started this blog post I was a little bummed that the only people able to take the IE Challenge would be those who have purchased Windows 8, or a machine that came loaded with Windows 8. This morning at 6am PST, the IEBlog announced Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7!

On to my day though – today was spent largely in Google Docs. I noticed there were some small layout differences between Chrome and IE. For instance, the number of characters you can fit on one line before a wrap occurs differs in Chrome than it does in IE. This was particularly bothersome since one of my templates features right-aligned text left-padded with enough spaces to complete a full line of characters. All of these characters are then set with a dark background color.

I wound up taking an alternative route, replacing this approach with a single-cell single-row table, and setting the background color of the cell instead of the background color of the text. This was far better and gave far more consistent results between IE and Chrome. No clue who is to blame, or what was the means by which both browsers diverged from one another, but Chrome appeared to hold itself together better overall when it came to Google Docs.

Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday

So at this point it’s just difficult to find things to blog about. I instinctively click on the Internet Explorer 10 and go straight to my browsing. I don’t experience any issues with my favorite sites. I tweet using TweetDeck, check in with Mom on facebook, drop images into imgur, broadcast using Google Hangouts, manage a channel on YouTube, help out where possible on StackOverflow, and blog about all of it here in WordPress – no issues. Everything just works.

I don’t mean to give the impression that there isn’t any work to be done – there is, a lot. Sadly, while the Internet Explorer developers have been doing an amazing job with their product, we (the community) need to step up our game as well. We’ve got to start writing better code, and paying attention to language specifications and APIs, as well as the ways in which they’re implemented in various browsers.

I came across another “my site doesn’t work in IE” thread today. The website popped up in Quirks mode. Changing it to Standards didn’t magically fix it (as it does from time to time). Instead, pushing it to Standards mode resulted in an even more damaged experience.

The problem here was written all over the Source: apathy, carelessness, and so much more. We aren’t teaching passion for our craft today as well as we should. We teach people how to hammer out some markup, and then encourage them to feed off of the visual presentation, rather than the compliance to the specification (too). New developers code, and refresh, code, and refresh. Rarely, if ever, making a trip to w3.org.

In early 2012 I came across a rather iconic website that was rendering well in Chrome and Firefox, but the side-bar navigation (made up of lists within lists) was severely broken in Internet Explorer 9. The problem wound up being an unclosed list item; I modified the response in Fiddler, issued a new request in IE9, and the page magically worked. This designer tested their markup in a browser that deviated from what the code explicitly requested (nasty nesting), and instead did what it thought the designer intended. While this resulted in the proper formatting, it breaks the web.

This was something I grew to appreciate in Internet Explorer 9 – it was brutally honest. You got what you asked for (generally speaking), and when your document was looking ugly, it was because your code was telling it to. Other browsers would implement a dose of speculation into its rendering process, which adds far too much variability to the web.

Not Perfect, But Better

A week of using Internet Explorer as your primary browser convinces me of at least two things: 1) Microsoft has come a long way with their product, and it deserves a second look. And 2) There’s still work to be done. While surfing the web on Internet Explorer 10 doesn’t feel like sucking on broken glass, it still leaves some areas for improvement.

I try to be a little less critical about massive software, given the enormous complexity to create, develop, and maintain it, but there are areas where Internet Explorer 10 can be improved. I come across these items from time to time, and try to create simplified reproducible examples when possible to share with others (and with whomever I have access to within Microsoft). One such issue is the :hover bug related to table-rows. You can see this online at http://jsfiddle.net/jonathansampson/FCzyf/show/ (Tested in Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 only).

Even with its flaws, Internet Explorer is still leading the way in other areas. It’s currently one of the only browsers to support pseudo-element animation, the Pointer model (though you can get ‘Pointium‘), and some CSS level 4 text properties.

My biggest concern lately is not with the browser itself, Microsoft has convinced me that their product is reliable. What concerns me lately is with the release cycles. Can they keep this new browser breathing, or are they going to continue resuscitating it on a bi-annual cycle? If so, we’ll quickly find the web moving out ahead of it again, and history will repeat itself. I find a glimmer of hope in the newest “About Internet Explorer” dialog.

Install New Versions Automatically

In my sincere opinion, Internet Explorer (in just a few years) went from being the bane of my existence (#somuchdrama), to being a bright luminary, back competing in the pack of modern browsers. Will it stay among the pack? Time will tell. Until then, welcome back Internet Explorer.

Download Internet Explorer 10, give it a week, and post your results below.

Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 7

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Over on the IEBlog Microsoft just announced the official release of Internet Explorer 10 for all Windows 7 users. This is tremendous news considering the great deal of support for web-standards that Internet Explorer 10 has over Internet Explorer 9. Apparently there a number of serious performance enhancements done as well.

All Windows 7 users (well, assuming they have a legit copy of Windows 7 I presume) can download the latest browser from Microsoft today, and begin to participate in the more modern web. Anybody running the Release Preview of IE10 on Windows 7 will be auto-updated today, and in weeks to come we will see instances of IE9 auto-update to IE10.

This is a good day for the web!

Flexible Browsers

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I overheard a comment a few days ago that a friend made regarding the default layout of Internet Explorer; namely its placing of the address bar inline with tabs. This results in reduced space for tabs, thus reduced title lengths, thus reduced efficiency managing multiple tasks in parallel.

Chrome, on the other hand, places the tabs above the address bar, giving the impression the address bar is part of the tab currently-opened tab. Firefox, and Opera both also place the tabs above the address bar. Every browser appears to write in stone their tab-placement – though Internet Explorer appears to show the most flexibility.

Upon exploring Internet Explorer following my friends comments, I soon found that I could resize the address bar, re-arrange the stop/refresh buttons, drop tabs down onto their own line (or leave them inline), reduce certain toolbars down into command buttons to minimize space-used. Needless to say, I was pretty impressed with just how much flexibility I found in Internet Explorer.

Here are a few arrangements I went through:

Exploring Varation in Internet Explorer's Layout

Exploring various customizations of the address bar, tabs, and more in Internet Explorer.

As previously mentioned, the above shows the resizing of the address bar, shifting of the stop/refresh buttons from the right over to the left (easier to avoid accidentally clicking the Compatibility View button), dropping tabs onto their own line (you can leave them inline, if that floats your boat), collapsing toolbars like the LastPass one into the command region, and making it inline with the favorites.

Of the four browsers I checked, Chrome appears to be the most rigid. As for customization, you can change the theme, but this is really not much more than swapping out a background image on browser itself. You can’t change the address bar width (well, you can resize the add-on bar, which results in a longer/shorter address bar), the placement of the tabs, the locality of the buttons or anything. You can, however, toggle the “Home” button on and off.

chrome-appearance

Both Firefox and Opera have really impressive options for customizing your toolbars, but that might be a degree of control that few people enjoy. I personally explored it, but didn’t find it too appealing. Also in Firefox you can disable tabs until you explicitly request to open a link in a second tab. This too reduces used-space around the “chrome” of the browser.

Opera sports an even more advanced set of options for Tab Bar Placement. While tabs at are traditionally at the top of the content (following their real-world exemplar of manila folders), you can place them on any side of the viewport in Opera. The changes of the layout are pretty drastic, so I apologize for the disorienting effect of the following gif:

Tab Bar Placement in Opera.

Tab Bar Placement in Opera.

My take-away is that Chrome is nice on the eyes, but far too rigid with the layout options. Opera and Firefox go to the other extreme, and drop enough tools in your lap that you’d need an engineer’s manual to truly understand the power you’ve been given. Internet Explorer hits closest to the sweet spot in my sincere opinion. While I wish Internet Explorer had a few features we’ve come to love in its competition, I am happy with the degree (and limits) of flexibility Microsoft has chosen to provide.