Anyway, I found myself wondering - how does SharePoint work with Chrome? We know Chrome is based on Firefox and Safari and other bits - but how well would it perform. The short answer - not bad…

It’s worth noting, this testing was done with the beta that was released today. I simply installed it (very easy) and tried using SharePoint, looking at common tasks, and awkward areas that I didn’t think would work very well. So, I logged in to my Sandbox system (Note, these images are compressed - Chrome doesn’t have the same dithering):

Okay, nice - though I never could get rid of the scrollbars. I’m figuring that might just be a feature of it being a beta - or maybe it’s to do with SharePoint’s styles…

Next, I had a look at the Calendar page, ‘cos it’s fairly complex:

Worked - but again, a scroll bar (at the bottom of the calendar) that won’t go away - seems to be ‘cos of styles again.

What about editing documents, and document libraries? Well, the menus and sorting work:

Cool. Editing in word? Well, the item menu shows okay, but it doesn’t work - just like Firefox.

Hmm. So what if I just click on the item? Well, it downloads, which is a bit weird in how it’s shown - and then you have to click to open the document:

But where is the document downloaded to? Well, to My Documents\Downloads - so upload is a manual thing from here (which isn’t surprising).

Navigation? Well, the menus seem to work, and so does the treeview (well, as well as that damn treeview works, anyway):

What else? Well, I figured Excel services might be a challenge -and they were. A few quirks here - the data displayed okay, but the menus opened behind the Excel charts/tables:

And yet, sometimes the menus did work:

Weird. Other notes? Well, the top right page menus didn’t look right - I kept getting some wrapping. This may be due to the sidebar problem:

And the final thing I noticed was that Chrome highlights links, sometimes. You can tab or shift-tab through the links - and the highlighting is pretty nice. Unfortunately, the colour could be a little confusing with the Default theme…

So, broadly, Chrome worked. It’ll be one of the ‘reduced functionality’ browsers, naturally, but that’s okay. I’ll wait for the final release with curiousity. While I like the sound of how Chrome manages it’s processes and memory, from a user standpoint, I didn’t feel I saw any huge benefits of it as a browser. It’s a very simple UI - but I’ve not yet really seen features that set it apart. The ‘incognito window’ (or ‘Porn mode’) is neat, but I’m a bit puzzled by the ‘history’ and ‘bookmarks’. I’m not sure, but these might be being stored on Google’s servers? I’m not sure I like that idea…

I remembered having seen this before, but a bit of poking around showed that my fix was still in place. Curious. When I clicked on the link to the presentation I got the ‘Download or Open’ dialog thingy:

First off I noticed that the file extension was .pps - good. I tried opening the file - and it opened it as if it were a .ppt file. Weird. So then I tried the other option - I saved it to my local machine and opened it locally. This time it opened correctly - it opened as a slideshow.

Hmm. So, they’re the same file, but something different is happening when they open. I wondered if it was to do with the HTTP headers, but the same difference occurs when the file is being served with the application/vnd.ms-pps or just text/html (we run MCMS 2002 on a IIS webserver but publish as static content to an Apache server. They serve the file as different mime types, but have the same result - Open opens the file for editing and Save and open shows the slideshow).

Next up, I tried the same experiment using Firefox. If you choose to Open the file rather than save it, it opens the slideshow - correctly! And if you save it, well, it saves the .pps file which, again, opens correctly.

So it looks like Internet Explorer will not open a .pps file as a slideshow irrespective of the mime type sent by the server and the .pps extension (and it’s file association in windows). However, if you save the file locally, it will. Weird.

The only thing that I can think is that this is some sort of security feature, but it’s a bit odd - after all, shouldn’t Firefox do this then?

Eventually figured it out from Geekette’s Blogette, and kbAlertz 833714.

We use Project 2003 still. This means two version of the owssupp.dll, apparently, under c:\program files\Microsoft Office\office11 and \office12

I followed the advice from the MS Knowledgebase article, but got the same error as all the folks at kbAlertz. In the end I tried just uninstalling MS Project Professional 2003 support - and low, Internet Explorer started letting me open documents from MOSS again. And, much to my surprise, Project 2003 web access works just fine - I guess it doesn’t use that dll.

I guess the lesson is to always maintain redundancy. Fortunately, the guys writing Firefox (presumably ‘cos they had problems with the bookmarks too) took to storing backups of the bookmark file - and that has worked nicely in this instance.

Anyway, it’s enough to put me off - I shall be looking for something else. I gather that Delicious (insert your own dots) has a good Firefox plugin, and works by tagging, which is good also. I’m just a wee bit worried as I really want to have a heirarchy too - so I can drill down, rather than just getting a ‘pool’ of matching tags.

So, who will win? Well, Microsoft clearly have an advantage as they’ll be shipping IE7 with their next OS - whenever that is. To be honest, though, the thing that interests me most is if this stimulates better standards across browsers. I just had a fight with aligning an image with a line of text - and I had to hack it to fix it - so here’s to hoping.

Personally, though, I’ll stick with Firefox for now.

A box with a border! Of course, this only works in Mozilla

Another box with a border!

Vertical Text

CSS seems to lack an real control over text direction - it should, but of course the reality is different.

What I found was a way of making vertical in IE using some of those pointless filters, and the support IE has for top to bottom, right to left languages. It’s a bit sneaky in doing this - but it works in IE, at least. I haven’t found a way of doing it in Mozilla.
<div style="{ writing-mode:tb-rl;
filter: flipv fliph;
white-space: nowrap;}">

- PNG opacity (with some nice examples)

- Fuzzy Drop shadows (like on Google Maps)

- Transparency with HTC files

- And again

- Choosing what image to serve in PHP on the server

Related: Opacity in CSS, being able to see through DIVS - CSS Transparency for IE, CSS Opacity

Adblock - the best think in Firefox bar none.

Cookie Culler - a much better cookie controller.

Web Developer Toolbar - Although this might be standard now - I don’t remember installing it last time…

- Menu Editor (trimmed down my context menu - another great feature)

- An easier History

- Live HTTP Headers

- Link Checker (neat!)

- Colorzilla

- View Formatted Source

Windows is crap. And this bug has been around for AT LEAST 2 years.

function addEngine(name,ext)
{
if ((typeof window.sidebar == "object") && (typeof
window.sidebar.addSearchEngine == "function"))
{
window.sidebar.addSearchEngine(
"http://www.example.com/searching/"+name+".src",
"http://www.example.com/searching/"+name+"."+ext,
name,
"" );
}
else
{
errorMsg(name,ext,"");
}
}

Anyway, I submitted my multimap plugin to them. The guys at work seemed quite impressed with these things too.