We’re planning on using Cufón to a larger extent than we have before on our build for Gregory, which has to be localized in a number of languages.  Using a text replacer for the designed text will allow us to localize text without rendering out new gifs and pngs for every language and whenever copy changes.  Not knowing how fast Cufón could render when given a lot of text, I put a test together.  PHP renders out a bunch of random text in blocks ranging from 10 characters to 1,000,000 characters.  Then Cufón goes to task on each, in sequence.  JS tells  you how long it takes.  Try it out here, but be advised it can crash your browser.

Here are the results of my very non-scientific test:

At 100,000 characters, FF3 threw “A script is running slow, blah blah” messages.  IE7 just crashed.  Safari 4 hung in there till 1,000,000 but then it gave up.  It looks like Apple’s claims about Safari 4’s speed have some truth.  I didn’t test any of the past generation of browsers, I may go back and add them later.

It looks like Cufón works perfectly fine on a page where it’s converting a thousand characters or less.  But it shouldn’t be used to convert the majority of the body copy of a page.  That’s perfectly acceptable to me.

I did say that I wasn’t going to bother with IE6 fixes on my new site. In fact, I was planning on insulting IE6 users with a special graphic overlay. I remembered however that this would include people like

a) 50% of our clients (guessing)
b) 66% of my family (my brother introduced me to firefox)
c) 30% of everybody (according to current stats)

So, that’s a lot. So, I spent the whole day (literally) fixing the site for 6 (argh) + 7 (which was admittedly easy). Anyway, for the IE6 users, I’m using a little script from this site:

http://savethedevelopers.com/

It’s cool, it animates in a pretty image at the top of the page saying how you should upgrade and provides links to current/modern browsers. So, while not an affront to each users’ browsing sensibilities, it does provide a nice recommendation that is rather obvious.

I ran into an issue today with Flash and targeting the div wrapper (when using SWFObject). Basically, there seems to be a bug in Firefox (and possibly other browsers) that causes the applet to reload when changing its display state. I found that instead of using

document.getElementById('flash_div').style.display = 'none';

that by using an explicit dimension you can achieve the same result without restarting the applet:

document.getElementById('flash_div').style.height = '0px';

Not sure if Firefox 3 addresses this. I’m guessing it does.

EDIT
ARGH. Setting the height to 0 definitely hides it, but little pieces of the flash are still active. Guess it’s an official “bug.”

Fluid is a webkit-powered site specific browser generator like Mozilla’s Prism.

Site specific browsers are web browsers dedicated to displaying a specific website or web application, such as Basecamp, Facebook, or Gmail. They can be quite handy if you tend to spend a lot of your time in a website or web application, and don’t want to clutter up your browser with lots of tabs. If your browser crashes, you’re also safe from loosing changes in your web app.

Fluid allows you to create an infinite number of site specific browsers on the fly, complete with their own icons. I have one for Basecamp and one for my local install of phpMyAdmin.

Go download it and give it a try. Also be sure to visit the Fluid Flickr group for all your icon needs. There’s even a phpMyAdmin icon by your’s truly,

H