Andy Edinborough

I present you with the CSS Stress Test bookmarklet.

Now let me explain: I have been losing my sanity over the oddest issue.  The project I’m working on right now has a fairly complex stylesheet.  Performance for the site is absolutely critical.  I’ve done my best to squeeze and optimize every line I can.  In all browsers, it runs like a champion.  Except IE9.  It runs terribly in IE9.  To make matters worse, it runs fine in IE8, IE7, and though it’s mangled, it even runs in IE6!

Something specific to IE9 was causing a serious performance glitch.  I realized fairly quickly that CSS was to blame.  Disabling JavaScript had no effect, but disabling all CSS instantly fixed performance.  I went through the usual suspects: filters, and various new CSS3 properties, but nothing seemed to help.  So I reached out to the community looking for something that could profile my… Read More →

UPDATE:  Please don’t read this post… It’s actually kind stupid.  :/  Now that IE supports 2D CSS tranforms, there are betters ways of handling this.

Can you believe that in 2010 we are still stuck  with using animated gif’s?  They support transparency, but not the alpha-channel.  So when you need to create a wait indicator that won’t have a specific background, you’re stuck with a pixelated look.

Recently, I wanted to create a beautiful wait-indicator to display while AJAX was loading.  I wanted to use PNG, but animated PNG’s don’t have wide support yet. Furthermore, PNG’s are fairly large, so an animated one would be orders of multitude larger.  I thought, “This is silly.  This is the image I want. ROTATE IT!”.  Seriously, what year is this?  1996?!

Enter Raphaël:

Raphaël is a small JavaScript library that should simplify your work with vector graphics on the web. If… Read More →

This truly is “embarrassing”.  The Mozilla team really pulled a “Windows ME” with their latest release of Firefox.  After being open for 5 minutes, Firefox with only the “embarrassing” tab open has 26 MB more memory usage than IE8 running for hours with 3 tabs open (including a Bing Map).

LAME!  And what happened to Firebug?!  When I try to inspect a page, the CSS gets completely hosed.  I know the Firebug team has rewritten it to use JetPack, but it looks like they had to rush to get a v3.5 compatible version out in time for Mozilla’s release.

I’m not one to rollback software.  I’m a software junkie—I NEED the latest version.  It is with a heart that I uninstall Firefox v3.5.  I’m slighted enough that I’ll probably go back to v2.0 until this whole mess gets straightened out <weeps bitterly />.

Update:  Firefox v3.5.1 is no better

I… Read More →