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 →

There are a TON of awful date pickers out there.  For a who’s who of the worst, check out Date Time Picker Competive Analysis.

jQuery UI’s Datepicker control is by far the best looking and most intuitive picker.  In light of maintaining a uniform UI, I wanted a date time picker that played on that control.  I found two:

1. http://blog.w3visions.com/2009/04/date-time-picker-with-jquery-ui-datepicker/ – Integrates with Datepicker, but the UI is completely disjoined.
2. http://engineeredweb.com/blog/10/4/jquery-date-and-time-pickers – The first one listed here is the one I had been using.  It integrated nicely with Datetpicker, but the author’s website is down now, and I found it was quite bulky and that it limited how you could use Datepicker—no inlining, no animation, etc.

So I created a duck-punched DateTimepicker that simply manipulates the Datepicker DOM element and functions to add the missing functionality:

As you can see, I also added the ability to specify custom buttons… 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 →