Microsoft has proudly announced that IE6 was used by only nine-tenths of the web surfers in the US in December 2011. The US joins Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Mexico, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Sweden and Ukraine in their champions circle, nations with an IE6 penetration of less than one percent.

Belgium, Colombia, Indonesia, Netherlands, and Turkey are all poised to join them, at 1.0 to 1.2%.

Asia is still, regrettably, home to a great many IE6 users. Fully a quarter of Chinese web traffic is on IE6. South Korea is at 7.2%, Japan is at 5.9%, Vietnam weighs in at 5.5%, India is at 5.4% and Taiwan is only slightly better at 4.9%. If your website serves significant numbers in these markets, consider encouraging users to upgrade.

Steven Shankland, over at CNET, has written an interesting piece about Google’s NaCl (yes, chemistry geeks, that is the formula for table salt). Overall, it’s a fairly balanced review.

On the one side, we get all of the benefits of WebKit, but with the performance of a compiled native application. In theory, that then allows us to write a knock-off of Photoshop and make it cross-platform, with easy electronic distribution.

On the other side, it’s not so cross-platform that it works on mobile devices and it does splinter development efforts. It only works on x86 CPU’s to date and it requires a browser plug-in API, which already dates it, since IE10′s Metro version will be plug-in-free.

Finally, Google and Mozilla both offer competing engines. Google’s Dart is intended to supplant JavaScript while Mozilla’s IonMonkey will further improve compiler performance.

Overall, if you’re willing to venture into relatively uncharted territory, have significant say in your deployment environment, and need as much performance as possible, this is an intriguing initiative. I just wonder how many of us developers fall into that bucket.

I’m not sure how I feel about having to install browser extensions to unlock the full potential of a site (It reminds me of Pepsi’s site, circa 1997), but some functionality simply isn’t practical without it.

GPG4Browsers, for example, performs browser-based PGP Gmail message encryption, storing the encryption keys as a browser setting, which from a usability perspective, makes a lot of sense, because it means that the entire experience can be nearly transparent to the user, or require minimal retraining.

For now, this only works in Chrome, but Firefox support is under development (and presumably similar behavior will be possible in IE 10). Naturally, it also has security implications stemming from Javascript’s lazy garbage collection and wide open variable scope, in addition to the usual concerns about browser security.

While GPG4Browsers is clearly a case of progressive enhancement, I can’t help but wonder if JS-based extensions could actually lead to browser lock-in.

Ariel Flesler has released a successor to Jquery Scroll Show.

Why is this better than jQuery Scroll Show:

• Doesn’t alter HTML at all
• Content doesn’t need to be aligned
• Content doesn’t need to be of the same type (div vs img)
• Content doesn’t need to be of the same size.

You can find the new tool here:

http://flesler.blogspot.com/2008/02/jqueryserialscroll.html

Base2 is exactly what the title says,  Unlike the major libraries that strive to enhance javascript with shiny new features, Base2 strives to achieve a clean, browser independent execution environment.  In many ways base2 does for javascript what Blueprint, Tripoli et al. do for CSS.

Key Features:

• Inconsistent enumeration across platforms
• instanceof doesn’t always work
• typeof is inconsistent (RegExps identify as type “function” in Mozilla browsers)
• Consistent object/platform detection
• Other various bugs

And the sugar:

• A mechanism for inheritance
• A decent hash object
• Array and String generics
• Array extras
• Support for ISO date parsing

Playing with the library, it really is a breath of fresh air in many respects.  It’s lightweight (20kb compessed & 6kb) gziped and loaded with features that make day to day javascript development faster and easier.  Most importantly, it raises the bar for all browsers by providing Javascript 1.6 features to browsers other than Firefox.

You can get it online at

http://code.google.com/p/base2/ 

and there’s an excellent introduction at

http://dean.edwards.name/weblog/2007/12/base2-intro/ 

Today I’m pleased to announce the release of SilkSprite 2.0.  Everything about SilkSprite stays the same but the decompressed file size drops by an astounding 46%.

Key Improvements

• 11% decrease in size for sprite.css
• 50% decrease in size for sprites.png

My special thanks go out to Andrew France for achieving such amazing compression of the png file.

You can find the new version here:

http://www.ajaxbestiary.com/Labs/SilkSprite/ 

Have you recently, or are you currently developing a web front end for a project? Want to talk about it? I’m looking for developers willing to discuss the design & technical challenges of their recent projects for a series of interviews on Ajax Bestiary. I’m asking for at most an hour of your time, In return you’ll get free publicity for yourself and your project and my gratitude.

Please use the form below to contact me if you are interested:

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Much like Google’s GWT, Microsoft’s new Volta project compiles .net assemblies into client side ajax interfaces without requiring a line of javascript.

From the press release:

You architect and build your application as a .NET client application, assigning the portions of the application that run on the server tier and client tier late in the development process. You can target either web browsers or the CLR as clients and Volta handles the complexities of tier-splitting. The compiler creates cross-browser JavaScript for the client tier, web services for the server tier, and all communication, serialization, synchronization, security, and other boilerplate code to tie the tiers together. In effect, Volta offers a best-effort experience in multiple environments without requiring tailoring of the application.

Check it out at labs.live.com/volta/

YUI has announced a major new release with the  immediate availability of YUI 2.4.

Key Features:

• Selector Utility: Following in the footsteps of most other toolkits, YUI now includes a CSS Selector.  This beta component includes much of the standard CSS3 selector syntax including the proposed Selector extensions.
• Charting: Using a hybrid Flash / Javascript model, a new charting component has been released with support for bar, line and pie charts.  Of special note is the fact that the charting utility utilizes the same data model as the data table implementation allowing hybrid chart / table interfaces.
• Get: dynamically load scripts and nodes via the new Get tools.
• Profiler: This combined with YUI Test will allow you to quickly and efficiently determine profiles and unit tests.  Most notably, profiler allows unit tests based on performance to be performed.
• JSON Utility: dramatically improved JSON support.

Behind the scenes:

Incremental improvments to: Calendar, Drag & Drop & Button controls.

Dramatic enhancements & customization support added to the Rich Text Editor:

Read about the release here:

http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/12/04/yuii-240/

It’s official, ExtJS 2.0 has landed.  ExtJS is one of the best toolkits out there for achieving ajax applications that rival desktop applications in interface richness.  Some of the new features in 2.0.

•  Grouping & Group Summary fields: Allows you to group related grid items and create summary rows.  Data sorts within each group set instead of across the grid.
• Scrolling tabs: You can now optimize screen Real Estate by allowing tabs to scroll off the tab par (Ala firefox)
• Anchor Layouts: Tack the dimensions of form elements to their parent container.
• Column Tree: The best of both worlds, integrate the powerful extjs grid & tree widgets

I should also point out that ExtJS continues its tradition of excellent documentation with a new API documentation center and rich set of demo applications to work from.   Check out ExtJS 2.0 here:http://extjs.com/blog/2007/12/04/ext-20-final-released/