As such, google, facebook and a whole host of other big names have dropped support for IE6 in the last couple of years. Even Microsoft has started a campaign to get people onto newer browsers to allow the web to evolve (http://www.ie6countdown.com/). Now it’s Ateliers turn to say goodbye. In order to provide the latest and greatest web technologies, we will no longer be able to support IE6 unless it is a specific requirement for a project.

When it comes to browser support, we will always aim to support at least 2 older versions as well as a browsers latest version. So In the case of Internet explorer, we’ll support the current version (IE9), as well as IE8 and IE7. With Firefox we’ll support the current version (FF6), as well as firefox 5, and firefox 4.

If you are still running IE6, there are a whole host of (much better) options available to you. We recommend the following:

Microsofts latest version, IE9.
Google Chrome.
Mozilla Firefox.

The new changes will completely change the way that the search engines robots scan and index all of the websites. They are now able to scan soundtracks and videos to pick out the content and use this as a key factor when determining rankings as they want the most engaging and interactive sites to be at the top of the search engines so that the searcher gets the most from their web experience.

So what does this mean for Search Engine Optimisation? According to Google’s own Matt Cutts, SEO’s across the world are going to have to redefine their task and their title to not just optimise sites to get them high up the rankings but to help create holistic online marketing solutions that tailor to the clients needs. The emphasis of any SEO campaign must move away from large amounts of keyword-dense text and move onto finding ways of optimising sites that means that they are both interactive and informative for the visitor. Furthermore as rankings will be more tailored to the searcher it means that the deliverables of an SEO account will focus almost on traffic and conversions and as SEO guru Bruce Clay stated at a major web conference, “ranking is dead”.

One thing is for sure, if you are not ready for these upcoming changes then you will be left behind.

So why have Google decided to throw the hand into the browser ring? “Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.”

?The biggest challenge for us is that users don?t realize they have a choice when it comes to browsers. If there is a competition, this will help improve the available browsers in the market. Our goal is to provide more choice for users, less problems for developers and grow the over-all market? said Linus Upson, Director of Engineering, Google Inc.

This was Microsofts response to the new browser:

Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer at Microsoft Corp., declared: ?The browser landscape is highly competitive, but people will choose Internet Explorer 8 for the way it puts the services they want right at their fingertips, respects their personal choices about how they want to browse and, more than any other browsing technology, puts them in control of their personal data online.?

Ooooooo!….Hand bags.

Google Chrome boasts impressive:

1) SPEED
2) PRIVACY/SECURITY
3) STANDARDS
4) USER EXPERIENCE and
5) STABILITY

And even comes with a comic book style introduction for all the Stan Lee fans.

Yes, this is big

CNET News.com Editor in Chief Dan Farber’s analysis of Google Chrome was this: “It would be in line with other Google open-source projects, such as OpenSocial and Google Gears. Creating a competitor to Firefox, as well as Internet Explorer and Opera, could spur more innovation.”

“Open sourcing the code is a smart way to avoid the ‘Google wants to take over the world’ fear, but it seems that Google has ambitions to create a comprehensive Internet operating system, including a browser, applications, middleware and cloud infrastructure.”

Check out the video tour of 2.6

smaller features include:

• Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
• Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
• Bulk management of plugins.
• A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It?s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
• Plugin update notification bubble.
• Customizable default avatars.
• You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
• Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
• Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
• You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
• Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for ?clean? SVN checkouts.
• Select a range of checkboxes with ?shift-click.?
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
• Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.
• Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.

“Big Brother is watching you”
George Orwell – Nineteen Eighty-Four

So what the futon is this new?ish devilry, well wiki says this, “Geocoding is the process of assigning geographic identifiers (e.g., codes or geographic coordinates expressed as latitude-longitude) to map features and other data records, such as street addresses. You can also geocode media, for example where a picture was taken, IP
addresses, and anything that has a geographic component. With geographic coordinates the features can be mapped and entered into Geographic Information Systems.”

So how does that affect my little universe? To answer this I first need to use the flux capacitor and take you back in time to last year where Tom Coates was speaking at d.construct. (his talk) Tom talked about a project he was working on called Fire Eagle that allowed applications to pass your geo location back and forth.

I haven?t been able to get my hands on Fire Eagle but I know others who have and they seem to be impressed by its potential. So combined with a mobile internet device like an iphone Fire
Eagle enables me to do lots of different things:

• I can attach my location to twitterposts and see other twitters nearby. (via Twinkle)
• I can upload photos with location information and see other photos taken from my current location. (via iFlickr)
• I can view wikipedia entries of nearby locations.
• I can broadcast my current location to my blog.
• I can see which of my friends are nearby (presuming they too broadcast their location). (via Navizon)
• I can find local restaurants, eventsand other points of interest.

Holy DPA batman, that?s a lot of information out there for any one to just get hold of, and the issue is definitely something that is on the minds of the creators of fireeagle. Tom Coates in a recent interview had this to say about the security provisions that have been built into fireeagle to set your mind at ease.

“We?ve talked to a lot of people about this, and we have been very careful about the privacy and control. These are the two watch words of the project. We are incredibly conservative, we don’t want to worry’s any one out. So at any time you can press a button to hide your information. Information will still come into FireEagle, but it won’t go out. Or you can delete all your information on FireEagle at one time, so we won’t keep any records at all if you do that. At the moment we don’t keep any location history at all ? any tracking, or location history there. And we even by default will send you an email once a month saying “Are you still OK sharing?, and if you don’t reply to the email, or you don’t click on the link in the email, then we’ll stop immediately. It’s just so there is no risk of you doing anything, you know, accidently, exposing it in ways you’re not comfortable with.”
Tom Coates.

Geocoding is still very much in its infancy, but its potential is undeniable and some believe is on the cusp of going main stream.

So, it looks like we?re stuck with IE 6 for a while longer, and therefore testing on it is still necessary no matter how much you hate it (http://toastytech.com/evil/index.html). Testing on multiple browsers has always been a pain as you cannot run multiple versions of IE on a single operating system. Previous solutions to this problem have included:

• Get another computer.
• Install a virtual machine.
• Drop support for IE6.
• Hack IE7 to work standalone.
• Use online services http://browsershots.org/

But now there is another option that has just emerged from those guys over at DebugBar called IETester http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage . IETester is a free web browser that allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE8 beta 1, IE7, IE 6 and IE5.5 on Vista and XP all at once. They are calling it Alpha software, which would suggests there will be other versions coming out.

For the time being, I would still give your site a thorough going over in native copies of IE before making it live.

If you expect Firefox 3 to be drastically different in appearance, features and UI philosophy than the previous version, then you will be disappointed up to the fact that you may wonder if this new browser should have been an incremental and minor upgrade instead. For instance, when you first fire up Firefox 3, you will hardly notice any visible difference to the previous version. However, there was nothing really wrong with the previous interface anyway and we are just fine with an evolutionary modification.

One of the most exciting new features of Firefox 3 I think is the full page zoom; from the view menu and via keyboard shortcuts, the new zooming feature lets you zoom in and out of entire pages, scaling the layout, text and images, or optionally only the text size. Your settings will be remembered whenever you return to the site.

So will this mean more for web accessibility in the future or will it just be a clever little gimmick? I think it could be tremendously useful, imagine if instead of increasing or decreasing your browser text, which alters the page layout you could just change the zoom percentage of your browser. That would mean your layout would always remain the same which would do away with liquid or elastic layouts and we could all concentrate on fixed width design. Now I?m not saying that this will happen, but it will certainly give the age old debate about fixed vs liquid vs elastic (http://www.autisticcuckoo.net/archive.php?id=2004/07/21/fixed-liquid-elastic) a new angle.