Last.fm launched a major redesign just over 10 days ago. It’s not gone over very well: after over 2000 (mostly negative) comments on the blog announcement, discussion moved to the feedback forum, with threads on the new interface, most missed features and how Last.fm is handling the feedback (or not), all with 100s of posts. The “Bring back the old Last.fm” group hit over 5000 members in just 2 days, and is now over 12,000 strong.
As a long-term Last.fm user myself (along with the office), my initial reaction to the redesign was “oh no”, and unfortunately that’s not changed much as I got used to it. There’s only one feature I really wished for — charts that update continuously, rather than weekly — and plenty of changes that do no good at all. The site’s speed is still as bad as ever.
Continue reading ‘Last.fm redesign controversy’
So, generally Firefox 3 did not have much impact on our sites. Besides the Kupu problem Andy mentioned, there were just a few small CSS-related glitches, but overall we did not have to scramble to roll out patches. However, on a site we’re currently working on, Firefox 3 showed a serious glitch I hadn’t seen for a long time: the Flash of Unstyled Content or FOUC, first described back in 2001. The page content displays un-styled for a split second before the stylesheet kicks in.
The bluerobot article is now outdated, but the problem occasionally still rears its head on more modern browsers. Since I’ve been using Firefox 3, I’ve been seeing it quite often, where Firefox 2 doesn’t. (I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with FF3, it’s probably just being less lax than FF2.) This article has a good explanation. In a nutshell, you see a FOUC whenever a script tries to access properties like scrollHeight or offsetWidth before the stylesheet has loaded. The solution is simply to have the CSS links above the JavaScript links in the HTML.
Here’s an example (until they fix it, anyway): getcloser.com, an ambitious HMV-sponsored social connector based on entertainment interests, designed by the clever bods at LBi. You can see in the <head> there’s 78KB of JavaScript followed by 151KB of CSS. Switch it round, and it’ll go away.
Just a quick note to say that we’ve just discovered that kupu 1.3.9 (the one that ships with Plone 2.5 by default) breaks rather nastily in Firefox 3. First looks show that kupu 1.4.10 (the latest from http://plone.org/products/kupu) is just a drop in replacement, so it shouldn’t be too bad to get sorted. If you too are suffering weird behaviour when using the kupu internal link tool or image browser it may well just be that.
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