Rapid Web News

Anyone who’s worked around computers for any length of time has probably seen the above statement several times. The latest issue, which you may have seen in the news, is the ‘cyber attacks’ on Google where hackers accessed Googlemail accounts of civil rights activists in China. Google then threatened they would pull out of the Chinese market. This sent a mild ripple of panic across a large portion of Europe where government officials advised to stop using IE. The actual press release wording was “the vulnerability could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer”. Hackers and code jockeys are always going to try and break the ‘big boys’ code it’s always been the way of things “I got one up on Bill Gates” yak yak. Good news for the rivals though; Opera, Chrome (which I use and thinks great!) and Mozilla’s Firefox.

Version 1.4 is the latest inception of the highly popular lightweight cross browser JavaScript framework. The new version features many new additions and speed improvements over 1.3.

jQuery was developed in 2006 by John Resig and since launch has been adopted by many large companies such as Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Digg and many more. The mantra behind jQuery is “write less, do more” With a wide range of easy DOM manipulation calls and user interface effects jQuery is an attractive option for developers looking to make applications more intuitive, user friendly and feature rich.

So whats new in 1.4?

Aside from all the new additions and improvements one of my favourite new functions is .delay(). Delay provides us with the functionality to delay execution of subsequent items in the queue.

For example we can fade out and fade in an element with a second delay.

jQuery not only allows us to delay on effects we can also apply delays to custom queues.

One of many new updates is the addition to pass event data to the function .live(). This gives developers much more flexibility to capture events. From form submission, focus changes, clicks and custom events.

The example below shows how to smooth scroll on all anchor tag elements using live to capture the click event data.

According to BuiltWith.com’s statistics jQuery is running on one in five websites on the internet. Not surprising considering the adaptability of the framework.

14 days of jQuery is still running and you can find more information via the below links.

http://jquery.com/
http://jquery14.com/

After talking to the guys in the office it appears they still have to do extensive testing of new websites in Internet Explorer 6, when I’d finished laughing and seeing the serious yet disapproving ‘share our pain and don’t mock us’ looks I decided to look into it somewhat further.

The most recent report I found on this is from earlier this year;

37% of people stated ‘I can’t upgrade because I don’t have administrator access on my PC’ now this has to be from large corporations locking down end user computers so as to not allow the installation of anything non work related. Plus the fact that a lot of large companies have bespoke software that will still only work with that version of IE. It seems to be popular belief that this comes down to spending hard currency (as ever) or the want to not spend. Understandable in the current climate but IE6 was first released in August 27 2001 to coincide with the release of Windows XP – over 8 years ago! I’m all for frugal but come on, surely the continued security threats to this antique version would be enough to promote an update?

32% of people claimed ‘I can’t upgrade because someone at work says I can’t’ isn’t this akin to the first reason though? So are we to believe a staggering 69% of computer users in the UK are governed by admin rights, or the lack there of, in the workplace?

Another report claims that just 30% are using the ‘because I have to’ reason with ‘Because I have an old computer’ in hot pursuit at 20%. The most popular reason, inside of the same study, claimed that 35% of people just didn’t care or actually refused all updates due to not wanting ‘change’ – now this sounds more like us brits!

Then Andrew forwarded me an article that Tim found:

“…According to October browser usage stats reported by Ars Technica, the old, incontinent granddad of the browsing world has finally been overtaken by the cool kid with all the rad accessories. Although IE6 still has 23% of the market – sadly, more than any other version of IE – when you add up the usage on every version of Firefox, you get 24.07%, enough to top that single old edition of Internet Explorer…”

One thing is for sure; when IE6 is finally put down like the sick ageing animal it is Andrew and Tim (our senior designers) will undoubtedly dance a small jig in the office, now if only they could convince me to stop using Google Chrome…