Linked List: June 17, 2008

Stacking the Odds 

Jack Shedd on Mozilla’s Firefox-vs.-Safari comparison:

The sad fact is, in most ways, WebKit/Safari is the superior browser. And it damn well better be. Apple caused a huge ruckus when it chose to use the kHTML engine as Safari’s starting point instead of Gecko. The long run has proven their decision was correct. They’ve managed to build a faster, more compliant-browser with fewer programmers and less glitz than the Firefox team.

The New UI Wars 

Kontra:

Many reasons have been floated for why Flash isn’t a good match for the iPhone: it’s slow, it hogs CPU cycles, it drains the battery, it crashes too often, it’s not optimized for Mac OS X and so on. As obvious as these reasons may be, even if all those technical issues could be solved tomorrow, there would still remain a huge divide between Adobe and Apple on the iPhone: who controls the UI?

Firefox vs. Safari 

Screenshot of Mozilla’s Firefox 3 site, with their comparison against Safari. Apparently if you view this same URL from a Windows machine, you get a comparison against Internet Explorer. Sean Sperte has an even longer list.

Mike Arrington: Flickr Co-Founders Join Mass Exodus From Yahoo 

Mike Arrington reports that Flickr co-founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield are leaving Yahoo.

New York Mets Fire Manager Willie Randolph 

They canned him in the middle of the night, 3 a.m. ET. Way to keep it classy, Mets.

Macworld’s iPhone 3G FAQ 

Includes not just the known knowns, but also the known unknowns (like, say, what the “improved audio” Steve Jobs mentioned actually means).

Indiana Jones and the Fonts on the Maps 

Mark Simonson on the typography of the Indiana Jones movie series. (Via Kottke.)

2008 PMC Software Auctions 

Seth Dillingham is looking for indie software developers to donate licenses to be auctioned to raise money for cancer research:

All proceeds will be donated to the Pan-Mass Challenge, and in turn to the Jimmy Fund, for the research and treatment of cancer at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The Pan-Mass Challenge is one of the most efficient charities in the world (over 99% of all rider-raised funds are passed through directly to the Jimmy Fund).

He did the same thing last year and raised over $5,000.

Firefox 3: ‘Failed to Open Page’ 

So today’s supposed to be the big day for Firefox 3 — the official release, and a much-publicized but idiotic attempt to break the “world record” for downloads in a 24-hour period. Their web servers have been offline for hours. Update: You can track their progress here.

iPhone Atlas on Flash Performance on Mobile Processors 

The funny part is that when I loaded this page on my Mac, I was presented with one of the most obnoxious Flash-based web ads I’ve ever seen: an ad for Verizon FiOS that, about 10 seconds after the page loaded, “set fire” to the paragraph of text I was reading. The iPhone’s lack of Flash is a feature.

Good Thing Mossberg Didn’t Hold His Breath 

Good time to recall Walt Mossberg’s “scoop” regarding Flash support for the iPhone, from 11 months ago:

Apple says it plans to add that plug-in through an early software update, which I am guessing will occur within the next couple of months.

Good Luck With That, Adobe 

The web’s abuzz regarding this nugget from Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen during their quarterly finance call yesterday, after being asked about the state of Flash for the iPhone:

“We have a version that’s working on the emulation. This is still on the computer and you know, we have to continue to move it from a test environment onto the device and continue to make it work. So we are pleased with the internal progress that we’ve made to date.”

So, (a) according to Narayen, it’s only running in the simulator (which is x86, not ARM, and a lot of things that run OK in the simulator run slowly on actual iPhones); and (b) they still have no solution to the problem of getting Flash content to display in MobileSafari. MobileSafari has no third-party plug-in API. It isn’t going to happen. The best Adobe can do is provide a standalone Flash player app for the iPhone, along the lines of Apple’s standalone QuickTime player.

‘If I’m Not Having a Good Time Working on It, There’s Something Wrong.’ 

Speaking of Field Tested Books, they made a nice little documentary about John Solimine, the designer and printer of this year’s FTB poster.