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There’s a comparison that I was pointed at today showing the difference between a number of different modern encoders. The Theora 1.1 demo on that page looked particularly bad, so I decided to investigate.

I downloaded and compiled the latest versions of libogg, libvorbis and libtheora from xiph.org. I ran the encoder example (as the other test did), but discovered that it does support two-pass encoding, contrary to what was stated on the other test’s page. I ran a few different two-pass encodes (including one with soft rates), but didn’t get a lot of variability between results. Overall, however, my newly re-encoded version is significantly better than the one on the other page.

IE6 has been getting a bad rap lately. France and Germany are both warning their citizens not to use it. The recent intrusions at Google were purported to be caused by holes in IE6. Even Microsoft is warning users to steer clear of it.

To get an idea of who’s given up on testing against this ancient browser, I’ve been running around browsing with IE6 in a VM. From what I’ve seen so far, it’s not getting a lot of love.

I’m pretty happy about this: as more and more sites break in IE6, it drives more people to browsers that don’t suck like Chrome or Firefox. It’s the last part of the browser death spiral: completely busted on the new and exciting sites.

We’re in the process of launching our new publisher integration feature at DotSpots and needed to gain an understanding of how browsers deal with “third-party cookies”, or cookies that are set on domains that differ from the top-level domain.

Each of the major browsers, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer have their own quirks about how cookies are accepted, which vary wildly depending on whether they were set by a top-level page, or a page in a third-party iframe.

It looks like the Chrome team has finally re-enabled extensions on Mac again (hat-tip to MG Siegler) in the latest dev channel build. You can’t update from the “About Google Chrome” screen yet, but you can grab the latest build and install it directly.

Even better, they are now allowing Mac users to install extensions directly from extension pages (warning: shameless self-promotion link).

Extensions are working well. They’ve turned on the browser action menus, so the various extensions that I’ve installed all work properly.

Bookmark sync is enabled as well, but I haven’t seen where the bookmarks are supposed to show up in Google Docs.

I previously discussed using window.name as a transport last year, but there wasn’t enough information and theory in the previous post to implement your own transport. I’ll fill in the gaps a bit more here to help developers looking to implement this themselves. You can also see the implementation we’re using at DotSpots in the gwt-rpc-plus project: Cross­Domain­Frame­Transport.java and Cross­Domain­Frame­Transport­Request.java.

The process of making a window.name request is described below. Note that you can inspect the HTML and HTTP traffic on my blog to see how our DotSpots plugin performs the cross-domain requests.

The last ten years have been a wild ride for this planet, but I’m sure the next ten are going to be even more exciting. I’d like to offer my predictions of what we’ll see around now, ten years in the future.