Wayne Pan

As most everybody knows by now the IE team will increase IE8’s concurrent connections to 6 (from 2). Now there are rumblings that the next FF3 beta will follow suit and increase the default to 6.The HTTP/1.1 standard recommends 2 which at the time made sense.

In the world of broadband, limiting connections per host to 2 makes little sense. Us fronteers have been forced to do subdomain hacks, css sprites, etc to deal with this. I’m psyched.

Steve Souders also has a good wrap up along trying to answer the question of will this break the internet?

The YUI 2nd Birthday was a dud except for the free shirts, free food, free beer, oh and something about YUI 3.0. The vision plan they have for 3.0 is faster, lighter, more secure, more modular.The front of the shirt is above but the back of the shirt has the quote “This is Yahoo!” and I agree.

Yahoo! has done wonders in terms of front-end engineering with YUI, Design Patterns, YSlow, Juku, and even hiring someone full time for firebug. They are bringing much needed attention web dev and the continued promotion of javascript as a first class language.

On a side note, when I read the “This is Yahoo!” slogan I imagined Jerry Yang kicking Balmer into an endless pit and yelling “THIS IS YAHOO!” 300 style.

I read that Microsoft’s online storage solution Skydrive was just upped to 5gb. I haven’t tried Live so I tried to register as a new user, what did I get?At first, I figured they were getting bombarded with new sign ups and I thought it was odd. On a whim, I opened up FireFox and lo-and-behold, the sign up page finally showed up.I tried again with Safari and I received the same error page! I can’t believe Microsoft is still pulling this shit. Maybe I’m wrong, if you’re on Safari let me know if you can sign up using this page.

Let’s take a look at the recent headlines, all garbage. Nothing to do with actual tech!

• Steve Jobs isn’t in Apple’s Facebook network — but his wife is
• Gene Simmons sex tape leaked on Web (NSFW)
• Sergey Brin’s weird wedding ring
• Sex parties in the Valley — how do I get invited?
• Become her sugar daddy in 3 easy steps
• Googlers getting laid way more than Microsoft, Yahoo
• Viagra ruining everything for Valley’s mistresses

Yes, I know VW is a gossip rag, but at least a year ago there was some semi-relevant content. I’m going to have to blame Denton’s new pay scheme which pays the writers on number of pageviews a story gets. The greatest draw? SEX. Right now it’s a free for all for who can come up with the story with the most sex. Sad.Deleted from my bloglines and deleted from my bookmarks. It looks like the only decent now a days is Gawker Media site to read it Kotaku.

If you haven’t started watching Start-Up Junkies on MojoHD, you should. (Catch the latest episodes here.).

This season is about the new start-up Earth Class Mail, a company that intends to put your snail mail and online. The show highlights the troubles of building a start-up and in this case a start-up with a lot of capital expenditures. These guys have to figure out a way manage millions of physical items, not just build a kick ass website.

Who would’ve guess? Now I have no doubt that my prediction will come true. Just a matter of which of Yahoo!’s properties bites the dust first.

Where is the Mac? No, not the iMac or the Mac Pro or even the Mac Mini. I’m talking a Mac, a machine that gives me better than iMac specs without a built in monitor. I don’t need the nuclear powered Mac Pro (or it’s price) but at the same time don’t want the paltry Mac Mini. Give me something in between damn it!

IMO, Apple has missed yet another opportunity at this year’s MacWorld by not introducing such a machine.

The first Acid test was essentially to test browser compatibility for the box model. The Acid2 (try it out in the browser you’re on, Safari3 passes btw) test focused on HTML/CSS for static content.

Now Acid3 is being developed and will focus on the dynamic portion of the web, ie javascript. Finally, an Acid test I can get behind! The other Acid tests merely pointed out inconstancies in very edge cases of css and html rendering; not very useful. Acid3 ensures that javascript code written adheres to the ECMAScript spec, which is much more important in my mind.

John Resig has a good summary of the draft along with renders of the test in different browsers. (Many more here.)

More to record my own thoughts…. Let’s do the obvious ones first:

• Facebook will decline as people either go to the next hottest thing or advertisers realize their ROI on the FB ad platform isn’t the greatest
• Google will acquire at least two mobile companies to aid Android
• iPhone will continue to gain mobile browser market share stagnating the mobile web even more

Now some not so obvious ones:

• Slide or RockYou will be acquired. If 07 was the year of widget, 08 will be the year they cash in.
• Google or Microsoft will launch an Amazon AWS competitor
• Yahoo will close at least 4 more properties in an attempt to slim down. (one down)
• A web 2.0 company outside the US will eek out a new niche (see last.fm)

I love the movement in the community as of late regarding front end engineers. PPK (of quirksmode.org fame) has been making great strides in by trying to establish an organization called Fronteers. Now, I just read that Yahoo! is doing something even more unprecedented… Yahoo! Juku. Essentially a training program for Fronteers to learn from the top people in the field and become a full time Yahoo! employee.Regardless of how Yahoo! is doing as a company, nobody can’t fault their contributions (yui, yslow, design patterns library, etc) in terms of web front end.