Peter Gfader 's Blog

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Silverlight - Browser interaction

Reminder to myself

Silverlight - How to use managed code to manipulate HTML DOM?
- How to interact with the DOM of the hosting page from Silverlight?
Silverlight – How to call a JavaScript from Silverlight
- How to open a new browser window in code?
- What about "htmlWindow.invoke" print from Silverlight?
Browser – How to call a Silverlight function?
- How to tell the Silverlight control to show next customer details from the HTML page?

All this is part of the Html bridge API of Silverlight, that allows talking to the browser
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645076(VS.95).aspx

Silverlight – The UI thread belongs to the browser!

To myself: Remember the following

Silverlight is “normally” hosted in the browser.
So, the single UI Thread should belong to the browser.

You can either learn that from different blogs, presentations or you learn it the hard way, like myself.

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Firefox as default browser and IE for SharePoint

If you are using more than 1 browser in your daily work life, make sure to use the small little “Browser Selector” tool from Marco

The good thing for me is:

Firefox is my default browser (web apps like gmail, wave, … just work nicer)
Opera is for reading (reading, zooming, 100 open tabs: Opera is still FAST)
IE is for Microsoft sites like SharePoint, MS CRM, … (that require IE or Kerberos authentication)

My configuration looks like this

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<BrowserSelector>
  <Rules>
    <Rule Url="microsoft.com" Browser="IE" />
    <Rule Url="msdn.com" Browser="IE" />
    <Rule Url="msn.com" Browser="IE" />
    <Rule Url="live.com" Browser="IE" />
    <Rule Url="sharepoint.ssw.com.au" Browser="IE" />
    <Rule Url="crm.ssw.com.au" Browser="IE" />
    <Rule Url="intranet.ssw.com.au" Browser="IE" />
-------SNIP SNIP SNIP SNIP -------
  </Rules>
  <Browsers>
    <Browser Name="Firefox" Path="C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" Default="true" />
    <Browser Name="Opera" Path="C:\Program Files (x86)\Opera\opera.exe" />
    <Browser Name="IE" Path="C:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" />
  </Browsers>
</BrowserSelector>

Get it from the dedicated “Browser selector” project page

Internet Explorer 8: Little things that matter

Try to guess which Tab page is the current one

Figure: IE 8

Figure: Chrome 1.0

Figure: Opera 9.5

Figure: Firefox 3

Chrome vs. Opera - Zoom Feature - Opera winner!

Bad Example - Chrome resizes the text, but not the container of the text (divs, tables,...)
See the large white unused space.

Good Example - Opera resizes the whole page, uses whole screen.

The Page where screenshots are taken, is Google Chrome blog

Opera vs. Google Chrome - Usability perspective

Bad Example - Opera has too many options to configure it, for the standard user. (No chance to find a setting)

Good Example - Chrome assumes many settings. (Brainstorming in Google Labs?)

In Opera we have 5 tabs, (14 tabs under the advanced tab), that makes: 5+14 -1
= 18 tabs with options to configure.

In Chrome (Beta 0.2.149.29) we have 3 Tabs with options to configure.
Maybe the Google Chrome Team adds more oft them later, but the essence is:
The Usability team has researched how the browser should work and behave,
all settings that makes sense to configure are there.
No options the users doesn't care about!

And that follows the 2nd major usability rule from Joel.
Yes, i like them a lot!! :-)

From Joel Spolsky first UI book.

Every time you provide an option, you're asking the user to make a decision.

Notes:

Chrome is the browser release from Google, based on Chromium. Chromium is the open source project.
More details on that on Wikipedia Chrome