My wife brought up a question she was asked about the dotted-line box that shows up around a link when you use the back button to return to a page, like the picture at the right. Is it possible to remove the box? Yes it is, but there are a few things to consider before doing that.
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Our group switched from Deskmail to UW Exchange last week. I won’t address the politics of the switch, but I thought it would be good to write a bit on how things are going for me.
First of all, many of us technically didn’t “switch to Exchange”, rather “Exchange was enabled”. In other words, mail which is sent from within Exchange goes to the Exchange inbox, but all other mail goes to the Deskmail inbox. Why keep two inboxes? I’ll try to explain why I’m keeping both, but first a description of how I’m got my mail client set up. I won’t touch on calendaring, since I’m still trying to work that out.
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I listen to several podcasts and I’ll mention a few of the tech-based ones on this blog, while non-tech ones will show up on my personal blog. The one podcast that makes it to the top of my playlist every day is Ken Ray’s Apple news podcast, Mac OS Ken.
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With many web applications becoming more dependent on JavaScript, much work is being put into improving JavaScript performance. Even though Google’s Chrome uses WebKit (the same engine as Safari), they’re using a different JavaScript engine named V8. Mozilla will be using TraceMonkey in Firefox 3.1, and Safari will be using SquirrelFish Extreme.
All these engines compile down to native code. How much does this affect performance? Taking WebKit as an example, the original SquirrelFish is about 50% faster than Safari 3.1’s JavaScript engine (already 3x the speed of Safari 3.0). Adding native code compilation, as well as other speedups (including a regular expression just-in-time compiler) makes SquirrelFish Extreme more than twice as fast as SquirrelFish.
The engines are playing leap frog, and all seem to be in very active development, so I find it very interesting to follow. I’ve found that SquirrelFish (Moderate, haven’t tried Extreme) works quite well, and I’ve played a few minutes with Chrome and found that to work well, too.
Exciting times in the JavaScript world.