HTML5 Benchmarks

I've been looking at HTML5 benchmarking sites this morning and thought I'd post them all together:

• Asteroids Benchmark
  
• Paintball Testdrive
  
• Impact HTML5 Benchmark
  
• HTML5 Compatibility Test
  
• Canvas vs. HTML vs. Flash vs. SVG
  
  

This last one in the list is particularly interesting as it not only provides a direct comparison of these different animation techniques but also has configurable CGI parameters to change many of the variables involved. Fun!

jQuery quickSearch Dynamic Row Count

I just spent an hour struggling to find a solution to what seemed to be a fairly simple problem. I have a webpage comprised primarily of a large table and a textbox which uses a jQuery plugin quickSearch to filter the table. What I wanted then was a dynamic count of the rows returned by quickSearch. In the end this was accomplished wih the following code in the HTML:

Results: <p id="count"></p>

And the addition of this argument to the quickSearch function directly after the "loader:" argument:

onAfter: function() {
document.getElementById("count").innerHTML=($('tr:visible').length-1);
}

Now, if one's quickSearch use were doing something other than simply setting rows to hidden then this example may not work exactly as shown, but this may be useful for other applications as well.

Install Chrome without admin rights

At my agency we actively encourage users to switch to a browser other than IE. Unfortunately I understand there are many IT departments in the world who still maintain a draconian insistence on IE. Without administrator privileges it's not possible to install Firefox, but luckily Google has built Chrome to install without them! Take that tyrannical IT overlords! Faster and safer browsing without your permission! I understand there may be some GP or something somewhere that disables this but for the most part it seems to work. Another downside is that the default Chrome installer only makes the application available for a single user. Google has thoughtfully provided an alternate installer which addresses this issue as well (alternate installer DOES need admin though).

Bit.ly ads sneaking past Adblock Plus?

I can't stand ads. I don't like them on TV, I don't read magazines due to the rampant advertising, and I definitely don't like them on the web. I've been using Adblock Plus for several years on Firefox and more recently on Chrome. I even run AdFree on my rooted android phone for system wide adblocking. Today I saw an ad, though. While blocking it I noticed something very unusual - the URL of the banner was on bit.ly. As this type of URL shortening service creates essentially pseudorandom URLs this seems like the perfect ploy to defeat Adblock.

I worriedly searched Google but I haven't found any information. I sure hope that one lone ad wasn't a canary in the coalmine of obnoxious banners returning to my web viewing experience.