During my Ajax Experience session I talked about browser detects and how almost nobody knows how to do them right. I’d like to repeat the main outline of my solution here.

I’d also like to ask you to participate in a little research project by spending two minutes of your time on checking whether your stat package or farm reports any Google Chrome hit. It should, by now. If it doesn’t, it’s likely broken or badly maintained.

This little test will allow us to distinguish between good and bad stat packages/farms.

Please participate. It takes about two minutes. Thanks.

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Well, one more conference done and dusted, and The Ajax Experience was definitely fun to do, not least because it allowed me to return to Boston.

Currently I’m sitting in the hotel bar with a few hours to kill, so this is as good a time as any for some impressions:

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Yesterday I gave my State of the Browsers presentation at The Ajax Experience in Boston. Here are the slides (PDF, 2MB).

The Fundamentos del Web conference has invited me to hold a JavaScript workshop in Gijón, Spain, on 28 October. This will be a full-day workshop in which I'll discuss intermediate and advanced JavaScript topics.

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Wow, it’s over. I created a first class web conference. Of course I borrowed heavily from the @media plan, which I now thorougly understand after five visits. But still, I’m happy — and exhausted.

Some random impressions:

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With three days to go before Fronteers 2008, we still have some tickets left. Why not join Dean Edwards, Andy Clarke, Chris Heilmann, Bert Bos, Stuart Langridge, Stephen Hay, and Pete LePage of the MSIE team in Amsterdam this Thursday and Friday? It promises to be two days full of front-end geekery.
(speakers' list)

You can still buy yourself a ticket (English page; includes bug, for which my sincere apologies).

Everything’s set up now; to my own surprise I have very little left to organise, which I think means I did a good job during the last months. I hadn’t really expected that, but I’m grateful even for small favours.

See you at Fronteers 2008.

Just downloaded Google Chrome and did some very brief tests. Rendering engine seems equal to Safari 3.1, as expected. There will be a few minor differences somewhere; I’ll let you know when I find them.

Feels light, quick.

It features a quite slick-looking Firebug clone that includes a YSlow clone. Right-click and select "Inspect element" to access it. Haven’t tried to actually debug with it yet, but it looks promising.

The important points in the Google Chrome story, however, are not about DOM and CSS compatibility, and not even about debugging tools.

John Resig and Alex Russell discuss some ways in which this release could be the start of a new browser war. (Contrary to what Opera states, it hasn’t quite started yet.) I also have a few points to make, but that’ll have to wait for another time.

In order to find out which effect on the market it has, Chrome’s share will have to be measured. Updated browser detect. Detect it by searching for Chrome in navigator.userAgent.
Note to Google Chrome team: please make navigator.vendor read "Google" instead of "Apple".

Which version number does it have? I can’t put a browser without a version number in my Tables. navigator.userAgent says 0.2

Come to think of it, I haven’t yet found any way of disguising it as another browser to get around browser detects written by clueless web developers.

Come to think of it, I haven’t yet found a Preferences menu.

0.2 sounds about right.

But it’s definitely a promising start.