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CSS Hacks for Google Chrome

Since Google Chrome is a Webkit based browser, we can target it’s screen rendering the same way we handle Safari.

While 90% of the time you will not need to hack around to fix a site for Chrome/Safari (if you are indeed developing with standards in mind) there are always exceptions.

The one problem I seem to have is when floating multiple elements in a singe div. There seems to be a 1px margin jog between Firefox and Opera/Safari/Chrome.

In order to target Webkit based browsers, we can use the CSS3 selector for the pseudo-class first-of-type.

Since we will only be employing one body element, we set first-of-type onto the document’s body and then combine it with whichever element we wish to target.

For example:

body:first-of-type #navigation { margin-top:-1px; }

Jeffrey Olchovy is a Web developer, designer and marketing strategist.

Optimizing Your Web Site for Google Chrome

Google’s brand new open source browser debuted the other day, achieving 1% of the Internet perusing market share in no time at all.

This 1% seemed to detract from Firefox’s user base, and it is yet to be determined if more and more people will make the switch from the Internet dominating IE.

In such cases of platform switching, developers need to be aware if their sites are ready for these new up-and-comers.

As far as Google Chrome is concerned, it seems as though it bases its screen rendering on pages that adhere to Web standards (the basis for Google’s own Webmaster Guidelines), so those sites that are intrinsically constructed with standards compliance in mind will fare much better than those sites which trigger less forgiving browsers’ quirks modes.

If people make the jump to Google Chrome, be ready to see many a people not bothering with sites that no longer are maintained and constructed with proprietary syntax and markup. Consider Google Chrome as a marker for a future Internet-wide sweep of garbage collection.

The other notable feature of Chrome that seems ast0unding is its ability to recall pages for keywords that appear within their Web content.

The better your site is optimized for a given keyword, the better the chance that Chrome’s omnibar will recall its URL for a past visitor when the said keyword is used as a search term.

In the next installation of Taming the Wild Wild Web, we’ll discuss tweaking your CSS to deal with a few layout/design inconsistencies you may experience when constructing your pages.

Jeffrey Olchovy is a Web developer, designer and marketing strategist.