Today while working on a site, I ran into a really frustrating bug in IE7. While trying to stack absolutely positioned elements on a website, IE7 would not pay attention to z-index what-so-ever. The solution to this problem was to change the z-index of the parent element of what you want to display on top to a z-index higher than that of what you are trying to display underneath. I have no idea why this is the case, but since we’ll be supporting IE7 for a long time to come, it’s something that web developers need to be aware of.
I found a pretty good example of this bug in this article – Squish the Internet Explorer Z-Index Bug | Brenelz Web Design Solutions
I’ll be updating this article shortly with an example of my own.
About 1.6 billion people use the Internet every day. Out of all of those people, about 70% of them use Google as their preferred search engine. My question for you is a simple one: What would happen if Google ceased to exist? This thought came to me today when a Google outage brought the Internet to a crawl.
I’m sure the first answer that comes to mind is “Omg, the world would implode!” Well, I’m here to tell you that the world probably wouldn’t implode, but it would have serious repercussions. Almost every major website on the Internet relies on Google in some way. Many sites receive almost all of their traffic directly from Google searches while other use Google services such as Gmail or Adsense for their business. If something critical happened to Google, what would these businesses do? What would the end-users do? What would we all do?
Today some of us caught a small glimpse of what the Internet would be like if Google suddenly disappeared. Every website that used any Google service almost completely shut down because the external scripts hosted on Google’s servers were inaccessible (this site included). I personally found myself lost and confused. My Gmail was down and Google was down so I couldn’t ‘Google’ what the problem was. I couldn’t get on Google Talk to ask any other web heads what was wrong either. I tried using Live Search and Yahoo to no avail. My only savior was ‘poor man’s email‘, Twitter. Twitter was running rampant with people twittering about the Google outage.
On that note, I think the answer is clear as to what we would do without Google: Twitter.
As you may or may not have noticed, the Internet ran into a few complications today. Apparently the problem has been linked to an AT&T routing problem somewhere in the Midwest. Some people didn’t experience any problems, while others were unable to access many large websites, most notably, Google. Several other large website such as Wal-Mart, Apple, and Microsoft were unreachable by people in certain locations.
I first noticed the problem while at work, trying to Google something. Google was down, so I used begrudgingly Yahoo!. Afterward, I noticed the website that I went to was also being extremely slow. I figured it was just our terrible T1 connection, but then used my Firebug to inspect the website and see what the problem was. It turned out that the problem was loading the analytics script from Google. Right about that time, I began to get worried. I tried a few trace routes and pings to Google and they all returned a bit dodgy. I then tried to ping other websites such as apple.com and microsoft.com and they too were unreachable. It was about this time that I began to wonder what would happen if Google ceased to exist.
I decided to check out Twitter to see exactly what was going on as there was no way to find any relevant information on what was happening. What I found was an abundance of news related to ‘googlefail’. You can see a stream of Twitters related to googlefail at the bottom of the post.
Now of course the problem wasn’t on Google’s end, but as Google is probably the most visited site on the Internet, when it goes down, people know it. Unfortunately, websites that use Adsense, Google API, Analytics, or any other Google service, became almost unreachable by people who could not reach Google.
11:30 AM (CST) Google appears to have fixed the problem on their end. They obviously disabled the route that linked the problem with AT&T. Shortly after that, the previously unreachable website began to come back up. This may be because AT&T fixed the problem on their end, or the other websites are taking the same approach as Google and disabling that route. On a side note, the problem seems to be linked to more than just problems at AT&T as keynote is showing packet loss in multiple places.