Tag Archive for 'Browsers'

Microsoft to start supporting Firefox?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 6/5/2006
in Browsers
. 3 Comments

I write posts here with boring regularity on Microsoft’s latest releases. They all follow a similar pattern - “I have just heard that Microsoft have just released [insert product name here] unfortunately it doesn’t work in Firefox/Mac”.

Now, however, I have acquired an unlikely ally in Robert Scoble - Microsoft’s chief blogger! Robert said in a post yesterday

if you want the most passionate people in society to use your stuff, you must support Firefox…. I won’t link (or say anything nice) to any Windows Live service that doesn’t support Firefox.

If the Microsoft development teams take note and start to release products with Firefox support, this will mean far better products, reviews and PR for Microsoft.

What will I have to complain about though!

UPDATE:
I see Damien and Dennis Howlett have responded to Robert’s post as well.

Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 to be abandoned?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 25/4/2006
in Browsers and Windows
. 3 Comments

Microsoft has announced today that Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 is available for download.

In the Microsoft announcement, Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer development at Microsoft, said the timeline for further releases is:

Windows Vista Beta 2, and then Beta 3 of IE7, release candidates, and then a final release before end of year.

In a review of IE7 Beta 2, Mich Arrington of TechCrunch pointed out that:

The key features are tabbed browsing (including “Quick Tabs�, a way to see multiple web pages on a single tab), a continuation of the minimalist approach on the UI and toolbars, and enhancements to the RSS reader built into the browser. The team says they’ve made significant improvements in CSS rendering as well, a problem I noticed in the previous beta version.

Co-incidentally (I think!) John C. Dvorak has an article in PC Magazine today where he calls on Microsoft to abandon the browser! John reckons that:

All the work that has to go into keeping the browser afloat is time that could have been better spent on making Vista work as first advertised.

All of Microsoft’s Internet-era public-relations and legal problems (in some way or another) stem from Internet Explorer.

John’s solution is that Microsoft should:

pull the browser out of the OS and discontinue all IE development immediately…. Then, Microsoft can worry about security issues that are OS-only in nature, rather than problems compounded by Internet Explorer.

I wonder if Dean Hachamovitch and the IE team are worried about their jobs now that John has put that sugestion out there. Somehow I doubt it! John’s idea, while superbly timed and very well argued is destined to be ignored by Microsoft. Giving up and conceding defeat is not the Microsoft way.

IE7 Beta 2 caveats - According to Microsoft’s IE Group Program Manager, Tony Chor,

there is no supported way for IE6 and IE7 to install side-by-side

IE7 is beta software - install it at your own risk!

Cool new Firefox plug-in

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 25/1/2006
in Browsers
. 3 Comments

Hyperwords was released yesterday and it is a very cool extension for Firefox and Flock. It has been developed by Liquid-Information an interesting company with an advisory board that reads like a who’s who in IT (Doug Engelbart, Vint Cerf, Ted Nelson, Bruce Horn, Dave Farber, Joi Ito, etc.

What does it do? Well, the default behaviour is that, when you select text in your browser, a drop-down menu appears, giving you instantly available options of what to do with the text -
Hyperwords drop-down menu

This is quite cool and allows quick and easy access to functionality you might otherwise have to go to other pages to get. The Preferences settings for the plug-in allows you to select whether the data you select opens in a new tab, or a new page, in the foreground or background. Also, all the menu options are available from the keyboard - so for the example above, I can simply type s s g and a Google Search for the highlighted term will open in a new tab (in the background in my case)!

It is also possible to turn off the menu (operate in invisible mode) and still have access to the keyboard options.

Two minor gripes I have with the extension are:

  1. The blog this with option only goes to Blogger and WordPress.com - it needs to allow blogging to other blog platforms like WordPress, Typepad etc.
  2. The drop-down menu doesn’t give a View Selection Source option - I sometimes like to view the source of a small portion of a page. In Firefox, I select that portion, right-click and select View Selection Source - this should also be possible in Hyperwords

Other than that I think this is a great plug-in.

The CEO of Hyperwords is called Frode Hegland (Frode is pronounced to rhyme with road). I interviewed Frode about this new extension and will publish that interview on PodLeaders.com as a podcast tomorrow. Frode gave me some fascinating insights into how he came up with Hyperwords and how he landed such an amazing Advisory Board!

Yahoo! purchase of Del.icio.us confirmed - who is flocking next?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 9/12/2005
in Browsers and Search Engines
. 7 Comments

Well, the post I made last night about the Yahoo! < -> Del.icio.us rumours was confirmed this evening when Del.icio.us made the announcement of the takeover on its blog and Yahoo! posted the news also.

All day today I was doubting my source ‘cos no-one else picked up the story but, no, it came good. It is a great feeling to scoop a story like this by about 24 hours ahead of everyone else on the Internet.

Michael Arrington and others are following up on the story now.

The real question is who does Yahoo! have in its sights next? Who would it make sense for them to acquire now that they have bought Flickr and Del.icio.us? If only there were some application which tied these two together… a browser even… pity I can’t think of any ;-)

How to make your website more indexable by search engines

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 24/11/2005
in Technology and Web Standards
. 2 Comments

I see Michael Arrington has a post on TechCrunch today about Dipsie dCloak - this is a product which is supposed to help websites make their content more indexable by search engines.

That sounds laudable enough I hear you say - but wait a minute, I know two words which can help you do that without the aid of any product - the words? Web Standards. Build a site which is web standards compliant and search engines will have no problems indexing your site - also, you site will load faster, will be cross browser compatible and will work predictably on most mobile browsers!

Don’t know if your site is web standards compliant - check it out using the free validator on the W3C site.

Firefox New Window command not working

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 26/7/2005
in Browsers, Open Source and Technology
. 18 Comments

I recently upgraded my Firefox install to 1.06 - while I was at it, I upgraded the extensions and added some new ones (GreaseMonkey, SessionSaver, Google Toolbar for Firefox, and Googlebar).

After installing all of these and re-starting Firefox a number of times, I realised that the File -> New Window command was no longer working. Neither was the right-click Open Link in New Window command.

I wasn’t sure if this was a bug in Firefox or if one of the new extensions was causing a problem so I googled and couldn’t find anything that might indicate a problem with Firefox 1.06.

I then started disabling the new extensions one by one (and re-starting Firefox in between). Still no joy.

Then I remembered that I had updated the SearchStatus extension to 1.6. Disabling this extension resolved the problem and I am now able to open new windows once more (phew!).

Curiously there is no mention of this bug on the developer’s site - I reported it on the comment form on their site so hopefully we will see an update soon.

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