Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

I smiled after reading this post.  It reminded me of the fact that in our office, designers use my laptop to test web sites on Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.  We have two guys doing the designs, and one of the uses Windows Vista, which runs MSIE 7.  Another one uses, I think, Windows XP, but with MSIE upgraded to version 7 too.    I heard it’s possible to have several versions of Internet Explorer running on the same Windows installation, but nobody around here knows how to do it or cares enough to experiment.

But the funniest thing in this whole story is that my laptop is running on Fedora Linux.

I wish Firefox (or any web browser for that matter) had a nice and easy way to group tabs together. If I could just move or copy tabs between groups, color them differently together or one by one, collapse and expand groups, search for tab, link tabs together (close one and linked one close together, move one and others will follow), etc.  Considering the amount of time it took for tabs to go mainstream, I am not sure I’ll live long enough to see a solution for grouping…

P.S.: Yes, I am aware of

• grouping related tabs in several browser windows,
• ColorfulTabs plugin for Firefox,
•  using bookmark groups to save tabs and open them later with one click,

but these aren’t solving my problems.  Not as they are now at least.

Every day I read more and more blogs and less and less mainstream news. Why? Because mainstream news suck! Most of the mainstream news agencies carry the heavy burden of the printed press and a century of mass media from before the Internet.

Picture is a thousand words they say. Here is a graphical example for you. Cool Tech Zone - “A Division of iTech Media.” Blah blah blah. One of the recent news items is titled “Microsoft Buys Out Opera“. Catching, isn’t it? It is.

In 5 paragraphs of text to follow, they tell that Microsoft is closing a deal purchasing Opera Software. Google is mentioned and so on and so forth. Makes one read a lot, wonder, think, wonder, think, and read some more…

6th paragraph reads:

Update: Opera recently confirmed that Microsoft has not approached the browser maker and there is no active acquistion deal between the two companies currently.

In plain English? OK. “All you’ve just read above is bullcrap. Lies. We just made it up.” Yeah. They just wasted a whole bunch of your time. And they are not sorry. “Opera recently confirmed…” Confirmed? Confirmed what? They didn’t confirm anything. In fact, they contradicted. It should have read something like “Opera recently contradicted this whole article.”

I’m telling you - blogs rule…

P.S.: Slashdot post

While Firefox suits me pretty good, it has a couple of issues that annoy a great deal out of me. The first one doesn’t happen all that often, but when it does, it annoys the big Jz out of me. The click with the middle mouse button anywhere on the page, except for the link. Usually, I use the middle button to open the link in a new tab. But if I miss the link, then Firefox uses whatever text was in the buffer as a new link for the current tab. I really hate that one, you know.

Today I accidentally discovered a fix. Simple, as usual. Navigate your browser to about:config and make sure that middlemouse.contentLoadURL is set to false. Tada! All done.

If you have been wondering how to switch to that nice little web search field in Mozilla Firefox using only the keyboard, I’ve got an answer for you. Ctrl+K. It’s that simple.

By the way, in Mozilla Firefox 1.5 which is due to be released in the nearest future, this shortcut will be bringing out a web search dialog even if the web search toolbar is hidden.