browsers

The Microsoft experience

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.

Firefox feature wishlist : tab groups

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.

My Stickies – the missing piece of your browser

By pure luck I cam across a new service, which is still currently in beta, – My Stickies. Within the first second I realized that it was something that I waited for a long time now.

In essence, My Stickies allows you to attach yellow sticky notes to websites. You can have as many of these notes attached to as many websites as you want. Whenever you come back to the website, you will see all your notes at the same place and of the same size as you left them.

Not only this functionality alone is great news, but there is more. You can even see your notes from a different place. This is great, because you can add notes to sites at home, and than see them later on in the office – no synchronizations are needed.

You can also see all your notes at their website. You can tag them, search them, and use notes as a sort of bookmarks.

Getting all this is easy too. All you have to do is register at My Stickies and install the Firefox extension. The service is free and works exactly as expected. Check it out.

Why blogs are better than mainstream news

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

Tip for Mozilla Firefox and the middle button

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.