Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on April 11, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

The bookmarks in your browser are probably one of the most valuable things you have invested in your browser…well, besides for your passwords. If you ever lost them I’m sure you would start scrambling trying to remember all the sites you had bookmarked.

Many of you are probably already using services like Del.icio.us that integrate well with most browsers. What if you could use the built-in bookmarking capabilities of Firefox and Internet Explorer (IE) all while harnessing the power of synchronization? I know, it almost sounds weird that people would want to keep their bookmarks synchronized between both Firefox and IE, but it is actually more common than you think.

I have lost count of how many people ask me if there is a way to synchronize the bookmarks between the two browsers. The most common reasoning behind it is that they use Firefox at home and Internet Explorer at work.

If you’re one of these people then you need to checkout Zinkmo. It is a free service that not only lets you share your bookmarks between the two browsers, but it also lets you synchronize them across multiple computers. Privacy is also very important to me, and Zinkmo definitely recognizes its importance by letting you choose which bookmarks/folders are public and which ones are private.

There is a small program that they require you to download and install before using the Zinkmo service. Here are a few screenshots from the installation with questions that they ask:

Then I went ahead and looked at what the Internet Explorer integration had to offer:

The Firefox extension has to be installed separately, and unfortunately it doesn’t have quite as many features as the Internet Explorer counterpart, but it does include the privacy option:

After I had it all setup in both browsers I began synchronizing a few bookmarks. The service worked very well and was surprisingly fast. There are two things, however, that makes the online bookmark management so wonderful: it checks for broken and duplicate links! Thats right, you’ll finally be able to go through all of those bookmarks that you have had sitting around for years without doing the grunt work yourself:

If you’ve been looking for a way to access your bookmarks no matter where you’re at, then Zinkmo will probably be just what you’re looking for. The service is completely free and definitely deserves a shot!

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on April 02, 2008 by CyberNet.

For about a month now browser developers have been eyeing the new Acid3 test to see how they can push to meet the standards it tests for. Shortly after the test was released we took a look at how the browsers stacked up to each other, but none of them passed the test. Then just last week both Opera and Safari released test builds that demonstrate their compliance.

What about Firefox? Mozilla co-founder Mike Shaver wrote about his thoughts on Ian Hixie’s Acid3 test, and I think it’s safe to say that he’s not overly fond of it:

Ian’s Acid 3, unlike its predecessors, is not about establishing a baseline of useful web capabilities. It’s quite explicitly about making browser developers jump — Ian specifically sought out tests that were broken in WebKit, Opera, and Gecko, perhaps out of a twisted attempt at fairness. But the Acid tests shouldn’t be fair to browsers, they should be fair to the web; they should be based on how good the web will be as a platform if all browsers conform, not about how far any given browser has to stretch to get there.

Mike then went on to say how they won’t be getting support for the Acid3 test into the Firefox 3 browser, which is completely understandable. It’s very unlikely that Opera and Internet Explorer will be adding support Acid3 for their next major milestone releases either. And Safari just released a new version of their browser, and so their next milestone won’t exactly be soon. It’s obvious that the browser developers need time to test the necessary changes, and I don’t think anyone will criticize them for that.

Ian Hixie, one of the developers of the Acid 3 test, responded to Mike in the comments of his post. Here’s a snippet of what he had to say:

I would love to have tested innerHTML and setTimeout and all kinds of stuff like that, but sadly there is no spec for those yet (other than the very much in-progress HTML5 drafts). We can’t write Acid tests for things that we don’t have a spec for. I’ve been working my ass off for the past few years to write a spec for these things. Hopefully by, say, Acid5, we’ll be able to write an Acid test for them.

With Acid2, the original “first cut” failed a lot in IE, Mozilla, and Safari, but actually did pretty well in Opera. We (Håkon and I) then went on a hunt for Opera bugs and made Opera fare much worse on the test. With Acid3, IE and Opera ended up doing really badly on the first cut, and Firefox and Safari did well, so we added some more things that failed in Firefox and Safari. (Then we added even more stuff that failed in Safari, because they kept fixing the damn bugs as I was adding them to the test.)

Of course you wouldn’t want a bunch of the browsers to pass the test immediately after it is released because it wouldn’t really be doing any good. What are your thoughts about this?

[via ZDNet] Thanks to “Change” for the tip!

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on March 06, 2008 by CyberNet.

(Click to Enlarge)

We’ve been receiving quite a few requests from our readers wanting to know what we think about Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1, and whether it is worth the upgrade. I downloaded and installed it shortly after it was released yesterday, and the total installation time on my Vista machine took around 4 or 5 minutes. There were absolutely no problems for me upgrading to IE 8 from IE 7.

–Performance–

Everything in Internet Explorer 8 seems a lot more responsive than in Internet Explorer 7: tabs open faster, pages render more quickly, and the “Quick Tabs” works almost instantaneously. Really, I’m not exaggerating the difference at all. Ashley and I have the exact same laptops, and we wanted to do a side-by-side comparison of how long it took to load our site. The difference was like night and day… Internet Explorer 8 loaded our site at least twice as fast.

I’ve gotten a handful of emails already that have been wanting me to run the SunSpider JavaScript test on Internet Explorer 8. Previously it failed miserably coming in a very distant last place. Here’s how it stacked up against the latest Firefox 3 nightly build (the lower amount of time is better):

1. Firefox 3 Nightly (03/05/2008 build): 6624.2ms
2. Internet Explorer 8 (Beta 1): 14302.0ms

That’s more than five times better than Internet Explorer 7 in our previous tests! So it looks as though there has been substantial changes under-the-hood in Internet Explorer 8 to make it perform better. The best thing is that the speediness doesn’t show just in the numbers. I can almost guarantee that as soon as you start using Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 you’ll see a noticeable difference.

–Features–

I’m not going to just list out the features here because I did that yesterday. Instead there are two things that I really wanted to comment on. The first is the new Activities that was introduced into Internet Explorer 8. I didn’t think that these were really anything special, but I’ve actually come to love them after just a few minutes of using the browser.

When you highlight some text a little green arrow will appear above your selection. If you click on that arrow you’ll see a list of all your installed Activities that you can choose from. This is a quick way for you to translate text, map an address, define a word, and much more:

Microsoft has a site setup where users can add more Activities, but given that the browser is so new there are only a handful of them available.

The one other thing that I really like is something Firefox 3 was (or maybe still is) supposed to have when it is released. It’s a domain highlighting feature that makes users more aware of the domain that they are viewing by graying out portions of the URL. Here’s what it looks like for one of our articles:

This will help users avoid phishing scams that are located at obscure domains disguised to look like a legitimate one, such as paypal.com.example.com.

–The Price of Standards–

Many of us applauded Microsoft for making the browser more standards compliant out-of-the-box, but I’m already starting to see the effects of the change. At first glance I have found that nearly every site I visit has some sort of rendering glitch in Internet Explorer 8. Our site, for example, had problems properly positioning the footer. We had to insert this code into the head section of the HTML on our site:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />

This forces Internet Explorer 8 to render the site the same way that Internet Explorer 7 does, and is a great temporary fix until you get the time to make the necessary changes. Our site is far from the only one that has problems. Here are some of the others that we’ve noticed:

• CNN.com has some video thumbnails that float off to the right side.
• Yahoo.com has a toolbar underneath the search box that is not aligned properly.
• News.com has a few issues in the upper part of their site around their search box.
• Yahoo Mail just pops up with error messages and is non responsive when you try to do just about anything.

You can quickly correct these issues by forcing IE 8 to emulate IE 7 using the “Emulate IE7″ button on the toolbar. You’ll need to restart the browser for the changes to become active, but it should solve most of the problems.

–Overview–

Overall I would have to say that this is a great update for Internet Explorer, but I don’t think Microsoft has done enough to pull users away from Firefox and Opera. There’s nothing that really leaves me in awe, but I do have to say that the performance improvements definitely deserve to be applauded.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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It’s not often that a web browser makes into our HWYC lineup, but it’s also a rare occurrence for Microsoft to issue an entirely new web browser. Internet Explorer 9 Beta has been in the wild (and thus, on your PC) for a few months now, and seeing that the browser wars are raging harder than ever these days, we felt it prudent to ask how you’d change things in the world of IE. After all, being that this is a beta, there’s still plenty of time for Microsoft to actually heed your wisdom and implement changes prior to the full, final, non-beta release. So, have you been pleased with performance? Tab layout? Any tweaks you’d make to the user interface? Compatibility? Go on and get sophisticated down in comments below, won’tcha?

How would you change Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 Beta? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 26 Nov 2010 22:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on October 06, 2007 by CyberNet.

I’ve never really understood why the idea of creating a laptop that includes a third mouse button never really took off. Would it be all that bad to have some miniature button squeezed in between the left and right buttons on the touchpad?

The middle mouse button is important to me because I use it to activate special actions in all kinds of different applications, especially in my browser. I can middle-click on a tab to close it, or middle-click on a hyperlink to have it open in a new background tab. That kind of functionality is hard to give up once you’ve become accustomed to it, but so many laptop users just forget about it. Well, not me!

–Two Button Middle Click–

I’ve heard that most laptops simulate a middle mouse button when the user presses both the left and right buttons at the same time. I was initially excited, and thought that this would cure all of my problems. Unfortunately, it has never worked on any laptops I’ve tried.

That was my ideal solution, and I searched like a mad monkey trying to find a way to make it happen. To my dismay I was on my own because Google didn’t come through for me. Then it dawned on me that I could easily do this myself with an AutoHotKey script! In fact it only took two lines of code:

~LButton & RButton::MouseClick, Middle
~RButton & LButton::MouseClick, Middle

That essentially checks to see if both mouse buttons have been pressed down at the same time, and if they have then simulate a middle-click of the mouse. Pretty cool, huh? I also put it together in a standalone application that you can throw in your Windows Startup folder without needing to have AutoHotKey installed:

Download the Middle-Click Simulator

There is one downside to using this though. If you use a Rocker mouse gesture (holding down one mouse button and pressing the other) to navigate in an application, such as going backward/forward in a browser, you’ll be disappointed to know that it will no longer work. I’m not quite sure how I can circumvent that problem in the script, but for right now I would rather have the middle-click simulation available. It is possible to “pause” the script (a.k.a. temporarily deactivate it) from the System Tray icon if needed though.

–Middle Click Tap Zone–

Some mouse software also lets you setup a “zone” that you can tap on the touchpad to serve as the middle mouse button. Below is a screenshot from my Synaptics TouchPad configuration screen which shows that I’m about to assign the bottom-left corner of my touchpad to the middle-click action.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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