Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on November 07, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

Have you ever wondered how browsers have evolved over time? I’m sure many of you can recall using early versions of Netscape as they were pushed out the door, but some of the new features and interface designs have happened so slowly that it may be hard to appreciate the browsers we currently have.

Today I want to revive your memories of old versions of Opera, Netscape, Firefox, and Internet Explorer showing how they have become the browsers we use today. Below you’ll find over 20 screenshots for the popular browsers, some of which have been around for over a decade. For each version I also provide the month and year it was released. Some of them still had release notes available, and in those cases I hyperlinked the release date.

It’s time to open the door and step back into the time machine!

–Opera–

Opera is one of the most powerful browsers available, which makes sense because they’ve had over 10 years to develop it. Thanks to this Opera Fan Site I was able to get my hands on 10 different versions of the browser that have been released over the last decade.

• Opera 2.12 (February 1997) – The very first public version of Opera. In case you couldn’t tell that’s our site in the screenshot.
  
• Opera 3.0 (December 1997) – Wow, that is quite a bookmark list they’ve got there in the “sidebar.”
   
• Opera 3.6 (June 1999) – Looks like some better CSS support is making it’s way into Opera, but our site is still a bit funky.
   
• Opera 4.02 (June 2000) – If I didn’t know better I would say that a tab system is in the works there! And look at that, it almost renders our current site perfectly.
  
• Opera 5.02 (December 2000) – You can now get Opera for free instead of dropping $39 on it. The catch … that big banner in the upper right corner.
  
• Opera 6.0 (November 2001) – Yay for transparency! Opera now supports full PNG alpha transparency. The interface also got a much needed overhaul, and oddly enough the tab bar was moved to the bottom by default.
   
• Opera 7.1 (April 2003) – M2, Opera’s revamped email/news client, was introduced in this version! Hey look, the tabs are back at the top now.
  
• Opera 8.5 (September 2005) – Opera is completely free without any banner ads! Not to mention that the interface is much cleaner, and the browser doesn’t ship with dozens of bookmarks.
  
• Opera 9.0 (June 2006) – Is that a widget in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me? Opera is the first browser to develop its own widget platform.
  
• Opera 9.24 (October 2007) – This version of Opera comes with Speed Dial, and the infamous Start Bar is disabled by default (smart move).
   

–Netscape–

I think we’ve all used Netscape at some time or another because it was the browser for quite some time. Eventually Microsoft got around to launching Internet Explorer which sent Netscape down the tubes, but they have started to return using Firefox as it’s base. Most of the older versions of Netscape I managed to get from their own archive, but the really old ones took some scrounging.

• Netscape 0.91 (October 1994) – This is the earliest version of Netscape that I was able to get my hands on. It wasn’t very functional by today’s standards, but it opened without crashing.
  
• Netscape 1.22 (August 1995) – Now this is more like a web browser since it actually supports images.
  
• Netscape 2.01 (March 1996) – There’s the big-buttoned Netscape Navigator that we all love. This version added support for frames, JavaScript, Java Applets, and all kinds of advanced stuff.
  
• Netscape 3.0 (August 1996) – QuickTime support was added, and we’ve still got the big buttons.
  
• Netscape 4.79 (September 1999) – Version 4.0 introduced the entire Communicator suite which included a web browser, website authoring program, email client, and newsgroup reader. Oh, AIM, RealPlayer, and Winamp were all bundled with it as well. I think this marked the beginning of the bloated browser!
  
• Netscape 6.0 (November 2000) – Brand new interface that gave new life to the browser. It included an integrated search feature and advanced sidebar.
  
• Netscape 7.0 (August 2002) – Finally offers tabbed browsing and a popup blocker. They’re a little bit behind since Opera has had tabs for several years by this point, but Opera wasn’t free (from both a paid subscription and ads) until 2005.
  
• Netscape 8.0 (May 2005) – This is the first version of Netscape to be based on Firefox 1.0, and with it comes a completely reworked interface. I guess the search bar on the left side of the address bar never took off.
  
• Netscape 9.0 (October 2007) – This is based on Firefox 2, which means it has several notable features such as inline spell checking. They’ve also bundled a few things that aren’t included in Firefox which I’ve listed here.
  

–Firefox–

Firefox is currently the second most popular browser in the world, and only falls short to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Development on the browser started back in 2002 when it was named Phoenix.

• Firefox 0.1 (September 2002) – This first version had a primary focus of speed. Oh, and you won’t find any extensions quite yet.
  
• Firefox 1.0 (November 2004) – Better tabbed browsing, several different languages are available, and there’s an extension system. We’ve got a truly great browser on our hands!
  
• Firefox 1.5 (November 2005) – Can you say automatic updates! Firefox can now update itself without needing the users to redownload the entire installer.
  
• Firefox 2.0 (October 2006) – Firefox got a nice new theme, inline spell checking, session restore, and more. What’s not to love?
  

–Internet Explorer–

Unfortunately it is pretty impossible to get older versions of Internet Explorer to work in Vista, so I had to pass on that one. Microsoft has created their own Internet Explorer history page that walks you through the different versions of the browser, but here is a screenshot that I took awhile back of Internet Explorer 3 and 5 running side-by-side:

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on January 31, 2007 by CyberNet.

Special Vista Edition: Part 2

Now that Windows Vista has been released (read our review) I expect to see the number of Internet Explorer 7 users begin to increase. A majority of those users will have previously used Internet Explorer 6 as their primary browser, and I suspect that many of those people will enjoy the changes that they find. 

I prefer to use Firefox or Opera myself, but I have become accustomed to the community that surrounds those browsers and therefore find it hard to break away from either of them. One thing that wouldn’t hold me back from using IE 7 is a lack of features, because it has quite a few nice additions that take their browser to the next level. Not only that, but you can get add-ons that do even more like restoring your tab session after a crash, blocking ads, integrating mouse gestures, and adding RSS notifications.

Here are some of my favorite add-ons available for Internet Explorer 7:

–Find As You Type (Homepage / Mirror [version 1.1])–

This add-on we have actually written about before, but I find it to be such a necessary feature in other browsers that I had to include it in this list. Basically, it will let you search for words on a website instantly while you type them.

It is very similar to Firefox’s “Find as you Type” feature. In Firefox this can be initiated by pressing an apostrophe if you don’t have this feature enabled to automatically start while you type. In Opera you can use this feature by pressing the period (“.”) key and then typing your search term.

–IE7pro (Homepage / Mirror [version 0.9.8])–

If you use Internet Explorer on a regular basis then you’ll probably find this extension to be unbelievably useful. It has all of the best features that people talk about loving the most in other browsers, such as mouse gestures and ad blocking. These are just some of the customization options that you’ll find in the add-on:

The other thing that you’ll notice is that the add-on installs an icon in the Status Bar of the browser. If you click on that little icon it will offer several different things that you can do, including refreshing the current page at a given interval or saving the site to an image file (it automatically scrolls the entire site to create the screenshot). Here is what that menu looks like:

–Feeds Plus (Homepage / Mirror)–

Microsoft did a nice job of integrating RSS into Internet Explorer 7, but they could have still taken the extra step to add some features to make it even more useful. The IE RSS team must have had some things that they just couldn’t fit into the final release though, because they too have developed their own add-on.

You can group your feeds into folders and then browse all of the news contained in that folder, making it much easier if you have a large number of feeds that you read. It also adds a notification popup to notify you when there are new feed items!

–Overview–

There are actually more add-ons for Internet Explorer than you probably think. When I started looking around I was surprised to see the things available that add a lot of the features people boast about in other browsers. Of course, one of the biggest reasons that people use other browsers is because of the security vulnerabilities that are constantly being found in Internet Explorer, and unfortunately there is no add-on to fix that problem.

Internet Explorer 7 is still not my browser of choice, but it is leaps and bounds better than the previous versions that were offered. Now that Vista is shipping on all new computers it will be interesting if that impacts Internet Explorer’s market share for the better, or if it will continue to decline as people search for other browser alternatives. I can’t wait to look back in a few years to see how browsers have evolved to meet the demand of users turning to more and more online services to get things done.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on February 09, 2011 by CyberNet.

Windows only
As a programmer there has probably come a time where you’ve wondered exactly how many lines of code you’ve actually written. I was actually wondering this the other day, and searched around for the best way to figure it out. That’s when I stumbled across the free and portable FileStats app for Windows.

What you do is point FileStats to the directory on your computer where all of your code resides. It will navigate through all of the files in a particular directory recursively diving through subfolders, and then it will return with an aggregated count (grouped by file extension) of the number of lines of code you’ve written.

There’s only one problem that I’ve found with FileStats so far. After you open it for the first time you my want to go to the Options -> Preferences and add all the extensions you typically write code in. I disappointingly found that a lot of extensions, such as “.c”, are not included in the list of file extensions that should have their number of lines counted. So if you run this out-of-the-box you may think it’s not working since it will just return zero for the number of lines of code for most of your filetypes.

I decided to download the source code for Pidgin, which is an awesome open source instant messenger application. I ran it through FileStats and it came out with the numbers you see in the screenshot above. In all there is over 1.8 million lines of code that makes up the instant messenger. Now that’s cool.

FileStats Homepage (Windows only; Freeware; Portable)

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on November 09, 2006 by CyberNet.

The Vista Transformation Pack (VTP) for Windows XP has become very popular and version 6 is right around the corner. The developer estimates its release to be around Christmas (December 25) and it will have several great features that people have been requesting all along:

• No more system files replacement issues, no more safemode.
• Partially x64 support (Well, I intended to make system files patching for x64 also but it’s too much of pain for me replacing each icon resources without more handy apps so only vista stuffs like themes, wallpapers, etc. for now).
• Machine configuration (Adjust your monitor for more compatible resources.
• Application tweaks (Vista MCE, Task manager, dial-up connection, etc…).
• More applications bundled (VistaTooltip, Start orb emulation, Styler and thoosje’s brand new SideBar, etc.).

If you have used the transformation pack before then you probably know how cool it looks. However, there has been a lot of uninstallation problems in the past where the users uninstall the VTP and not everything returns to normal. That is the biggest issue I would like to see resolved in this release.

You can impress a lot of people by using the Vista Transformation Pack and several people really thought I was running Vista back when I had this installed. If you don’t want to wait until December to try out the new VTP you can download VTP 5.5 right now.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on April 09, 2009 by CyberNet.

Windows only
At work I use Microsoft’s Robocopy command line tool almost everyday for copying files between multiple environments. Digital Inspiration dug up a real gem though, and it’s a tool Microsoft recently released called RichCopy. It not only has a nice graphical interface for copying files, but also comes packed with a few handy features.

Here’s what Microsoft has to say about the tool:

RichCopy is a free utility that comes to us from Ken Tamaru of Microsoft. The tool was first developed in 2001 and has been updated regularly to keep pace with evolving needs. Trust me when I tell you, this is the answer to all your file copying needs. What you’ll find most striking the first time you take RichCopy out for a spin is that it’s a multithreaded copying tool. That means that rather than copying one file at a time in serial order, RichCopy can open multiple threads simultaneously, allowing many files to be copied in parallel and cutting the total time required to complete the operation several times over. You can also pause and resume file copy operations, so if you lose network connectivity at any point, you can just pick up where you left off.

Some people may argue that there is already a GUI available for Robocopy, but this tool appears to contain all of the same features and then some. I definitely like what this has to offer, and I’ll be using this almost everyday at work now. Why can’t Microsoft release useful tools like this more often?

RichCopy Homepage

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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