Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on July 18, 2007 by CyberNet.

I think the Opera development team should be proud of their Speed Dial idea because it is now available for most major browsers, and even as a standalone website. Firefox was the second browser to get it via an extension, and now with the Beta version of IE7Pro you can get it in Internet Explorer 7!

Instead of blatantly calling the feature Speed Dial, IE7Pro has opted for the name "Easy Homepage". You’ll find the option in the right-click menu of the IE7Pro icon in the Status Bar, and after that you can bookmark the address if you want it as your true homepage.

That’s not all that the new Beta entails though:

1. EasyHome added
2. Hotkey full customizable now.
3. Single IE instance support
4. Tab session restore function added
5. Can use hotkey to dupliate tabs.
6. Plugin system improved
7. Plugin auto-install support
8. DEP problem solved
9. Inline search improved
10. PRO_setValue/PRO_getValue problem solved

Those are a lot of great improvements, but that’s not even half of what IE7Pro does. It can also do inline spell checking, add the current weather to the Status Bar, restore your tab session, and much more. I don’t think that I would ever use Internet Explorer without IE7Pro because it adds a lot of features that make the browser a lot more functional.

Download IE7Pro 1.0.1 Beta and leave your feedback [MajorGeeks has a download mirror]

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on May 28, 2008 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

Keyboard shortcuts step aside! Mouse gestures have been around for quite some time, and are often used as a way to quickly issue commands. One of the places that these are used the most is in the web browser, and that’s because a lot of repetitive actions are performed there. Just think about how many times each day you click the back or refresh buttons.

Today we’re going to demonstrate the various ways that you can use mouse gestures in Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer. The only problem you’ll run into is trying to absorb everything you can do with the mouse gestures.

–Firefox–

Windows; Mac; Linux
As you can imagine there are quite a few Firefox extensions out there that provide some sort of mouse gesture support. Here are two of my favorites (they both work with Firefox 3, although they are not officially compatible yet):

• FireGestures [Homepage]
  This is everything that you would expect from a mouse gesture system, and more. There are dozens of different commands you can associate with your own gestures, and you can even take it one step further by creating your own commands. My guess is that you’ll be more than satisfied with the built-in commands though.

  (Click to Enlarge)
  

• Easy DragToGo [Homepage]
  This isn’t a full-fledged mouse gesture extension like the one above, but it does use mouse movement to perform useful actions. What you can do is set it up so that when you drag-and-drop text, links, or images in a certain direction it will perform a special action. This can be an easy way to open links in a new tab, perform a Google search for text, or save images to your computer.

  (Click to Enlarge)
  

–Opera–

Windows; Mac; Linux
Opera has got to be the easiest browser to use mouse gestures simply because they are included out-of-the-box. You can perform a gesture by holding down the right mouse button and moving the mouse in one of the basic patterns described here, or one of the more advanced gestures here.

The first time you perform a mouse gesture it will prompt you with a box asking whether you want the gestures to be enabled. Alternatively you can open the Preferences and go to Advanced -> Shortcuts to turn them on. While you’re in the preferences you can also have it flip-flop the back and forward gestures if you’re left handed.

If you find yourself having trouble remembering the various gestures then you may want to consider adding this site as a panel in the sidebar. You can do this by bookmarking the site and choosing the option to show it as a panel. You’ll be more inclined to use the mouse gestures if you leave that site open in the sidebar for a few days while you grow accustomed to the various mouse gestures.

–Internet Explorer–

Windows only
Of course Internet Explorer isn’t without mouse gestures. There are two plug-ins that I believe do a good job of executing mouse gestures in Internet Explorer, and the best part is that both come in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors! Here they are:

• Mouse Gestures [Homepage]
  What I really love about this mouse gesture system is that it integrates very well into the browser. You can assign gestures to dozens of different commands, and it is also capable of opening a bookmark or simulating a keyboard shortcut.

  (Click to Enlarge)
  

• IE7Pro [Homepage]
  This is a pretty popular plug-in for Internet Explorer, but if you’re looking only for mouse gestures this won’t likely be what you want. It’s a feature-packed add-on that does dozens of other things besides just gestures. Not only that but the configurability of the mouse gestures is not nearly as good as the previous plug-in that we mentioned. However, if you’re already using IE7Pro for some of the other features then you might as well take advantage of the mouse gestures.

  (Click to Enlarge)
  

–Overview–

As you can see mouse gestures are all over the place, and can be found in all the major browsers. Do you use mouse gestures, or are they not your thing? Personally I’m more of a keyboard shortcut person myself, but I’m sure many of you would rather keep your hand on the mouse.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on May 08, 2008 by CyberNet.

Last week we took a look at where the various browsers stood up against each other in terms of market share. I was shocked (to say the least) when Internet Explorer triumphantly came out on top with a 1.22% market share increase. That really hit hard for Firefox who’s market share was sent spiraling down to 16.96%, which was nearly a percent lower than the previous month. It’s not too often that you see a single browser gain or drop an entire percent from one month to the next.

When the stats rolled out there were a number of red flags thrown up questioning the integrity of the data. Mozilla, confident that their internal numbers did not show such a significant drop, started to investigate the findings. Net Applications gave them a hand, and here are some of the things they found:

1. Usage of Firefox did not appear to decline in April.

2. Usage of IE saw an ultra unusual spike over the period of a few days in April. While there was steady traffic from IE users – as measured by page views – for a short period surrounding April 18th, there was a huge spike in traffic from IE users – as measure by unique visitors – during the same time period. When I say “huge spike”, I mean something on order of 25% to 50% greater than what could have been expected.

3. Most of IE’s spike was attributable to IE6 users on XP (with some assistance from IE7 users on Vista), and nearly the entire spike came from users outside North America.

Net Applications receives traffic data from nearly 40,000 different business websites, and as it turns out there was an online marketing campaign aimed only at Internet Explorer users. There was no details released as to what sites were running it, but Net Applications said that it was “totally unrelated to anything with Vista, Microsoft or Windows.”

They have now put additional filters in place to watch for abnormal behavior like this. According to them they were already watching for stuff like this to happen on any one particular site, but they weren’t expecting such a widespread campaign to occur.

The stats have been updated, and it looks like things have returned to normal. Firefox and Safari both dropped slightly in market share, but only by miniscule amounts this time. Internet Explorer only saw a 0.03% increase instead of the 1.22% that is was at with the incorrect data. Here are the revised stats:

Much better! If you’re curious about what the stats looked like before hop on over to our previous post.

[via ComputerWorld]

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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Internet Explorer not stirring your cup of Windows Phone 7 tea correctly? Well, you now have an alternative in the form of a new browser that’s arrived in the Marketplace: Browser+. It does seem to have been built on IE code rather than its own framework, so don’t get your hopes up for Chrome to Phone on WP7 any time soon. Anyhow, the new app’s been given a test drive by a couple of sites, who note it integrates a view of your current tabs and a Google search box right into the general web view, providing a slightly more accessible interface than the default option, while also throwing in a private surfing mode for the paranoid among us. A few crashes and bugs have been spotted in Browser+ so far, but hey, it’s cheap and it at least gives us hope for a less monotheistic browsing experience. See it in video action after the break.

Continue reading Windows Phone 7 will work with third party browsers, so long as they’re based on IE? (video)

Windows Phone 7 will work with third party browsers, so long as they’re based on IE? (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Nov 2010 06:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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