Tredosoft have put together an version of IE 7 that installs in a standalone mode. This means that you can run it side-by-side with IE6 etc.

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I'm typing this post from my newly installed Firefox 2 Beta 1 Candidate which is available from Mozilla's FTP site.

The UI hasn't changed much but they have now added a spell checker (though it doesn't know the word "Mozilla") as well as an Anti Phising option. I'm still working through the features at the moment but the install was pretty painless. Any Add-Ons that could be updated have, the rest are all disabled which has left me without the Web Dev Toolbar!

Going around the web on some random link folllowing mission I came across Browser Wars. Its a site that is dedicated to finishing the war that started in the 1990's by playing connect 4 [you read that correctly]. The object of the game is to get four of the same browser icons in a row. To do this visit the site with you chosen browser and decide on one of the games to play to select where you want your browser icon to go. Obviously its a fair game so if the last move was made your browser you will have to wait till another browser has made a move. So far Firefox has got the higher percentages of games won out of games participated in.

Browser Wars

Microsoft have made available the new Beta 2 Preview of IE7.

Be warned it does need a valid XP SP2, and apparntly my VLK is not accepted, so its not yet installed here.

UPDATE: Have got it working on my laptop, and all i can say so far is EUGH! MS really do need to pinch some designers from Apple or somewhere. Especially don't try it in XP with the classic look on!

Handy for when you are designing, plus it keeps it mean you don't have to keep jumping between two apps.

addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application=firefox&id=1419

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The IE blog announced last month that after listening to developers feedback (or seeing what Firefox delivered as standard) they have created the IE Developer Toolbar.

• Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a web page.
• Locate and select specific elements on a web page through a variety of techniques.
• Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings.
• View HTML object class names, ID's, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.
• Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
• Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS web feed links.
• Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text.
• Immediately resize the browser window to 800x600 or a custom size.
• Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain.
• Choose direct links to W3C specification references, the Internet Explorer team weblog (blog), and other resources.
• Display a fully featured design ruler to help accurately align objects on your pages. - Very handy

Though mainly a copy of what FF offer - its well worth the download and handy to have. Plus the ruler feature is pretty handy, and the DOM explorer is a nice way of drilling through your tags and elements to find any problems.

You might of read, that Opera have dropped the fee and ads from their browser. It was only at the end of last month they were celebrating their 10th anniversary and giving away the code to anyone that registered, and now its totally free. To me it looks like they were just throwing bread out to the fishes to see how many came up, and obivously enough did cause the whole loaf is there.

Will they manage to get a share of the market before IE 7 comes out though? Dare i say it, it looks like a browser war is in the making again, with IE maybe needing to defend on two fronts. My own stats are already showing that Firefox is slipping a bit.

Personally as long as they browse safely and are compliant i don't care. Happy browsing.

The Gmail Notifier 0.4.3 extension for Firefox has been released to fix the issue of Gmail changing their URL.

Stu Nicholls has posted a CSS design to emulate good ol frames.

It works in IE 6, Firefox and Opera, though be warned in FF its a little choppy.

So just installed, all went well, below is a quick brief guide to whats been noticed already.

By default the browser users the IE engine on trusted sites to improve compatibility though you can change the rendering engine to not use the IE engine automatically on Trusted sites.

There's a little bit of adware but you can choose not to install Desktop Weather (from the Weather channel), and Real Arcade. Also so far i havent seen any little yellow AIM men anywere.....yet!

The other usual stuff is there along with importing bookmarks.

During the install it claims to be safer than any other browser and from the looks of it i can see why: Per site you can set which you view with the Gecko or IE engine. Including on the fly changes between the two - this is one nice feature as a developer to be able to do this. Also per site there is the ability to set up trust settings to allow maximum or minimum functionality.

I gotta admit i didnt think i'd like it at first (from the old NN 4.5 days i think) but so far it looks good. Though lets give it a couple of days then see :o)

CNet has an editors take on the new browser on the block. Im just off to install now to have a look but one quote which intregued me is:

"This version is built on the Gecko engine that powers the Mozilla Firefox browser (AOL Time Warner spun off the Mozilla team as a nonprofit in 2004), but it can also run the same engine as Microsoft Internet Explorer on more than 150,000 sites that have been certified as "trusty" by the TrustE organization."

Time to go and have fund

Update: Just been to the Netscape site using Firefox and got "Your Current Browser is outdated" upgrade to Netscape 8. Which conisdering they are using the base from my browser (and im on the 1.04 version) is a little pretentious

The IE Blog is reporting that IE7 beta will have tabs.

It mentions that they are already available through some third party software but also states that "MSN's rently released toolbar will also be providing support for tabs within IE when they update it in the coming months"

Seems like they are jumping on the speeding past band wagon here. No doubt MS will also release this as the "Newest and latest" thing

Access iTunes control via Firefox with FoxyTunes. You can also use it for WinAmp, WindowsMediaPlayer, Music Match Jukebox, the list goes on.

Thank Dan for the link

Wikipedia is just a great online resource that personally i always forget about. Usually i go to Google and type define:whatever

Anyway as im using it a lot at the moment i've created a bookmarklet for Firefox. Just drag the link below to your toolbar links

WikiPedia

I wish i could take credit for this but this code is just modified from Peter Freitag bookmarklets for CFDocs.org

The IE Blog have posted a Few details on the up coming release

They mention support for alpha channels in PNG along with better support for CSS.

The comments are quite good (until it posted on Slashdot - then the trolls start the anti MS bashing)

One comment which i though good was

"SVG support. Now that Adobe owns Flash, they may not be pushing SVG as its competitior, so MS could fill the void." - I figured if the buyout goes through then maybe Adobe would look at getting SVG into Flash not just do away with it??

I meant to post this the other week but forgot, but a clean install has just prompted me to add it again. Found via Digital Minute

1. Click on the Bookmarks menu and select Manage Bookmarks&
2. Click the New Bookmark toolbar button
3. Enter JavaScript Console as the name
4. Enter chrome://global/content/console.xul as the location
5. Check the Load this bookmark in the sidebar checkbox
6. Click OK

Mozilla Foundation have released a statement regarding the immediate shift of focus from Seamonkey to it premier products Firefox and Thunderbird

I nice little extention for Firefox. Based on Tidy, a HTML clean up tool maintained at tidy.sourceforge.net .

The Firefox extention shows:

• The number of errors on the page
• Details of the errors
• Page source, with
  • Original HTML
  • Cleaned Up HTML
  • Original Browser Wiew
  • Cleaned Up Browser View

Peter Torr on his Blog examines the secuitry with Firefox, particulary signed (or lack of) software installs. He does raise some interesting points throughout the article right down to simple default choice when installing unsigned extentions.

MozillaZine (where i originally found the article) has said that IE is better at preventing accidental installations of malicious code in some situations but the Extention mechanism is trickier to exploit. Be sure to read the MozillaZine article as it goes on to mention the Slashdot discussion which lead to a follow-up post by Peter

-- Microsoft Corp. today released a new security patch for its Internet Explorer (IE) - find out more here