Blog - Guy's Blog

This time with sensible logic...

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />

Well, at least this time they've got the logic the right way round - things run as standards compliant by default but you can optionally add the tag (or a HTML header to your web server config) for sites that need a little longer to adapt to standards compliance.

It was interesting to note that there are already security patches for IE8 and it's only just gone in to beta.

You'll notice that there isn't an "EmulateIE6" mode - IE6 is dead. For corporations still using IE6, it really is time to start thinking about cutting your losses and moving to a more standards compliant world.

Anyway, let's hope that Microsoft do actually release a browser that works by default - if they don't it will be a disaster.

And it's frickin awesome...

For a few years now, Firefox and other browsers such as Safari and Opera have been steadily eating away at Microsoft's dominant market share for Internet Explorer.

Earlier today, Firefox 3 was released and I must say, it rocks! If you're one of those people still using Internet Exploder, you seriously need your head examined!

Speed, lots and lots of speed!

If you thought Firefox 2 was getting a little sluggish, mainly due to installing too many plugins no doubt, you'll be amazed at the performance boost you'll get from Firefox 3. Pages load in a fraction of the time they used to and the whole thing feels vastly more responsive.

Clean, crisp text and rendering

The rendering engine in Firefox 3 has been completely re-written from scratch, making it significantly faster and much higher quality. Text in particular looks better than ever and is far easier on the eye.

Awesome Bar

The URL bar (or location bar) has seen some of the best innovation since tabbed browsing.

When you start typing something in, it searches your history and bookmarks and gives you an instant list of places you've visited in the past, ordered by the places you're most likely to visit.

While this doesn't sound like much, it really will change the way you get back to pages you've viewed before - it's super easy and fast. Because it's searching through pages that you've already visited, the results are far more personalised than something like Google search results.

Security

Firefox now provides a plethora of user-friendly security enhancements that warn you about all kinds of scams you might encounter on the internet. The new features make Firefox arguably the most secure browser on the planet.

Addons

Most addons have been updated for Firefox 3, however the Mozilla addons sites are all under extremely heavy load so it could take a couple of days for you to get some of your addons upgraded.

That being said, Firefox now runs lightning fast even if, like me, you've got insane numbers of addons installed.

There's new addon browsers and management features that help keep everything, including plugins such as Flash, up-to-date.

Download

If you haven't done so already, download Firefox 3 and see the difference for yourself!

I've been literally swamped in wall-to-wall meetings this week, however just wanted to quickly post about a free service called "Doodle" that helps with scheduling meetings online...

Doodle allows you to do two things:

1. You can schedule meetings - provide dates (and optionally timeslots and locations) and let people tick the times/dates that they are available
2. You can vote on things - for example, the type of food for our recent Christmas meal was voted for using Doodle

Here's a screen grab of a meeting we scheduled recently:

The only gripe we had with Doodle is that if someone makes a mistake, they can't edit their existing entry and there's no way for the poll administrator to delete or modify entries.

That being said, Doodle is still a superb and very easy to use method for online meeting scheduling and voting. Go give it a try - it's free: http://doodle.ch