MetaFilter posts tagged with browsers

Need Firefox 0.8?

netbros — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 06:37:15 -0800

Remember when your computer just worked? Did you click 'OK' to that recommended update on programs like iTunes, Adobe Reader, or Yahoo Messenger, only to realize that the older version ran faster or had better features? Then Version Download may be your solution. Includes back-level versions of browsers, audio and video, security and anti-virus, FTP, file-sharing and communications software.

"It's where you put your search terms. Correct?"

chorltonmeateater — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 09:58:21 -0800

What is a browser? Nobody seems to be sure. Whatever one is, Microsoft are convinced that Internet Explorer 8 is the best of the lot: if you disagree, you might like to get the facts. After all, only the best browser could offer you potential winnings of $10,000 for using it (unlike 'old Firefox', 'tarnished Chrome', or 'boring Safari'). It looks like Internet Explorer isn't willing to be bullied anymore.

CSS3 Now

netbros — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:15:23 -0800

Take Your Design To The Next Level With CSS3. Why can’t we make use of the rich CSS3 features and tools available in modern web browsers and take the quality of web designs to the next level? It’s time to introduce CSS3 features into projects and not be afraid to gradually incorporate CSS3 properties and selectors in style sheets.

The State of the Web 2008

netbros — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 04:25:52 -0800

The State of the Web 2008 is a report from Web Directions that includes details and analysis of all the responses to over 50 questions covering technologies, techniques, philosophies and practices that today’s web professionals employ. The survey was open for just under 3 weeks, from December 1st to 20th 2008. In total, over 1200 designers and developers from around the world responded to the survey. Respondents were likely to be self-educating, “early adopters” who keep abreast of developments in their field. Here are the tabular results. In short, what did the survey find? Some quite surprising results include:

just how few of the respondents use any form of Internet Explorer for their day to day web use (with only 3 out of over 1200 respondents using IE8), and similarly how few use Google Chrome as their primary browser, despite the splash the launch of that browser recently
nearly half of respondents use Mac OS X as their primary operating system, and only 10% use Windows Vista
less than a third of respondents test their web sites with Internet Explorer 8 (while Mobile Safari comes in at 20%, and Chrome at 40%)

There’s also a great deal of interest in terms of the nitty-gritty of web design philosophy and practice, from the high percentage of respondents who use JavaScript (around 95%), to the very small uptake of Silverlight (around 2% of all respondents) to the very high percentage of database driven sites (96%), overwhelmingly run on open source databases (over 80%). The number of responses, 1234 total, and the results themselves definitely provide both food for thought, and in many cases, cause for optimism that web development best practices are becoming more widely adopted over time. Web Directions conducts two major conferences annually in Sydney, Australia and Vancouver, Canada, and covers the full range of interests for web professionals - web design, front-end and and back-end development, information architecture, interaction design, accessibility, data visualization and much more. Their more focused conferences home in on specific areas and segments, as seen from their podcasts, slides, and other presentation materials.

History of the browser user-agent string

East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 09:31:46 -0800

History of the browser user-agent string

Firefox 3: Hot or Not?

spock — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 10:57:08 -0800

A major new release: Firefox 3 is now out in your language. (RC3 is said to be identical to the Final 3.0.0.0 version). Top 10 Reasons Why You Should Upgrade to Firefox 3. Firefox 3 Versus IE 8 Beta An opposing view: Hold Off on Firefox 3 (the chicken!). Alternative view? Flock catches up with Firefox 3. PS: (As you might expect from something expected to set a World Record for number of downloads today, he Mozilla sites are currently getting crushed, apparently ).

VF: How the Web Was Won

spiderwire — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 21:02:34 -0800

Vanity Fair has a typically excellent article out -- "How the Web Was Won," an oral history of the Web. Even if you're familiar with ARPANet, Metcalfe's Law, Pearl Harbor Day, the VC rush, whatever -- the story told by the often-animated people at the center of the whirlwind is an enlightening and entertaining experience. And for those of you don't know the history of the Internet, learn it! This is part of your heritage now. I just like this quote because it sums up my experience with all hackers-as-CEOs:

Jeff Bezos: When we started out, we were packing on our hands and knees on these cement floors. One of the software engineers that I was packing next to was saying, You know, this is really killing my knees and my back. And I said to this person, I just had a great idea. We should get kneepads. And he looked at me like I was from Mars. And he said, Jeff, we should get packing tables. We got packing tables the next day, and it doubled our productivity.

Death to IE?

aletheia — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 12:01:19 -0800

Death to IE? If Firefox wasn't enough to ween you off Internet Explorer on Windows, perhaps Safari for Windows will be.

The Firefox Cold War: “Mr. Mathowie, we must not allow an extension gap!”

rfbjames — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 13:11:47 -0800

Firefox really is amazingly extendable, but perhaps WAY too much so. [previously]

Internet Explorer 7 Released

armoured-ant — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 00:43:22 -0800

It is done. Windows Internet Explorer 7 has been released.

A Day at the Opera

revgeorge — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 08:55:37 -0800

Free Opera serial numbers. Want to try a new browser? For their 10th birthday, Opera is giving away free serial numbers for their web browser to anyone who registers. The codes are available today (August 30, 2005) only and remove the annoying ad bar. Opera is available for all major (and many minor) operating systems. You can learn more about the browser's features (like a built in BitTorrent client) or just go straight to the download page so you have somewhere to put that new registration code.

50,000,000

jikel_morten — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 10:24:05 -0800

50 Million Firefox Downloads. At 8:58 AM PST this morning, we rolled over the 50,000,000 downloads line.

Don’t you know you’re gonna to shock the monkey

gwint — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 11:33:11 -0800

Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows users to create scripts that alter the display of existing web pages. Like removing ads from google pages. I learned about the google script from boingboing. Oh, here's a script to remove the ads from there. Greasemonkey has a lot of uses, but has adblocking gone too far?

Internet Explorer 7 announced

j.p. Hung — Tue, 15 Feb 2005 14:38:34 -0800

Internet Explorer 7 announced We've heard about it for a while and it's been discussed here before. Will the new version of I.E. be able to hold its own against open source browsers like Firefox?

Speedup Firefox

You Should See the Other Guy — Sun, 02 Jan 2005 20:06:38 -0800

Speed-up Firefox. Wow.

sIFR: anti-aliased text in any font

Termite — Wed, 29 Dec 2004 11:36:42 -0800

Forget Verdana, here’s sIFR: anti-aliased text in your browser in any font you like.
The next big thing? Just a kludge? Heard about it already?

Mint chip anyone?

bluno — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 11:00:04 -0800

Screenshots from the new Netscape release. (via waxy)

Making IE Better

will — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 21:40:10 -0800

Microsoft's IE team is calling for input into the future of their browser. Over lunch with Robert Scoble they communicated that they're working hard on security patches. So where do you come in?

"The team is looking to work with community members to improve Internet Explorer. That means blogs. That means taking harsh feedback. That means having a dialog about the future that's frank and as open as possible."

With an opportunity like this we should forgo mere whining and name calling, and participate.

Nasty new IE hole

dejah420 — Tue, 09 Dec 2003 14:28:08 -0800

A new MS Internet Explorer vulnerability is discovered. Most digerati already know about the spammer and lamer trick to publish URLs that look like legitimate hostnames to fool people in to trusting a malicious site. This trick is frequently used by spammers to steal people's PayPal accounts, by tricking them in to "resetting" their password at a site owned by the spammer but disguised as PayPal.com. Today's new IE vulnerability is significantly worse. By including an 0x01 character after the @ symbol in the fake URL, IE can be tricked in to not displaying the rest of the URL at all. Don't expect a patch right way, the guy who found the hole released it to BugTraq on the same day he notified Microsoft. (via Simon Willison)

Reuters doesn't do (crickets)

jfuller — Mon, 17 Nov 2003 07:35:33 -0800

Don't do browser sniffing. To properly view our site, you must be using a standards-compliant web browser. Your current browser is: (...nothing...) Over 97% of our audience now uses a standards-compliant web browser, however you appear not to be using one. We want to help you fix this situation and improve your experience on reuters.co.uk and the rest of the internet. I'm using Mozilla 1.5 but my user agent string is set to report Netscape 4.75 running on Windows 95.

David, Herman and Mighty Mouse vs. Goliath

poopy — Fri, 10 Oct 2003 08:11:22 -0800

Developers gripe about IE standards inaction "Seeking to goad Microsoft into action, digital document giant Adobe Systems last week unveiled a deal to bolster support for CSS in its GoLive Web authoring tool with technology from tiny Web browser maker Opera Software..." ( via Stopdesign )

Browser manipulation as advertising tactic?

kokogiak — Wed, 24 Sep 2003 11:47:44 -0800

Ugh - and Ooqa Ooqa The company that brought us "shoshkeles" (flash ads plastered over your webstite of choice), United Virtualities - has now launched a newer, more annoying ad banner/tool/, ooqa-ooqa, which basically takes over your browser, removes your toolbar, and inserts ads. (They call it a "Branded Browser", and say it's fully "opt-in", which it wasn't for me) I saw it in action here, at Forbes.com (to be a victim, I believe you need IE5+ on a PC, maybe not). Wasn't the idea of taking over the end-users browser squashed, chalked up as never a welcome or good idea years ago, when the ability to do it first arose?

Font Browser

bluedaniel — Sat, 13 Sep 2003 21:06:01 -0800

This interface displays a preview of the fonts active on your system. Could be useful for a quick check on what's what.

costas — Tue, 10 Sep 2002 12:55:26 -0800

Blog baiting. This content-free Salon article is pointed to by News.com and chances are it will be picked up by tech weblogs within a couple of hours. Notice the presence of popular (in blogland) underdog in the title (Mozilla). The many blog references in the article body, including a gratuitious reference to the arch-tech-weblog that presumes knowledge of said blog's moderation system. The meta implications of web media composing content so that it may be picked up by weblogs are interesting --and yes, the irony of a MeFi FPP is painfully obvious. What next?

vowe — Wed, 28 Aug 2002 12:43:50 -0800

Netscape market share at an all time low? Not according to Heise Online, a major news site here in Germany. In their very substantial weblogs, Microsoft went from 66,9% down to 65% from March to August of this year, while Netscape/Mozilla rose from 21,3 % to 22,6 and Opera from 7,8% to 8,4%. (Warning: Link in German, but you will understand the tables at the end of the article easily).