* IE7 Emulation

* Developer Tools for debugging, with similar functionality to the Firefox Ad on  (mentioned just as a reference not as a comparison).

*  IE8 activities - Providing quick access to external services from any webpage by sending information from the page to another application or fetching external information related to data on the current page.

* IE8 Webslices - you can slice a piece of a Webslices enable site to receive it’s updates, very much like you would subscribe to an rss feed. Partners already enabled are Facebook, eBay, MSN and StambleUpon

* CSS 2.1 compliant and HTML parsing improvement (claimed)

* Import ”Favourites” from other browsers

* Improved Phishing Filtre

* Automatic Crash Recovery (ACR) - recovers tabs and minimizes the interruption of sessions in the likely event of a browser crash.

* Faster startup

Unfortunately it still has the annoying ”Navigation Blocked” page when there’s a question about a secure certificate on a URL, that can confuse a lot of people eg. http://google.com/adsense on IE will give you this page.

Technorati Tags: internet explorer, browser, microsoft, web programming, beta software

PicLens suports a number of sites: Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa Web Albums, Fotki, FotoTime, deviantART, Smugmug, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster, Google Images, Yahoo Images, Ask Images, Live Images, AOL Images Freewebs, Adobe Lightroom

It is available as an Add on for Firefox, Safari and IE, as usual the Linux desktop users have been left behind as the Firefox Add on is just for Win adn Mac. Installation and usage ins very easy but there’s a good tutorial, including a video available on their website.

To Download visit www.piclens.com or read/watch the tutorial here.

Technorati Tags:browser ad on, firefox, safari, ie, slideshow, picasa, flickr, piclens

There are 2 ways of doing it (maybe more) I found .

1 – Create your own search plugin.xml as instructed on the Mozilla Developers site (more work)

or

2 – Go to searchplugins.net and follow these steps.

• FIll in all the fields but make sure on the Search URL you add the word TEST as the searched item eg: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=TEST
• Generate plugin and it’s done, you can then install it from the top of the page or the side bar but you might like to make it available on your own site so….
• copy this code – change 11399 to your plugin id (found on the link for your plugin on searchplugin.net)

<script language=javascript>
function addProvider(url) {
try {
window.external.AddSearchProvider(url);
} catch (e) {
alert(“You need to be using IE7 or Firefox2 to add a search engine!”);
return;
}
}

</script>

<a href=”javascript:addProvider(‘http://www.searchplugins.net/createos.aspx?number=11399′);void(0)”>Install Search Plugin</a>

• save this as a html file or insert into any existing page and your users will be able to install and use yor search plugin.

Microsoft are now making Internet Explorer 7 available without having to go through the process of validation (WGA) for your Windows installation.

By visiting their site, you can now elect to have your os automatically detected and updated, or, download the installation files for you to do on multiple machines.

This development – or change of heart – was announced by Microsoft on October 4th. They described it as a firm step to ‘take [Microsoft's] commitment to help protect the entire Windows ecosystem seriously’, presumably by offering to Windows XP users some of the anti-phishing techonology
and other goodies inherent in IE7 to those who use Windows illegally. Others might cynically say that they simply want to keep market share as Firefox continues to grab users who have until now been stuck with IE6 and have taken the migration plunge.

Anyway, whatever the reason, if you are still using IE6 and want to upgrade to IE7 then now is your chance. No questions asked.

As he uses Firefox as his browser I advised him to install the FireFTP plugin for Firefox. It works perfectly, opening up a FTP client on a new tab. The client records account details for future use and has an interface similar to Filezilla, my personal favourite. I know that Filezilla has a version for Mac but even the great Filezilla disapointed me on the Mac platform.

To install the FireFTP plugin on Firefox is really easy:

1. Install it from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/684
2. Restart Firefox
3. To run FireFTP, just go to Tools / FireFTP and a new Tab will open with the ftp client in it

That’s it, dead easy and works great.

As Firefox is cross-platform this FTP client can be used in any Operating System.

After that I researched the shotcut and found this page with not just this one but the most used Firefox and IE shortcuts. URL:http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/keyboard

I find this shortcut very useful, especially when working on a website where sometimes just a simple refresh doesn’t show the changes you’ve made. This shortcut overrides the cache forcing the page to reaload from the source instead of relying on the cache (local or remote).

Reload (override cache)

CTRL+SHIFT+R for Firefox

CTRL+F5 for IE

MySpace has traditionally been one of the hardest to crosspost to, but if you are a WordPress user, then enter some funky php courtesy of Roderick Russell.

Because of some of the limitations of MySpace, and particularly its formatting options, the 2 scripts he has written post an announcement on your MySpace blog that give the title and then direct the user to click through to your WordPress blog. This might sound a bit odd, but actually, those of us who maintain WordPress blogs tend to want users to land there first, rather than MySpace, so I leave that option alone. You can attempt a full post though, if you prefer.

Here is a sample of what the post looks like on MySpace:

Thanks are due, once again, to my good friend Donovan who found the original link.