Firefox 3 and Firefox 2 windows media support
Those of you trying out the Firefox 3 beta or considering it may want access to firefox 2. This is particularly true for developers as you will want to test in both version of the browser and the much loved Firebug plugin is not supported in Firefox 3 yet.
Fortunately there is an excellent guide on getting both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 running at the same time thanks to Hikikomori’s blog redemption in a blog
The problem I encountered is Windows Media Player video embedded in a page will not play. I tried re-installing the plugin but while this works for firefox 2 it does not for firefox 3.
I then recalled I encountered this same problem when first upgrading to Vista. A fix is to copy the needed dll files into the firefox 3 plugin folder. You can just copy the files over from firefox 2 plugins folder or download only the required ones from dll dump.
Quote from last blog post on this topic:
You can find the missing files on dlldump.com
If this doesn’t solve the problem get more indepth help here: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=206213
Filed under Browsers, Extentions, Plugins, Vista | Comment (0)Microsoft make a desperate push for IE7
With uptake of the latest Internet Explorer browser being slow compared to that of main rival Firefox, Microsoft have started a big push to encourage more users to make the change.
The first big advantage Microsoft had was having it pre-installed on it’s latest OS - Vista and not allowing the obsolete Internet Explorer 6 to be installed (which would undermine vista security anyway). However, with Vista uptake being slow and with the tech savvy already using firefox, opera or other browsers IE7 is struggling to make much ground.
Latest figures I have from various sites I run/developed show that on sites for web developers or tech savvy users Firefox now has the majority over both all other browsers combined.
On consumer sites it is about 30% IE7, 28% IE6, 40% Firefox and the remaining 2% using other browsers. So although overall Internet explorer has the majority users still, IE7 alone has not caught up with firefox.
On business sites the weighting is slightly more in favour for Internet explorer but then the figure is increased for IE6 rather than IE7.
In a bid to convert more users to IE7 this week we’ve seen them <a href=”http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39289859,00.htm”>remove the validation requirement</a> to download it.
Now they have sent out a newsletter promoting Internet Explorer 7. It seems to be targetted at IE6 users as it focuses on the improved security in IE7 and the fact that it doesn’t render correctly in Firefox:
<em>”The Internet is a vast place–and not every site is friendly. How do you help protect yourself online? With Windows Internet Explorer 7. Already, the Internet Explorer 7 Phishing Filter prevents nearly one million visits per week to known dangerous websites. In just a few clicks, see how the latest version of the world’s most popular web browser can help you be safer online.”</em>
The latest version of <strong>the world’s most popular web browser</strong> may not be a statement the internet explorer team can use for much longer…
As a developer I am happy with this push to IE7 - the sooner we get rid of IE6 the sooner I will stop having to support it. It is currently holding designers/developers back in what can be done as we have to ensure whatever we do is supported it. Binning IE6 will mean - less hacks, more advancement, less development time - resulting in savings for everyone.
Filed under Browsers, Newsflash, Vista | Comments (2)Firefox 3 on the horizon
You can download this blog post in audio format here (right-click and save target/link as..) or play it using the podcast player on the right.
Firefox 3 - code named Gran Paradiso is under development. It will use the Gecko 1.9 engine and the latest build released already is said to have passed the CSS Acid2 test. Although Opera, Safari have already achieved this it’s a big landmark for Firefox and a good sign of things to come.
Firefox 2.0 already features the most advanced CSS 3.0 support including CSS rounded corners and alpha transparency and Firefox 3 is set to have full support. Other features include improved graphic rendering and support for Javascript 2.
Of course we can expect there will be many bug fixes and tweaks making Firefox faster and more stable. It has been optimised to make better use of your systems hardware so if you have a good graphics card you should notice big improvements both in visual quality and speed for sites that take advantage of this.
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Hacked to Death iii
While testing Krugle for my pending review I was able to find a Safari hack that works.
You may already have heard of the Safari Stokely Hack. It’s not as straight forward as most IE hacks but it works on even the latest versions of Safari and can be a real life saver.
View details on the Stormdetector website.
Now IE7 is here hacks have to be more specific in their targeting. Some Beta versions of IE7 ignore * html hacks and some apply them (The final release ignores them).
To be sure which browser will be affected by your styles you can use conditional comments.
e.g.
<!--[if lte IE 6]>
(html for IE 6 or older goes here)
<![endif]–>
This goes into your html not your css file. The version(s) of IE you specify will read the code you enter within the comments while other browsers will ignore it. This means you can link to a seperate style sheet with your IE hacks in and it will not affect other browsers.
Selecting versions to affect:
To affect just one version of a browser (e.g. IE7) simply start your conditional comment with <!–[if IE 7]> replacing 7 with whatever browser version you want to target. If you want to target a range of browsers you can insert an extra word before IE.
- lte - less than or equal to
- lt - less than
Because you have targeted a specific set of IE browsers future releases should be happy viewing your page without the hacks getting in the way.
These conditional comments can be used to hide any other html from non-IE browsers too, such as an IE only feature you may have on your page.
Filed under Browsers, Newsflash, Tutorials, hacks | Comment (0)Hacked to Death ii (Safari)
Apologises for the lack of posts the last few days. I’ve not been on holiday, far from it, I’ve started a new contract. I will be producing for a leading media company.
This actually brings me nicely onto this blog entry’s topic - Hacking Safari. I am used to testing on the major PC based browsers (FireFox, IE, Opera and to a lesser extent Mozilla, Netscape, linx) but have never been required or had the hardware to test with Macintosh’s Safari.
For the most part if a design works in FF and IE, Safari will quite happily play along. However, on one page where I have used relative positioning to move an image up by a few pixels I encountered a problem. FF and IE6 didn’t line up. I was forced to use an IE6 hack (see previous hacked to death entry) to set a different pixel adjust for the two browsers. While this solved the problem in IE6, Opera, FF and IE7 - Safari was not happy.
While Safari had rendered the page as FF it treated the positioning of this image as IE6. As IE6 hack only affects IE6 and older Safari’s positioning of he image is not corrected. Quiet a problem.
Thus began my quest to find a CSS hack that only affected Safari. Preferably an elegant hack (if there is such a thing) still allowed my style sheet to validate and would not affect future versions of The browser.
Filed under CSS, Newsflash, hacks | Comment (0)Hacked to Death
Everyone working on the front lines (building for the front-end) will have likely encountered a page that despite being a coding piece of art looks great in one browser but falls apart in another.
If you don’t work for Microsoft you’ll know the problem is usually with the Internet Explorer browser. A lot of the time tweaking a style sheet a little can solve things but sometimes there is no other option but to add a hack.
No one likes hacks, in fact I go to insane lengths trying to find an alternative before I will use one. However, if it is necessary to ad a hack is there a good way, or is a hack always going to be ugly and we just have to face it?
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