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)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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Firefox 2 review
Seems every tech blog in the land has picked up on the hot release of the week - Firefox 2.0. I heard a lot of good things about it while still in Beta and I finally got round to giving it a spin today.
IE7 also saw a new release this week but got a lot less attention/praise (unless you work for Microsoft) as it didn’t offer much extra compared to RC1 which I already had installed. Opera’s latest release has impressed as it’s the first browser to pass the Acid2 test.
So is FF2.0 worth the download. Well if you haven’t got Firefox at all it’s an obvious yes. Once you’ve tried Firefox for a couple of weeks you’ll find it a frustrating experience to try and browse the web with anything less. However, I am sure I’m preaching to the converted so I’ll focus on What’s New in 2.0.
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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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