Stop Living in the Past

It now takes a movement to get rid of Internet Explorer 6.  A conglomerate of Norwegian newspapers decided to phase out Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 browser and started a campaign to encourage people to upgrade to a later version of Internet Explorer.

Check out the Stop Living in the Past campaign and some examples of how to encourage your users to upgrade.

Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate Now Available

Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate is now available for download for Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Server. According to the the Internet Explorer blog some changes and features to look forward to are:

• Platform Complete. The technical community should expect the final IE8 release to behave as the Release Candidate does. The IE8 product is effectively complete and done. We’ll post separately about the thousands of additional test cases we’re contributing to the W3C. We’ve listened very carefully to feedback from the betas. With the Release Candidate, we’re listening carefully for critical issues.
• Reliability, Performance, and Compatibility improvements. We’ve studied the telemetry feedback about the browser’s underlying quality and addressed many issues.
• Security. We’ve worked closely with people in the security community to enable consumer-ready clickjacking protection. Sites can now protect themselves and their users from clickjacking attacks “out of the box,” without impacting compatibility or requiring browser add-ons. We also made some changes to InPrivate based on feedback from customers and partners.

Adobe Flash and Internet Explorer 7

Earlier last month I was having trouble with certain websites such as YouTube or MSN Soapbox. It appeared as if the site failed to detect that the Adobe Flash player was installed whereas other sites such as the Adobe Flash Player installation page would detect the correct version of the player and even display the Flash movie. According to an Adobe TechNote, this could happen due to an incomplete installation of Flash Player.

If you’re experiencing a similar problem, try the following:

1. Quit all running applications or simply restart your computer
2. Run the stand alone Adobe Flash Uninstaller
3. Run the stand alone Adobe Flash Installer

Related Links:

Installing Macromedia Flash Player for IE7 on Windows Vista
Corrupt Flash Player install after IE 7 upgrade

Internet Explorer 7 Released

According to the IE blog, Internet Explorer 7 is now available for download and use on Windows XP.

Related Links:

Internet Explorer Download

Inline Search for Internet Explorer

I’m one of those users who hasn’t completely moved to Firefox. In fact the only reasons I use Firefox are because of:

1) Inline Search or Find in Page – Quick instant searching on the page

2) Session Saver – Restores the state of your browser exactly as you left it, including tabs, windows and anything that you may have been typing.

3) Adblock – Blocks advertisements and other image sources.

Today, thanks to Omar Shahine’s blog titled Inline Search for Internet Explorer, I found out about a similar Find in Page or Inline Search add-on for Internet Explorer. Best part of all is that it works great. If you’re interested, you can download the add-on from Core Services.

Click to activate and use this control

As a result of a recent Internet Explorer update any control that appears on a page by way of an OBJECT or EMBED tag such as a Flash, QuickTime or RealPlayer movie will cause a user to now see the following text ‘Click to activate and use this control’ or in other words users have to click the object first in order to activate its functions. I believe the update was a result of recent legal battle with Eolas and was introduced to adequately address issues raised during the lawsuit.

However, for end users this is mildly annonying and while there are tons of work arounds posted on Macromedia and Adobe forums the easiest one that I’ve come across is a simplified solution provided by Eric Duncan. I ended up using his solution for my SlideShowPro gallery and am extremely pleased with the results.

Explorer Destroyer

How wrong is this? Explorer Destroyer – a script to help you convince people to switch to Firefox. According to the site, for each person that switches, Google gives you $1, Microsoft loses marketshare, and an angel gets its wings. Would you switch to Internet Explorer if Microsoft gave you $2? Although I must say that convincing someone to switch from IE 6 to Firefox 1.5 is probably doing the person a big favor. Using a script to force all IE users to upgrade to Firefox is another story.

IE 7 Beta 2 Preview

As part of the Mix 06 conference, Microsoft has released a new refresh to IE 7 Beta 2. This new release is supposed to be feature complete in terms of layout.

Related Links:

Download IE 7 Beta 2 (Refreshed on March 20th, 2006)