In the beginning there was NCSA Mosaic, and Mosaic called itself NCSA_Mosaic/2.0 (Windows 3.1), and Mosaic displayed pictures along with text, and there was much rejoicing…
Have you ever wondered why every major web browser identifies itself as “Mozilla”? Wonder no longer…
Microsoft recently tweeted: “It’s not
often that we encourage you to stop using one of our products, but for IE6, we’ll make an exception”. This coincides with the launch of The Internet Explorer 6 Countdown, a website that tries to encourage people to drop this hideously old and awful browser in favour of better, modern,
standards-compliant ones, thereby saving web developers heaps of work.
That’s not strictly true; they’re encouraging people to upgrade to Internet Explorer 8 and 9, presumably, which are still a little lacking in support for some modern web standards. But
they’re a huge step forward, and everybody who’d like to stick with Internet Explorer should be encouraged to upgrade. There’s no excuse for still using IE6.
They’re even providing a tool to let you put a “Upgrade now, damnit!” banner on your website,
visible only to IE6 users. It’s similar to the IE6Update tool, really, but has the benefit of actually
being supported by the browser manufacturer. That has to count for something.
Will it make a difference? I don’t know. I’m frankly appalled that there are modern, high-tech countries that still have significant numbers of IE6 users: Japan counts over
10%, for example! We’re talking here about a ten year old web browser: a web browser that’s older than MySpace, older than Facebook, older than GMail, older than YouTube.
Internet Explorer 6 was released into a world where Lord of the Rings that would take you a long time to read, rather than taking you a long time to watch. A world where in-car
CD players still weren’t universal, and MP3 players were a rarity. Do you remember MiniDisc players? Internet Explorer 6 does. The World Trade Center? Those towers were still standing
when Internet Explorer was released to the world. And if that’s making you think that 10 years is a long time, remember that in the fast-changing world of technology, it’s always even
longer.
Just remember what Microsoft (now, at long last) says: Friends don’t let friends use Internet Explorer 6.
I’ve been playing about with the beta of Firefox 4 for a little while now, and I wanted to tell you about a
feature that I thought was absolutely amazing, until it turned out that it was a bug and they “fixed” it. This feature is made possible by a handful of other new tools that are coming
into Firefox in this new version:
App tabs. You’re now able to turn tabs into small tabs which sit at the left-hand side.
Tab groups. You can “group” your tabs and display only a subset of them at once.
I run with a lot of tabs open most of the time. Not so many as Ruth, but a good number. These can
be divided into three major categories: those related to my work with SmartData, those related to my work with
Three Rings, and those related to my freelance work and my personal websurfing. Since an early beta of Firefox 4, I
discovered that I could do this:
Group all of my SmartData/Three Rings/personal tabs into tab groups, accordingly.
This includes the webmail tab for each of them, which is kept as an App Tab – so my SmartData webmail is an app tab which is in the SmartData tab group, for example.
Then – and here’s the awesome bit – a can switch between my tab groups just be clicking on the relevant app tab!
Time to do some SmartData work? I just click the SmartData webmail app tab and there’s my e-mail, and the rest of the non-app tabs transform magically into my work-related tabs:
development versions of the sites I’m working on, relevant APIs, and so on. Time to clock off for lunch? I click on the personal webmail tab, look at my e-mail, and magically all of the
other tabs are my personal ones – my RSS feeds, the forum threads I’m following, and so on. Doing some Three Rings work in the evening? I can click the Three Rings webmail tab and check
my mail, and simultaneously the browser presents me with the Three Rings related tabs I was working on last, too. It was fabulous.
The other day, Firefox 4 beta 7 was released, and this functionality didn’t work any more. Now app tabs aren’t associated with particular tab groups any longer: they’re associated with
all tab groups. This means:
I can’t use the app tabs to switch tab group, because they don’t belong to tab groups any more, and
I can’t fix this by making them into regular tabs, because then they won’t all be shown.
I’m painfully familiar about what happens when people treat a bug as a feature. Some years ago, a University Nightline were using a bug in Three Rings as a feature, and were
outraged when we “fixed” it. Eventually, we had to provide a workaround so that they could continue to use the buggy behaviour that they’d come to depend upon.
So please, Mozilla – help me out here and at least make an about:config option that I can switch on to make app tabs belong to specific tab groups again (but still be always visible).
It was such an awesome feature, and it saddens me that you made it by mistake.
Have you seen the latest stupidity that the Windows Internet Explorer team have come up with? Ten Grand Is Buried Here.
The idea is that they encourage you to give up whatever browser you’re using (assuming it’s not Internet Explorer 8), calling it names (like “old Firefox” if you’re using Firefox,
“boring Safari” if you’re using Safari, “tarnished Chrome” if you’re using Chrome, and… “that browser” if you’re using Opera) and upgrade to Internet Explorer 8, and they’ll be giving
out clues on their Twitter feed about some secret website that’ll only work in IE8 at which you can register and win $10,000AUS (yes, this is an Australian competition).
After looking at the site in Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera, I thought I’d give it a go in Internet Explorer 8. But it didn’t work – it mis-detected my installation of IE8 as being
IE7 (no, I didn’t have Compatability Mode on).
In the end, though, I just used User Agent Switcher to make my copy of Firefox
pretend to be Internet Explorer 8. Then it worked. So basically, all that I’ve learned is that Firefox does a better job of everything that Internet Explorer does,
including viewing websites designed to only work in Internet Explorer. Good work, Microsoft. Have a slow clap.