David Gardiner - Web Browsers

Supporting IE6, 7, 8 (and maybe 9) on the same machine

2010-09-20T13:45:00.001+09:30

It's nice to live on the cutting edge – using the latest version of everything, especially web browsers. But sometimes you may have to support users running older versions, and it is a lot easier to support a user if you can be using the same software that they have in front of them.

The problem is that you can normally only have one version of IE installed in Windows.

Roger showed me IE Tester which looks quite impressive. It works by hosting separate version-specific instances of the IE rendering engine. Probably a good option if you're a web developer.

If you have access to Microsoft's Expression Web, then Expression Web SuperPreview offers similar functionality. Another option is to utilise the free virtual machines provided by Microsoft. These are complete standalone copies of Windows XP and Vista with versions of IE6, 7 and 8. To run these, you need either Virtual PC 2007, Windows Virtual PC (Windows 7 Pro or Ultimate only) or Hyper-V.

If you're using Virtual PC 2007, one nice thing you can do is add a desktop shortcut to the VMs so they can be launched easily:

Create a new shortcut on the desktop
Point it at "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Virtual PC\Virtual PC.exe"
Give it a useful name – eg. "IE6 on XPSP3"
Edit the shortcut target and append -pc "VM Name" –launch
Replace "VM Name" with the exact name of the appropriate virtual machine (Include the double-quotes if the name has spaces in it)
Change the shortcut icon to point to one from "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe"

Ryan Adams has posted a comprehensive list of all the available command-line options.

One thing to note – the VMs do have an expiry date. Updated VMs are usually made available before then though.

Firefox 3.5

2009-07-01T12:00:00.001+09:30

Today is "Upgrade to Firefox 3.5" day :-)

My upgrade went very smoothly, and one nice feature was it warned me beforehand which extensions wouldn't work with the new version.

Post-upgrade, it found a compatible version of Firebug, but I'm still waiting for updates of

Bookmark Duplicate Detector
Google Notebook
Live Writerfox
Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant 1.0

The following extensions work ok:

DownThemAll
English (Australian) Dictionary
IE Tab
Xmarks

They reckon 3.5 is about twice as fast as 3.0. It certainly does seem snappier.

As a side note, I just noticed that Google Notebook is no longer being developed. Might be time to finally make the transition to Evernote.

Firefox Extensions I use

2008-01-17T12:36:00.001+10:30

I thought it would be useful for posterity to document which add-ons to Firefox I'm currently using.

Bookmark Duplicate Detector

Does what it's name says - keeps your bookmarks free of redundant entries.

ColorZilla

Let's you find out what colour something is on the current web page.

DownThemAll

Download manager (I'm using 1.0b2) which makes big files downloading a lot faster. Not 100% compatible with all sites, so you do need to resort to the built-in manager sometimes.

Firebug

The best web page debugger and inspector.

Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer

I use this to synchronise my bookmarks between work and home.

IE View

I don't use this as much as I once did, but there are some pages out there that unfortunately only render in IE.

Link Alert

One of those nice productivity enhancers - it modifies the cursor when you hover over a link to indicate what the target file type is. Notice in the image below how it tells me that this is a link to a Word Document.

Live Writerfox

Let's me launch LiveWriter to blog about the current web page.

View Trace.axd

Roger's fantastic add-on that makes debugging ASP.NET applications so much easier.

Web Developer

The original web developer toolbar. Firebug supercedes some (but not all) functionality so I don't use this as much as I used to.

YSlow

Requires Firebug and gives you a "performance report card" of the current web page.

I haven't mentioned DOM Inspector or Talkback, as they both come with Firefox.

CSSVista - Edit your CSS code live on Internet Explorer and Firefox

2007-09-19T10:11:00.001+09:30

Mike mentions CSSVista in today's Daily Grind.

It lets you edit CSS and see the results live in embedded IE and Firefox browser windows.

YSlow for Firebug

2007-07-30T10:02:00.001+09:30

YSlow for Firebug is a Firefox addin analyses web pages and suggests ways to make them load faster. It requires the Firebug addin.

(Via Ayende's blog)

Blog This for Firefox 2.0 now available for Windows Live Writer

2006-11-23T07:32:00.001+10:30

Microsoft have released a Firefox Extension (amazing in itself!) to add a Blog This button that launches Windows Live Writer.

I quite like Live Writer, particularly as it understands how to put <p> tags around paragraphs of text. All it is missing is support for Blogger Beta tags and uploading images. Hopefully these features will be coming soon.

Tabbed user interfaces

2006-11-17T09:02:00.001+10:30

I've been using Firefox for web browsing since it's first release, so I'm quite used to tabbed-browsing.

The new version of Firefox (and IE7 too) has made a small change to how tabbed browsing works - the 'close tab' button is now part of each tab.

What I've realised is that there's a difference now with how Visual Studio works - it's tabbed editing environment is like the old Firefox method - there's just one 'close' button over on the right-hand side.

I'm not sure which way I prefer - I can see advantages to both, but I just wish that I could make all the apps do it the same way and not be inconsistent now.

I haven't tried any of the CTPs of the next version of Visual Studio yet, but I would guess that they'll change Visual Studio to mirror tabbing in IE7 (and Firefox 2).

Firefox 2 released

2006-11-08T09:24:00.000+10:30

Catching up on lots of stuff that happened while I was away.. Firefox 2 is now officially released. Might need to check that all your extensions are going to work ok in the new version.

Internet Explorer 7 for XP

2006-10-19T13:48:00.001+09:30

IE 7 for Windows XP has been released

FoxyVoice

2005-03-18T12:59:00.000+10:30

A nifty Firefox extension: Mozilla Update :: Extensions -- More Info: FoxyVoice: "Provides text-to-speech functionality by using Microsoft Speech API."