Leslie Franke

For Firefox users, here is a simple, time saving extension when developing websites or looking at sites that only render well in IE. IE Tab is a new extension that launches IE within a Firefox tab. The extension will put an IE icon on any tab opened in IE and also gives you the ability to add sites to a list of URLs you want to always view in IE. The one quirk I see is that if you put site a site like myweb.com in the ie tab filter list and myweb.com redirects to www.myweb.com the rendering in IE will not carry over when www.myweb.com loads in the tab.

If you want to see the thing work take a look at Mozilla’s home page to see the difference in a tab open in Firefox versus one in IE.

Steve Rubel has written a great post about Technorati entitled, “Ten Technorati Hacks“. Technorati seems to be doing a better job of quickly indexing blogs than their competitors. Thus, I have been using them lately for any real-time searches that I need. Some of the features that I have found useful that Steve highlights include: createing feeds of a tag or a search, seeing who is saying what about a site, and the mobile version of Technorati.

Opera is now offering a sneak peak of Opera Mini exclusively to all Opera Community Members. This version, like the previous version, runs fine on a Palm OS.

Getting Opera Mini on your Palm is fairly straight forward and simple. (If you have not already installed the Palm Java VM, you need to go to Palm’s WebSphere Everyplace Micro Environment Download page and download the WEME571.zip file.)

1. First you need to acquire the Opera Mini .jad and .jar file. (See this post at Mobile Read. You may find a straight PRC file out there but this would be a violation of Opera’s user agreement.)

2. Upload the .jad and .jar files somewhere on the web which you can link to in the next step.

3. Finally open your IBM Java VM, click on the Install button, enter the URL to the .jad file and click the OK button. This will install the file on your Palm.

Note: If you already have a previous version of Opera installed you will either need to rename the new version or delete the old one before you undertake step 3.

Opera Mini Initial Screen

Opera Mini Default Bookmarks

Flickr on Opera Mini

Palm Addict on Opera Mini

This one page cheat sheet brings together Mozilla Firefox’s keyboard & mouse shortcuts, a few tips & tricks, and where to find things in Firefox, onto one simple to view page.

• PDF format
• HTML format

Update: Added several search/find shortcuts to the cheat sheet

Great post by Paul Scrivens of 9rules fame discussing why he believes Flock never stood a chance of becoming the “default browswer of the non-IE crowd”. Paul is right on. I have tried Flock but I cannot see the reason to switch from using Mozilla Firefox as my default browser. It is a well designed product, with a great looking theme, but really adds nothing to my browsing experience. Things like my del.icio.us blog and my WordPress adminstration panel are only one click away in my bookmarks toolbar.

In many ways, Flock suffers from the same problem as convincing IE users to switch to Firefox. “IE works fine for my purposes, why should I change”. With Firefox you can point to issues such as tabbed browsing, security, extensions, etc., with Flock I just cannot see a reason to switch is.