Web Worker Daily |
| Posted: 30 Aug 2008 10:04 AM CDT Now that Internet Explorer 8 is in serious beta, web workers who develop or design web pages are faced, once again, with a knotty question: which browsers (and which versions) do you design for? The basic problem is understanding your market: browser usage statistics are unreliable, but they all seem to agree that the market belongs to Internet Explorer and Firefox, with a smidge of Safari thrown in (Opera advocates, I know you’re out there, but with a usage number rarely cracking 1% in any survey, it’s tough to justify spending time on Opera-specific testing). Even within those broad categories, though, the market is more fragmented than ever before: Firefox 2 and 3 are both in substantial use, as are IE6 and IE7. It’s worse in some markets; I have one customer who requires IE5.5 compatibility due to restrictions on browser version at a government agency. Some people want to address this by campaigning against IE6, but that still seems quixotic to me. With no end in sight to new versions, and intense competition in the browser market, it seems like this problem will only keep getting worse. If you create web pages, what’s your testing strategy? What browsers do you consider important enough to check?           |
| Firefox TweakGuide: As Good as the Best Extensions Posted: 29 Aug 2008 06:00 PM CDT I’ve written before about TweakGuides.com, and the truly extensive guides for customizing both Windows XP and Windows Vista offered for free there. Recently, I’ve been diving into the free TweakGuide for Firefox that the site offers. It’s not as extensive as the Windows TweakGuides, but if you spend a little time with it you can definitely make Firefox more efficient for you. One of the great strengths of Firefox, of course, is that it is so extensible. Many people are hip to really useful extensions, but Firefox is also very customizable under its own hood. That’s what’s good about the Firefox TweakGuide. The Firefox TweakGuide was extensively modified in July to reflect changes in Firefox 3, but not everything in it applies to Firefox 3. The vast majority of the customizations will work in Firefox 3 and Firefox 2, and there are many “new to Firefox 3″ citations in bold. The TweakGuide begins with a discussion of Settings which is basically a walkthrough of how to optimize the browser using the options menus. These let you get warnings if opening multiple tabs will slow the browser down, or if closing multiple tabs will cause a problem, and much more. The best stuff in the TweakGuide, though, comes in the several Advanced Tweaking guides. There is helpful information on backing up and restoring various versions of your Bookmarks, retrieving selected items from cache, and even scripts for changing the look of the browser. You can change the colors of your tabs, for example. Many web workers spend more time in Firefox than any other application. If that’s you, you’ll especially benefit from the Firefox TweakGuide.           |
| Posted: 29 Aug 2008 04:00 PM CDT Comcast has come clean about their plans to cap usage on its broadband service. Starting in October, if you use more than 250GB of bandwidth in a month, you’ll get a talking-to. Cross that threshold twice in six months and they’ll kick you off the service, for a year. They’ve issues new Acceptable Use Policy and FAQ documents to try to sugar-coat this as a limit that most people will never hit. The last time we covered this story, readers were mildly outraged. Now that we’re starting to see specific numbers associated with specific services, it’s easier to get a sense of whether you’ll be affected. Does 250GB per month worry you? If it does, leave us a note - and hop over to our parent blog GigaOM, which is challenging people to come up with plausible ways to cross the threshold.           |
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