Even these days when the share of Internet Explorer is declining, there are sites that weren't built according standards, but were built, designed and tested specifically for Internet Explorer. I really hate those sites. If you are building a site don’t just limit your visitors to be IE users. Build it using the web standards and it will work for the modern browsers (IE 8, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera).
For now there is a workaround for those sites that work only in IE. If you use Firefox there is add-on called IE Tab. When you visit a site that works well only in IE, just click on add-on IE icon and Firefox will change the current tab to IE that is embedded in Firefox.
Same site in Firefox. Left displayed in IE Tab, right regularly.
We are starting a series that covers Firefox add-ons. Firefox add-ons is one of the best features that come with firefox. You can browse through a vast collection of add-ons here, and start benefit more from your browser.
Today we will show you a must have add-on called flashblock. This add-on replace all the flash animations in the site with an empty white box and “play” icon inside. Only when you click on the play button the flash animation start to play. That way all the CPU-hungry flash advertisements are removed from the site, and the page loads much faster. When you click play then you see your desired flash animation. Another feature when you are tired on clicking play is the ability to add a site to a white list so each time you enter this specific site flashblock will be disabled and all the flash animations will work regularly.
Install flashblock and enjoy cleaner (ads-free) and faster internet browsing experience.
Finally today Mozilla Firefox was released. So go and download it. We will publish later a post about our impression from the new version. Feel free to comment about this new version of Firefox.
Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
Support for new web technologies such as: HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements, downloadable fonts and other new CSS properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 offline data storage for applications, and SVG transforms.
“Private Browsing Mode” is something that all modern browsers already has.
The boost on performance is very good, and another reason to stay with Firefox (the other is the add-ons) and not to migrate to Chrome or Safari (don’t even think about Internet Explorer).
It will be interesting to see websites such as YouTube use the HTML 5 <video> tag instead of flash plug-in. YouTube already prepared a page featuring this technology http://www.youtube.com/html5.
It seems that the 3.5 release is not a major breathtaking features but mainly improvements to catch up with the other browsers.
You can download the release candidate version from here.
Mike Beltzner gives a quick preview of what’s new and exciting in Firefox 3.5.
