Blog and Browser Business
First off, two non-critical address changes for Fanatical Apathy and James Wolcott. They are non-critical because the old addresses are re-directed to the new sites, but if you change to the new addresses they will load faster:
http://fanaticalapathy.com/
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/blogs/wolcott
Now for the browser updates: Both Internet Explorer and Firefox have new versions.
If you are using Windows XP with Service Pack 2, will you get IE 7.0 delivered to you as part of the automatic updates. If you are unsure what version of Windows you have, you can find out by clicking on the Start menu, highlighting Settings, selecting Control Panel, and then clicking on System. The pop-up will display your version information. You need Service Pack 2 to use IE 7.0.
Firefox 2.0 is available here, if you can’t wait any longer.
Steve Bates of Yellow Doggerel Democrat has been watching these releases because he is currently working on a project that has to support the latest browsers, and, as luck would have it, the definition of latest has changed.
Steve links to a Houston Chronicle article that compares the two browsers, but has written his own, more complete, reviews of Firefox 2.0 and IE 7.
6 comments
I couldn’t wait for Firefox 2.0, and I also installed the “MapIt” add-on. I LOVE it. Just highlight an address, right-click and select ‘view map’ – and voila’…and little map. Perfect for those of us with no sense of direction and a fear of getting lost.
They had me with the integrated spell check. I’ve been using an add-on forever, and really appreciate it.
I’m sure Firefox 2.0 has some bugs waiting for me, but IE7 is not quite ready for prime time. I’ve crashed it once just by clicking a link, and I do mean “crashed” … locked it up to the point of having to use Task Manager to sweep it away. And I’ve seen some “oddities” in sites that use JavaScript in ways that push the limits, including the one I’m working on.
Some of this is normal new-release stuff; I’m curious how much Microsoft will clean up in the next few weeks. But I’m most certainly keeping Firefox 2.0 as my default.
I’m currently clicking along with Firefox 2.0. It stripped out my three add-ons, but now includes the spelling, which was the only one I really cared about. I’ll check on the others later.
I had to reinstall IEView, which allows one to open the current site in a newly launched IE window. IEView required a newer version for Firefox 2.0.
The new “Error Console” (formerly “JavaScript Console”) looks much like the old one, as does the DOM Inspector.
Venkman (Mozilla’s JavaScript debugger) carried over unchanged, but I haven’t had occasion to use it today… word is that it works more reliably with more recent builds of Firefox than 1.5.0.7, so I expect great things in 2.0. Well, actually, I never really expect “great” things… 🙂
They’ve included a new Java engine, so some of the “anomalies” have probably been dealt with…okay, bugs have been fixed.