Unintentionally Blank

A year ago, Microsoft released the long awaited new version of the world’s most popular browser. Internet Explorer 7 swept in to replace the tired, old and fragile IE6. Developers got suitably excited at the prospect of spending less time banging their heads against the brick wall of standards support and bugs in IE6 and some even went as far as thinking about dropping support for IE6. Now we are a year on and IE6 is still the most popular browser, but Microsoft are doing something about it now.

Why Not To Download IE7

Some people were excited about IE7, but I was more skeptical and rightfully so it seems. You see, when you ban a third of your user base from installing your browser’s major update, just because they pirated your operating system, you run the risk of the update going unnoticed. And largely it has, IE6 stills rules the roost, Firefox continues to make gains and IE7 is still trying to get a footing on the browser stage.

Time To Move Forward Again

On Thursday, Microsoft announced that computers would no longer have to pass Windows Genuine Advantage checks in order to install IE7. It seems like an attempt to regain market from Firefox and move closer to booting IE6 out of the door. But re-including 200 million users can never be a bad thing.

Continue reading “Internet Explorer 7 Now Available To Everyone” »

According to the BBC, IBM are set to release a web browser specifically for blind and partially sighted users. The aim of the Accessibility Browser is to give access to and control over multimedia content embedded in websites to those who can’t use a mouse for browsing.

Screen readers and self-talking browsers are not able to deal with video and animation, some of which starts playing as soon as a page is loaded.

This often interferes with the synthesised speech output from the screen-reader software.

Using the A-Browser, a vision-impaired person can control media content by using predefined shortcut keys, rather than having to look for the control buttons using a mouse.

Continue reading “Accessibility Browser From IBM - Helps Blind “See” Web Video” »

So, I have been found amongst the last day’s submissions of ProBlogger’s group writing project again. But Internet or no Internet, when a group writing project comes along, who can resist. So, I rigged up my bluetooth dongle, my mobile phone and my laptop and violá, I’m posting again. This month’s theme is reviews and predictions. I haven’t been out of school long enough to write a decent review of this year (I’m still coming across blog posts from 2002 that are news to me) so I thought I would give my predictions for 2007 and the web. Then I read Read/Write Web’s predictions and knew I couldn’t beat that.

So in the end I thought I would comment on and ponder over what I thought was important from other people’s predictions as well as my own, and I would throw in some more personal reviews as well. The Internet and blogging is what you make of it, so I’m not following any rules here

Continue reading “Unintentionally Blank Predictions ‘07″ »

The waiting is over for those poor users of Internet Explorer 6 as yesterday Microsoft announced that IE7 is now available. Go, go and download it now and experience a safer and better way of surfing the web (with a Microsoft product). Then start up Firefox again, because you know better.

Big Changes?

IE7 means a few different things; a lot of bug fixes, removal of security holes, tabbed browsing, simpler interface, the list is probably longer than I’m willing to go on for, I’m not advertising it! But more importantly, this could affect any website already on the internet.

Your site may have looked great in IE6 after tweaking, and possibly hacking at it, but I urge you to try it in IE7 now (if you weren’t already looking with the beta versions). The problem is, the rendering has been improved, but it still isn’t of the capability of proper standards compliant browsers. Add to that the fact that all of the famous CSS hacks have been removed and any site could look wrong in IE7. My advice has always been to use conditional comments to keep your site looking good in IE, but I thought I’d warn you anyway.

Continue reading “Internet Explorer 7 Released” »

Microsoft is considering the early release of a fix for a bug in Internet Explorer that malicious hackers are actively exploiting online.

BBC

Considering? The vulnerability only means that a malicious website can hijack a Windows PC and install anything they want. Anti-Spyware firm Sunbelt-Software have discovered sites using this vunerability to download spyware, including keyloggers, and adware onto unsuspecting users computers. Aren’t IE users lucky that Microsoft are thinking about releasing a patch before their monthly update, next due on the 10th of October?

If you have IE and are worried, ZERT have released an unofficial patch for the time being. The other, better option, of course, being to get Firefox or Opera instead.

Update (27/09/06): Microsoft have released the patch now, though they still claim that the attacks they had seen exploiting the bug were very limited.