Opera 9.02 has been released yesterday, head over to the official website to grab a copy and update your existing version of Opera. If you are not using Opera it is time to try it, it is in my opinion as good as Firefox and it’s always a good idea to have a second browser installed. (A webdesigner should have at least all three major ones..) So what’s new in Opera 9.02 ?

The changelog lists some general items like “lots of stability fixes” and “Several fixes to saving of images”. Other changes include site specific fixes for flickr, Fixed functionality on the new Flickr Organizer, and last.fm, Fixed crash with last.fm. For a complete list of changes take a look at the changelog on the release website.

continue reading "Opera 9.02 is out"

The requested web page was not found. Errors. I hate them. Never know if the server is down because it was taken offline, because it is experiencing traffic spikes or the admin is tampering with the system. My normal solution would be to hit F5 a few times and see if the website loads fine. If it does not I tend to forget about it or save it in the bookmarks if it is worth trying again in a few hours.

ErrorZilla is a Firefox extension that offers you other possibilities than hitting F5. The following options popup if a webpage could not be loaded: Try again which is basically a reload, Google Cache which searches the Google cache for information about the website that you wanted to view, Wayback checks if the website was saved at archive.org and displays the hits.

continue reading "Error Zilla Firefox Extension"

Internet Explorer users beware: Stealth Web Page Recorder is a little add on for internet explorer that records every visited webpage including every action on that website like entering passwords, forms, emails and account numbers. The add on can’t be spotted in the task manager nor in advanced tools like process explorer, it is a so called BHO - Browser Helper Object.

To check if this add on is running on your system click on tools - manage add ons. If SWL Plugin Class appears it is already installed on your system. It is very easy to spy upon another user if stealh web page recorder is installed on the system. AntiVir Guard warns you if you download / install the tool on your system and I suppose that most other antivirus tools will detect the BHO as well. I’am not sure if they will warn the user once it is installed, this remains to be tested.

continue reading "Stealth Web Page Recorder"

The length of the bookmarks tab in firefox has been bothering me for a while. It is equal to the length of the largest entry which could mean that it could quickly clutter your interface when you have some sort of subfolder system that I use. One method to overcome this would be to strip every bookmark so that it would never use more than 20 chars, everything else would be cut off. I did that for some time but discovered a way that makes everything so much easier.

You need to access the userchrome.css file of your firefox installation, for windows xp it is located in C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\chrome - take a look at the official firefox support page if you want to located this file on different systems. If you never edited this file you will find a file called userChrome-example.css instead of userChrome.css. Rename this file by removing -example and you are ready to edit it.

continue reading "How to compact your firefox bookmarks tab"

Browzer was widely reported as a web browser that takes privacy and security serious. It seems most websites that “tested” browzer did not do their homeworks and parotted instead what the developers of browzer were claiming. The first thing that strikes me as odd is that Browzer is not really a new web browser but simply an add on of the Internet Explorer by Microsoft. It uses the same engine and identifies itself as the Internet Explorer.

The homepage of Browzer will be the starting page of it from now on with no way of changing that setting. Not a really good feature, don’t you think ? The search features use overture, a well known pay per click search engine, to generate revenue for the developers it seems. What about privacy ? Do they live up to that promise or is this also not what they want us to believe it is ?

continue reading "Browzer not so good after all"