Browsers

Walt Mossberg of WSJ is highly regarded as one of the most influential writers on information technology. After trying out iPhone for 2 week, he has his say on this post

Checkout this video too :)

Points to note from the video:

He was able to get in terms with the virtual keyboard after 5 days of usage Access to Internet using EDGE is slow (However there is an alternative way to connecting using WiFi which is faster) The phone is locked on AT&T and if the AT&T coverage is not good, its not worth going for the lusty phone as of now. ...

One of the announcements made by Steve Jobs in WWDC was the availability of Safari Web Browser on Windows. As soon as I saw the news (it was around 1AM IST), I was tempted to try it out.

The windows installable is around 8MB. The Browser setup optionally installs the following components:

Bonjour Networking Service Apple Update Software

According to Apple, Safari loads pages up to 2 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2.

Also Safari executes JavaScript up to 2.8 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox

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Pingdom is a service which provides tools to monitor web sites, E-Mail Servers, FTP servers and a multitude of other services.

Though I didn't find the service that useful, they do seem to have introduced a nice little tool (free) to check the page loading speed.

http://www.pingdom.com/tools/fpt/?url=www.venukb.com/blog

(Replace the "url" parameter with the URL of your site)

The Full Page Test loads the complete HTML page including all objects : images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes). It mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser.

The load time of all objects is shown visually with time bars. It will help in finding the culprit script/image which is probably

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Originally uploaded by venukb. Trying out the "Blog This" feature of Flickr ! Also ever since I found out about the macro mode in my camera, I have been shooting photos of flowers like crazy ! Don't believe me ! Check this flickr set :)  

Wordpress is truly a great publishing platform. It is written completely in PHP and is backed by a MySQL database.

The true power of Wordpress lies in the extensible plugin architecture. Also you can change the look and feel just by a click !

However the Admin interface of Wordpress has always looked dull and there were various plugins to spruce up the UI.

One such widely used plugin was the WP Tiger Administration Plugin from Steve Smith.

I had tried the old version of this plugin and was not that impressed. Some of the pages especially the "Write Post" were not appearing properly even in Firefox

Steve has done a complete redesign of the

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Snap is a search portal which shows a image preview for each search result. Unfortunately the search engine is not that great, it would have been nice if the they had used the Google search engine to show the search results :)

However they have another service called Snap Preview Anywhere which I liked very much. It lets the site owners to add a "snap" preview to all the links in their website. By rolling over any link, the user gets a visual preview of the site

The links pointing to the site itself (internal

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In most of the browsers, toolbars take a lot of space on the display. You can either remove/hide the toolbars or switch to Full Screen Mode.

In the latest version of Firefox (Version 2.0) the Full Screen mode will display only the Navigation Toolbar. However you are forced to switch back to the normal view if you want to access features in other hidden toolbars.

AutoHide is a nice little Firefox Extension which gives you more control of the browser in full screen mode.

Using the extension customization dialog, you can configure "Autohide" setting for individual toolbars. The plugin is intelligent in the sense that when you install a new

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One of the nice feature of Firefox Web browser is the ability to add new features via extensions.

Extensions are small add-ons that add new functionality to Firefox, from a simple toolbar button to a completely new feature. They allow you to customize Firefox to fit your own needs and preferences.

Note that extensions shouldn't be confused with plugins, which perform a specific function like playing multi-media files etc. Acrobat Reader, Flash Player etc are some examples of plugins.

There are thousands of extensions available via Firefox. Even though the extensions are categorized, the sheer number makes it very difficult the find good, useful extensions.

However with the

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I am not sure how true this is, but it seems that Mozilla got a cake from Microsoft IE Team for the release of Firefox 2.0 !

Checkout some interesting comments for this post on Digg

even their cake probably has bugs in it

It was a nice gesture from the IE7 team. I guess developers don't take these "browser wars" as seriously as the users do.

One reason why the above comment is true is because the IE team needs browser wars to keep their jobs. If Mozilla doesn't keep posing a challenge, the Microsoft IE devs will eventually lose their jobs since there won't be a reason to keep improving. They're effectively thanking the Mozilla

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Firefox 2 (codenamed Bon Echo) is now officially released and is available for download here. I checked for updates from within the browser, however I was prompted with a message saying that no new updates were available. This means that Firefox 2 is not being pushed via the update mechanism as of now !

I had got hold of the Beta version of Firefox 2.0, some 5 months back, when I was actually searching for Firefox 3; codenamed Minefield. You can find more about the Firefox 2.0 features here. The transition from 1.5 to 2.0 was not so painful. Most of the plugins were ported onto the new version (i.e.

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