Well, yeah, a new browser has arrived to compete with Firefox

As a designer/developer, I'm not taking anything away from Firefox, my firm No.1 browser over the past few years. It's helped my no ends - speeding up designing and development. Getting emotional, I will never forget.

But, and perhaps its my fault for installing and keeping active developer add-ons such as FireBug, xMarks and HTML Validator (which all would inevitably slow Firefox), but day-to-day browsing I now use Google Chrome. Why?

Cos it's so damn fast!

(You're still here with me Firefox. Very close beside me kiss kiss kiss)

Windows now offering a choice of browsers

The BBC reports that Windows users are now offered, within a Windows Update, a choice to make on what browser they wish to use - rather having to be 'forced' to use Internet Explorer. Well, that's nice to see but they're not playing by the rules.

I wondered what the fuss was about over the past so many years with the lawsuits & Microsoft. I now understand Microsoft acts unfairly in this market; dominating. Their acts of having, as standard, their software installed as default and other things such as restricting documentation or access to platform code (which hinders competing software houses developing software for Windows), is in-deed, anti-competitive.

But there I was, updating a friend's Windows - I received a friendly ' An important choice to make ' screen where I jumped at the chance of passing advice to my friend of not choosing IE as the standard browser. IE, as other developers and designers well know, is the bain as we need to re-write code or target code for IE. This amazingly slows down work. Anyway, to try and ensure IE was gone for good, I also deselected IE in the Control Panel's Windows features option.

Alas, I thought IE had gone on this machine until moments later another Windows Update notification popped up - with, could you imagine - an update for Internet Explorer 8!!

Windows looks nicer but is Crap

Vista. SO many issues.

I have the latest high-spec machine (Intel 6700 processor, 8800GTX graphics, Corssair XMS2 memory)....powering (under dourest) Microsoft Vista [Ultimate].

Sure, it looks nice. However, Mac's look good too.....but they've looked nice for quite a while, they also operate so, so much 'nicer' and efficiently. When problems occur, Mac's greet you graciously; Windows shafts you - and more often.

It isn't enjoyable investing in hardware and being forced to use an operating system where I have a problem EVERY time I boot up. It strips the enjoyment out of it all.

I can handle it; I'm IT-Literate.

But it has persuaded my usually optimistic view that you should 100% NOT DOWNGRADE to Vista.

Until a feasible operating system emerges with enough clout to capture the market (the various application needs we expect, and without the majority customers, businesses), we're stuck with it. This clout, this urge to become the biggest company in the world is a big incentive.

Linux Ubuntu may be an alternative. It's not Windows or Tiger. From my knowledge its for mainly techy people who enjoy code more than looks....but that's changed.....Ubuntu looks better than Macs and Windows. It's FREE too.

I'll try anything but Vista at the moment......

nVidia nvlddmkm Vista Driver Solution

Since installing my custom desktop last weekend, updating all the necassary drivers, my screen flickers with Windows Vista soon warning me :

"Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered."

Looking in the Event log, this appears as a 'warning' and not a more serious red 'Error'. Funny, I would have thought the screen flickering, turning to black is fairly serious?

Anyhow, follow nVidia's advice to pause anti-virus, un-install any existing nVidia drivers, re-starting and installing their update http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x86_100.65.html seems to be the solution.

My System is now running just fine, and starting (although its a fresh install, already have doubts on a) start-up time; b) loading times and c) errors), I will be looking at alternatives to Windows, and will dual-boot Linux over the coming week.
Anyway, I'll enjoy my custom built system:

• Processor: Intel E6700 Dual Core
• Graphics: Asus 8800GTX
• Memory: XMS2 2Gb
• Hard drive: 2x Samsung T166 500Gb drives (RAID)
• Monitor: 22" Samsung SyncMaster 226BW

I'll reserve my judgement on rating all the elements, but it looks good so far!

Vista realse

With Vista released, and Microsoft working on the next verison, I will present my direction to Microsoft in the coming weeks - on an essential element they have missed this time around.

Sure, Vista looks great (if you've the graphic power) and has a better user experience than XP, but there is a fundimental flaw....watch this space.....

Ensuring Firefox grabs a Fresh page every time

With Internet Explorer you can easily set the Internet Options to grab a Fresh copy of a web page each time you visit. But in Firefox there has never been a simple option, until now with a simple tweak!

In fact Firefox (v2) is set to grab a fresh copy upon the 3rd refresh. This is a problem both for wanting/waiting for up-to-date information on a page or, which is my reason for finding this fix, when I'm designing a web page and need an updated preview in a browser. (not the version done half an hour ago).

But there is a real easy fix :

1. Open Firefox, type about:config in the address bar
   
2. Find the setting for browser.cache.check_doc_frequency
3. Right click, modify
4. Change the value to 1

Press coverage on the Your Gallery project I completed

I didn't realise, until I started writing a page on my site, that the Your Gallery project I managed at Saatchi Gallery received so much press! Anyway, since it was launched in May 2006, its been in the newspapers, on TV and across the net.

I'm compiled a page summarising some (or perhaps most) of the coverage and its mostly praise!

Please visit it on my onemanwebdesign website.

The 'Standard' is changing again with the upcoming Internet Explorer 7

Microsoft Vista is around the corner and with it comes a new release of the most popular browser on earth, a new Internet Explorer (IE) - version 7.

Generally, I welcome new editions from software houses because it means new exciting features geared to 'making life easier'. But a Microsoft release, I do feel cautious.
Why?
Because it usually means that the design/development & testing effort you've previously made on the launch of the software/web release means you are going to have to re-think your work with any new release. IE7 is no different. Is this really bad or part of the process?

Web designers, when designing web pages, know that the holy grail is ensuring their pages - when being viewed using most browsers & platforms - are displayed/rendered as you intended. Technologies such as XHTML & CSS help in this, along with the automated accessibility & compliance checks which a designer does in ensuring x-compatibility.

(Although not a fan) we all know Netscape Navigator (when it was around) displayed pages correctly, and now-days, Firefox displays well too but of the dominance of IE6 (between 70% - 95% of the market (different countries vary)) a web designer ensures their pages will look as they intended using IE. But with IE7 around the corner, Microsoft has written a web page describing that their new IE7 rectifies issues with IE6 with a spin that IE7 improves on IE6 to better follow W3C guidelines. Their spin :

Internet Explorer 7 contains a number of improvements to cascading style sheet (CSS) parsing and rendering over IE6. These improvements are aimed at improving the consistency of how Internet Explorer interprets cascading style sheets as recommended by the W3C in order that developers have a reliable set of functionality on which to rely.
see fullpage on Microsoft website

Why have I got a bone to pick?
I spent a couple of months at the beginning of 2006 learning Microsoft's newly released ASP.NET 2 / Visual Studio 2005 / SQL Server 2005 and to aide my learning, I re-built my onemanwebdesign website using all these new releases.

As a 'computer lover', I enjoyed learning the new releases but I also made a decision that when I re-built the site, I took time & effort in ensuring it is both CSS and XHTML 1.0 (transitional) compliant (which it is). But upon viewing the site using with a beta version of IE7, a couple of elements on my site do not render correctly. This means I'll need to re-visit my website to ensure it will look as I intended. Though one important point - although I know this quirk in my website, I am not going to change the site until IE7 has more market share and IE6 is less of the norm.