Posted on September 8th, 2006%
For the past few years, I’ve been doing a lot of web development. Part of my design mantra (at least from a code perspective) is table-less design using CSS that works in as many browsers as humanly possible.
Since Firefox‘s support for CSS standards is superior to that of IE, I generally code everything so it looks good in Firefox, then apply hacks to get it to work in IE. (Most other browsers require minimal tweaking once something works well in Firefox and IE.) At times, the hack is to add some IE-specific CSS code, which is usually done using the asterisk hack:
.myClass {
background-color:white;
}
* html body .myclass {
background-color:black;
}
Only IE recognizes the second line, so in IE, the background color of any element with the myClass class will be black; for all other browsers, it will be white.
However, this hack can be replaced by one I found today, which is beautifully simple and elegant: add an underscore before the CSS property . . .
→ Read More: A wonderfully simple, wonderfully useful IE CSS hack
Posted on May 2nd, 2006%
If you’re a Web developer or designer, you know the pains of testing Web sites with multiple browsers. My approach is typically to code against the standards, then check to make sure it looks good in Firefox, then check to make sure it looks good in Internet Explorer. It’s that third step which is a bear, because with every change you make to try to get something to work in IE, you need to check and make sure it didn’t break anything in Firefox. Needless to say, that’s a lot of time spent ALT-TABbing.
I stumbled across a Firefox extension that makes this job easier. IE Tab allows you to have a Firefox browser tab that uses the IE rendering engine — quite literally, Internet Explorer in Firefox. It works flawlessly, and makes one less window to manage on my desktop. Even better, it will ensure that certain WEb sites (like Windows Update) will always use the IE . . .
→ Read More: IE in Firefox with the IE Tab extension
Posted on September 20th, 2005%
As reported on Slashdot, the Opera Web browser is now free of licensing fees or advertisements. (You can still pay for premium support.) You don’t even have to provide an email address or name to download it.
Oh, and there’s versions for Windows, Mac OS, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, OS/2, QNX, and for dozens of different mobile devices. All free. Wow!
. . .
→ Read More: One less reason to use IE: Opera is now free!
Posted on December 12th, 2004%
The Firefox web browser, part of the Mozilla project, became my standard Web browser some weeks back, replacing Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. There’s a lot of reasons to use Firefox instead of IE: Firefox is more secure, takes up less system resources, is independent of the rest of the operating system, has a tabbed interface, and more.
The biggest reason to use Firefox is for its extensions. Extensions are “small add-ons that add new functionality to Firefox”. Here’s three extensions that any tech-savvy person can not do without.
Web Developer. This is the single greatest thing for Web developers since the birth of the markup language. Web Developer adds a toolbar to Firefox that allows you to do dozens of tasks: edit a page’s CSS, auto-complete form fields and expose password fields, convert between GET/POST requests, display image ALT, size, and dimensions (or hide them altogether), view cookie and header info, display HTML block, ID, CLASS, and link properties, . . .
→ Read More: Three reasons to use Firefox
|
|
Uncategorized 