VT’s Tech Blog

Skin firefox according to your mood. Change your Firefox themes without having to download, install and restart the browser using Firefox Personas.

In this version, the Persona selector is dynamically loaded and populated from a JSON feed and all designs are loaded via URLs to remote resources. All changes to the browser chrome are applied instantly, with no need to restart.

Get Firefox Personas extension : https://addons.mozilla.org/services/install.php?addon_id=personas

More on Firefox Personas at: http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/12/personas-for-firefox/

Here’s an excellent article on Yahoo on how to speed up your website.  The points covered in this are:

• Make Fewer HTTP Requests
• Use a Content Delivery Network
• Add an Expires Header
• Gzip Components
• Put Stylesheets at the Top
• Put Scripts at the Bottom
• Avoid CSS Expressions
• Make JavaScript and CSS External
• Reduce DNS Lookups
• Minify JavaScript
• Avoid Redirects
• Remove Duplicate Scripts
• Configure ETags
• Make Ajax Cacheable

Read on at: Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site

Here’s a Firefox plugin from to grade your site performance according to the rules outlined in this article:

YSlow for Firefox: http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

If you’re working on Ajax based websites, you’ll always face usability problems when users click on the Back or Forward buttons on the broswer. Using Really Simple History (RSH) allows you over come this issue.

The Really Simple History (RSH) framework makes it easy for AJAX applications to incorporate bookmarking and back and button support. By default, AJAX systems are not bookmarkable, nor can they recover from the user pressing the browser’s back and forward buttons. The RSH library makes it possible to handle both cases.

In addition, RSH provides a framework to cache transient session information that persists after a user leaves the web page. This cache is used by the RSH framework to help with history issues, but can also be used by your own applications to improve application performance. The cache is linked to a single instance of the web page, and will disappear when the user closes their browser or clear their browser’s cache.

RSH works on Internet Explorer 6+ and Gecko-based browsers, like Firefox. Safari is not supported.

Link: Really Simple History
Demo Link: testDhtmlHistory.html (try using the browser back button after you get to this demo)

Google has released a beta version of Google Gears which is an open source browser extension which  enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs.

Here’s what you can do with the API’s:

• Store and serve application resources locally
• Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
• Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness

You can take a look at the sample applications at http://code.google.com/apis/gears/sample.html once you install the browser plugin.

The news out there is that Google’s planning to offer offline support for their current applications like Google Reader, Docs & Spreadsheets.

Did you know that PHP has a built in function to detect which browser your visitor is running? Well neither did I till one of my collegues, Ansar, pointed out PHP’s get_browser function.

Here’s how to use this function:

< ?
$visitorbrowser = get_browser(null,true);
print_r($visitorbrowser);
?>

The output of this function is an object which contains details about the user’s browser and looks something like the one below:

[browser_name_regex] => ^mozilla/5\.0 (windows; .*; windows nt 5\.1.*) gecko/.* firefox/1\.5.*$
[browser_name_pattern] => Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; *; Windows NT 5.1*) Gecko/* Firefox/1.5*
[parent] => Firefox 1.5
[platform] => WinXP
[browser] => Firefox
[version] => 1.5
[majorver] => 1
[minorver] => 5
[css] => 2
[frames] => 1
[iframes] => 1
[tables] => 1
[cookies] => 1
[backgroundsounds] =>
[vbscript] =>
[javascript] => 1
[javaapplets] => 1
[activexcontrols] =>
[cdf] =>
[aol] =>
[beta] =>
[win16] =>
[crawler] =>
[stripper] =>
[wap] =>
[ismobiledevice] =>
[netclr] =>

To get PHP to detect your browser properly, you’ll have to get the updated browsecap.ini file and set the path to the file in your php.ini file.

To set the path to browsecap.ini file, add the following entries in your php.ini file:

[browscap]
browscap = /path/to/browscap.ini


Links:

browsecap.ini file: http://browsers.garykeith.com/downloads.asp
PHP get_browser function lookup: http://in.php.net/manual/en/function.get-browser.php

Here’s a cool firefox extension for Gmail addicts called Gmail Manager. Gmail Manager allows you to manage multiple Gmail accounts and receive new mail notifications. Displays your account details including unread messages, saved drafts, spam messages, labels with new mail, space used, and new mail snippets.

• Manage multiple Gmail accounts
• Receive new mail notifications
• Support for Gmail hosted accounts
• Ability to import/export account preferences
• Tooltip with account details and new mail snippets
• One-click access for loading your Gmail account
• Mailto: links detection
• Quick mail compose for Gmail accounts
• Customizable icon placement in the toolbar/statusbar

Link: tLo : Gmail Manager

Here’s a cool extension for Firefox which gives you a quick look at the javascripts which are linked within the HTML page. No more hunting for JS includes in the HTML source !

“All browsers include a “View Source” option, but none of them offer the ability to view the source code of external files. Most websites store their javascripts and style sheets in external files and then link to them within a web page’s source code. Previously if you wanted to view the source code of an external javascript/css you would have to manually look through the source code to find the url and then type that into your browser. ”

Link: JSView :: Mozilla Add-ons :: Add Features to Mozilla Software

Since Microsoft lost a legal battle on how they display multimedia conent in their browser, they’ve had to the change the way these content displays on screen. Now a user has to click these elements to start playing the flash animation.

This affects Flash files, QuickTime, RealPlayer, Java , Adobe Acrobat among others. It means users have to click the object first in order to activate its functions.

To fix the problem, please follow these steps:

1) Just below the last <object> in your HTML page, insert the following Javascript:

2) Open a new document in Notepad or your HTML editor, and copy & paste the following content into it:

theObjects = document.getElementsByTagName("object");
for (var i = 0; i < theObjects.length; i++ )
{
theObjects[i].outerHTML = theObjects[i].outerHTML;
}

3) Save this file as fixit.js

Thanks to Mix FX for this info: FIX IT – Click to activate and use this control – Flash | Java | I.E | Problem

Here’s a cool plugin for Firefox which allows you to debug Ajax code.

FireBug is a new tool that aids with debugging Javascript, DHTML, and Ajax. It is like a combination of the Javascript Console, DOM Inspector, and a command line Javascript interpreter.

Other fun features:

1. * XMLHttpRequest Spy – Ever wonder what all them newfangled Ajax websites are up to? Watch the requests fly by in the console!
2. * One web page, one console – Tired of slogging through a zillion errors in the JavaScript Console trying to find the one you want? The FireBug console is built into the bottom of the browser, and only shows you errors and log messages that came from the page you’re looking at.
3. * JavaScript Error Status Bar Indicator – It’s a sin that Firefox doesn’t include this by default, like IE does. When there is an error in the page, the status bar will let you know with a big red blob.
4. Logging for web pages – Sick and tired of “alert debugging”? Jealous of all your C programmer buddies with their fancy printf? Now you can log text and objects to the FireBug console from any web page.

Link to Plugin Page:Mozilla Update :: Extensions — More Info:FireBug – All Releases

Microsoft is officially retiring IE for Mac from the end of January. They plan to stop updates by the end of December and downloads by the end of January

Microsoft plans to discontinue support for its Internet Explorer browser on Mac OS X at the end of this year.
The software developer mothballed the browser, which is currently on version 5.2, in June 2003 after Apple released Safari. Development ever since has been limited to the release of security patches.
Link: Microsoft bids Internet Explorer for Mac farewell – vnunet.com