Leonard Austin

Safari 3 for windows

http://www.apple.com/safari/

Although only beta it’s a start. I remember this time last year looking for a windows KHTML or WebKit browser and could only find the swift browser which at the time was very buggy. Since then I think it’s changed hand and probably still worth a look.

http://try.swift.ws/

For me this is great news, no longer do I have to keep on checking browsershots or browsercamp even time I make a slight change to my css or html. I know it probably wont render exactly as it does on the mac but still it’s a great start.

12) Speed up Firefox. If you have a broadband
connection (and most of us do), you can use pipelining to speed up your
page loads. This allows Firefox to load multiple things on a page at
once, instead of one at a time (by default, it’s optimized for dialup
connections). Here’s how:

• Type about:config into the address bar and hit return. Type
  network.http in the filter field, and change the following settings
  (double-click on them to change them):
• Set network.http.pipelining to true
• Set network.http.proxy.pipelining to true
• Set network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to a number like 30. This will allow it to make 30 requests at once.
• network.dns.disableIPv6 to “true”
• Also, right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it
  nglayout.initialpaint.delay and set its value to 0. This value is
  the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it
  receives.

13) Limit RAM usage. If Firefox takes up too much
memory on your computer, you can limit the amount of RAM it is allowed
to us. Again, go to about:config, filterbrowser.cache and select
browser.cache.disk.capacity. It’s set to 50000, but you can lower it,
depending on how much memory you have. Try 15000 if you have between
512MB and 1GB ram.

14) Reduce RAM usage further for when Firefox is minimized.
This setting will move Firefox to your hard drive when you minimize it,
taking up much less memory. And there is no noticeable difference in
speed when you restore Firefox, so it’s definitely worth a go. Again,
go to about:config, right-click anywhere and select New-> Boolean.
Name it config.trim_on_minimize and set it to TRUE. You have to
restart Firefox for these settings to take effect.

15) Move or remove the close tab button. Do you
accidentally click on the close button of Firefox’s tabs? You can move
them or remove them, again through about:config. Edit the preference
for “browser.tabs.closeButtons”. Here are the meanings of each value:

• 0: Display a close button on the active tab only
• 1:(Default) Display close buttons on all tabs
• 2:Don’t display any close buttons
• 3:Display a single close button at the end of the tab bar (Firefox 1.x behavior)

If you read my last post “I used to love Firefox” you will already know my favorite Firefox addons, however you will also know that by installing a load of addons your browser speed will suffer. I can’t live without my addons so here is my recommended list of Firefox addons a web developer needs without slowing his/her firefox down too much.

1. Colorzilla

With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. You can Zoom the page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page. The built-in palette browser allows choosing colors from pre-defined color sets and saving the most used colors in custom palettes. DOM spying features allow getting various information about DOM elements quickly and easily.

2. del.icio.us Bookmarks 1.5.29

This extension seamlessly integrates your browser with del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/), the leading social bookmarking service on the Web.

This extension integrates your browser with del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/), the leading social bookmarking service on the Web. It does this by augmenting the bookmarking functionality in Firefox with an enhanced experience that offers the following advantages:

- Search and browse your bookmarks
- Access your bookmarks from any computer at any time
- Keep your bookmarks organized with tags
- Share your bookmarks with friends or anyone on the Web
- Import your existing Firefox bookmarks

3. Download Statusbar

View and manage downloads from a tidy statusbar – without the download window getting in the way of your web browsing. Despite its compact size, Download Statusbar packs in more useful features than the standard download window. The fully customizable interface auto-hides when not in use, allowing full control without interruption.

4. Firebug

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

5. Flash Switcher

Switch between various flash plugins or remove current plugin. It is installed in the statusbar of your browser. when you click on it a popup menu appears showing different options: which flash player version to install (2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) or if you want to remove the currently installed one.

6. Google Toolbar

Basically this is another toolbar with good features like spell check, bookmarks, quick links, autofill forms and so on. For me however the most important deature is the page rank.

7. Html Validator

HTML Validator is a Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation inside Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen on the form of an icon in the status bar when browsing.

I’m not sure whether to add this to the list as you can simple use the “Web Developer Toolbar” to do the same thing through the w3c validator, but i guess this dows save two mouse clicks.

8. IE Tab

This is a great tool for web developers, since you can easily see how your web page displayed in IE with just one click and then switch back to Firefox. Got to say I develope website in firefox and this make switching to an IE browser unbelievably easy.

9. MeasureIt

Draw out a ruler to get the pixel width and height of any elements on a webpage. Amazingly useful when you are trying to get the pixel distance perfect from on div tag to another, or measure the sapcing you have left. I personally use if for turning the jpg image of the website into a perfect copy full product.

10. Save As Image

I used to use screengap however I dont think its supported in the new firefox and it uses Java runtime to save the image. I’ve got to say it took me a while to find this addon but it’s brilliant. Adds the ability to save a page, frame, or part of either as an image.

Useful for showing people bugs in a website, creating a snapshot of design progress, or perhaps even creating a gallery of websites.

11. Web Developer Toolbar

This is the absolute MUST for any web developer using Firefox. I use it every day no matter what i’m doing, its so user friendly and packed full of feature. This is my number 1 recommendation, try it you will not be disappointed.

And that’s it. If anyone else has any recommendations please feel free to post them.

I installed Firefox (FF) way back in early 2005 and since then haven’t touched Internet Explorer (IE) until now. I used to find that FF loaded pages much quicker and kept up with new CSS techniques unlike IE. Furthermore I love the add-ons you can get and, for me, web development would have been a real pain without them but alas things have changed with the release of IE7.

IE7 Better than Firefox?

IE7 now has good support for CSS (although a few annoying bugs), a growing number of add-ons and seems to load web pages a lot faster than FF. On top of all of this (and I don’t know whether this is just me but) text seems to render beautifully in IE7 and makes FF text rendering look of lack of a better word jagged. I have read into this a little and I have found people talking about anti-aliasing and using TFT screens (which I do) and so on. All I know is text looks better in IE than FF. I also find the FF often freezes or crashes when I have a few tabs open or a lot of pages with flash open.

So why am I writing this post well, I am willing to forgive FF unsmooth text (in the hope that FF v3 will fix this) as long as it runs faster and stops crashing/freezing all the time. So I have a load of add-ons installed (which I love and am going to list below) that I’m going to uninstall to try and speed up FF. Some of the below addons I don’t have active normally only when I need them but I think they are still slowing things down (na = not active)

The best addons for Firefox for a web developer

BetterSearch
British English Dictionary
Colorzilla
del.icio.us Bookmarks 1.5.29
Download Statusbar
Firebug
Flash Switcher- na
Foxmark Bookmark Synchronizer
Google Toolbar
IE Tab
MeasureIt
Online Bookmark Manager Synchronizer
Save As Image
SEOquake For Firefox- na
Server Spy
Web Developer Toolbar

Personal Use addons

Download them all- na
Firefox Extension Backup Extension- na
StumbleUpon
VideoDownloader- na

Uninstall All Add-ons

Right back to my original plan, I’m using Firefox right now so I’ll let you know my finding after I restarted… Oh yeah forgot to mention I have over 1500 bookmarks which might be causing the issue with FF however IE7 has the same bookmarks and seems to run fine, anyway back to the uninstalling…

Conclusion

Right so if your Firefox browser is loadin pages slowly uninstall your addons for a huge speed boost. It’s about the same speed as IE7 now. Problem is I love my addons just got to decide which ones I can live without.

Oh yeah the bookmarks make no difference.