Charlemagne Stavanger

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

IE 6 Standalone - IE 7 Part II

Now that I have upgraded to Internet Explorer 7, it of course removed Internet Explorer 6. This present yet another problem for browser testing for IE 6. It is not possible to run to versions of Internet Explorer...now wait a minute, here's something interesting, you can download the standalone version of Interenet Explorer 6 here. Simply download the last file, unzip the file and put everything in a folder somewhere and you're good to go.

Because of the standalone IE probably use some functions from the shell, which is integrated with Internet Explorer 7, you can see some of the feature from IE 7 in the standalone such as the little icon for some sites in the address bar. Don't worry though, the standalone still renders webpages incorrectly just as IE 6 does...in this case, that is a good thing.

posted by Stavanger at 6:38 PM | 0 comments




Monday, October 30, 2006

Internet Explorer 7.0

Like many others, I upgraded to Internet Explorer 7.0 from Internet 7.0 Beta sometimes last week. I didn't give a second thought about it since Firefox (version 2.0 was release a week later), not Internet Explorer was my native browser. Not until yesterday did I get a huge wake up call to do some browser testing to see my sites show up ok in 7.0.

Internet Explorer 6.0 and below are notorious for not conforming at all to the CSS/HTML coding conventions and your webpage show up in a mad jumbo. Why I don't know, all I know is how to implement some inconvenient but absolutely necessary CSS hack to make sure everything shows up at least close to how it is suppose to look in Firefox and Opera (I mostly use the underscore '_' hack and star html '* html' hack for IE 6.0).

To my great relief, when I typed in http://www.blogcrowds.com in the IE 7.0 address bar, my site Blogcrowds.com showed up fine if not better in IE 7.0. That, I give my thanks Bill Gates :).

I guess the reason that I forgot about testing my site for IE 7.0 and not testing when I got IE 7.0 Beta was because I thought most users will still be using IE 6. My initial thought, perhaps influenced by some 'internet browser trend analyst', was that IE 7.0 will be shipped with Windows Vista sometimes in early 2007 but most users who does not switch to Vista will still be stuck with IE 6.0 for another couple of years and still taking up most of browser population. Now it looks like IE 6.0 will be obsolete sooner than I expected (hopefully), which is a very good thing and I could stop worrying about hacks :D. Something else I will be looking forward to is the 'new' age of online images with .PNG for better qualities and transparency (which isn't really recommended because IE 6.0 does not render transparent .PNG properly). And again, thanks to Bill Gates.

posted by Stavanger at 5:07 PM | 1 comments




Friday, October 27, 2006

Blogcrowds Directory Launched!!
I am happy to announce that Blogcrowds.com has launched its own directory at http://www.blogcrowds.com/directory/. Feel free to add your blogs to our directory, it however does require a recipical link as our directory is not a 'no-follow' one like many other directories and every link included in the directory goes toward Page Rank as well. Thanks.

Over the next period of time we will also look for some feedback on the directory, categories etc. So please post your comments about the directory in the feedback forum. Thanks again

posted by Stavanger at 6:33 PM | 0 comments