[pchelpers] Firefox tabs, IE impersonation, IEview plugin

Hi George

> I went and got that but it doesn't fool some sites.

You're right that some sites don't display correctly, but they *are* in 
fact fooled into believing you are using IE to look at them. The reason 
they don't display correctly is that they are written to suit some IE 
"behavior" that is not standards compliant. In other words, making the 
site believe you are looking at it with IE doesn't affect your FF's 
behavior and does not make FF open the site in a non-standards-compliant 
way.

By the way, i've been surprised to hear how many sites react positively 
to requests to use standards-compliant coding. I've only written to 
about 10, but 3 of those said they'd correct the problem. And now that i 
know about the exciting technical innovation described here
www.firefoxie.net/press2.html
i can even provide technical info that would help a reluctant or 
uninformed Web master do the necessary "extra" or "impossible" or 
"senseless" work, as the Web masters that say no often call rewriting a 
page so that it views correctly in both IE and FF.

By the way, with the snowball effect of several good standards-compliant 
browsers on the market, which are not only much safer than IE (because 
designed with safety in mind, which was never the case with IE) but also 
all have more functions and goodies than IE (which is the only thing 
that interests most users until they run into serious trouble), there is 
a very good chance of the number of non-standards-compliant Web pages 
decreasing drastically soon.

(Please skip next paragraph if you don't want to hear critical 
information and comments about MS:)
Since MS's strategy has so far always consisted of providing lots of 
bells and whistles and ahead of the competition or by buying it up 
(while ignoring safety and problems due to bloated and hastily written 
program code), it's quite ironic that MS stopped adding features and 
goodies to IE many years ago (as soon as they'd illegally strangled 
Netscape). I guess they were caught off guard by the sudden profusion of 
more modern browsers, but you'd think they would have added more new 
features than a rudimentary popup blocker to IE in SP2 if they hadn't 
encountered insurmountable security problems in IE that require 
rewriting from scratch. As i've heard, apparently the reason they didn't 
add tabbed browsing is that that would require a new Windows shell which 
is not possible before Longhorn.

What you, George, might want is the following brilliant plugin that lets 
you view a page inside FF with IE!
http://ieview.mozdev.org
The ieview plugin is a simple Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox extension (for 
Microsoft Windows systems), which allows the current page or a selected 
link to be opened in Internet Explorer. I use Mozilla 99.99% of the 
time, but there are those moments -- particularly when testing new 
pages, or when viewing that rare IE-only page that's actually 
interesting -- when I need to see what things look like in IE.

Scratching the itch, this plugin adds menu items to the page context 
menu, and the link context menu. Right-clicking a link now includes an 
"Open link target in IE" menu item. Right-clicking elsewhere in the main 
body of the page (not within an image, text box, etc.) gives "View this 
page in IE."

In both cases, we try and track down the IE executable on your system, 
and launch with the appropriate URL. Brain-dead simple, but I'm using it 
daily.


> I can't find the setting that makes Firefox use tabs instead of opening 
> a new window. The only tabs I get are when I click the button for making 
> bookmarks display as tabs but I thought that regular movement from page 
> to page created tabs too.

Well, it depends on the user, but apparently most people would be very 
annoyed both by getting a new window and by getting a new tab when they 
click on a link. They don't want their screen cluttered with many new 
tabs or windows. That's why the default setting in all browsers is to 
open the new page in the same window (unless the link has an added 
command to open in a new window). This can of course be annoying too, 
especially when checking out many different search results or many 
interesting links on a site that doesn't have a navigation bar.

The easy solution in FF is to hold down the Ctrl or Shift key while 
clicking on a link depending on whether you want it to open in a new tab 
or a new window!

But maybe you were talking about what happens when you click a link in 
another program? Then you can find help here:
http://texturizer.net/firefox/faq.html#newwindow

Ekhart


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