I’m testing it… Look’s very nice.

Just a quick note to say after playing around with the beta of Firefox 3 I’m making a permanent change towards it. I’ve been using Camino of late. But this Firefox build looks superb.

I downloaded and installed Firefox 3 Beta 1 today as it would seem so did lots of other people. I am a bit out of the loop on Firefox development and I wasn’t really sure what the new version had that was new. And I didn’t really care to be honest — I don’t use Firefox at the moment (I’m using Camino instead).

 Anyway: I don’t want to comment on the new features as I don’t know what they are. But I will say that if you install the prototype of the mac theme — which is not installed by default but there are instructions re: how to do it on the Firefox Start page — the browser looks really nice.

Maybe you should try it?

Opera 9.

And now here comes another big browser upgrade. I am all over the place right now with browsers. Firefox is the default but I was very into Flock when I first saw that and I think Safari looks nice and now… Opera 9.

I was just about to switch it to the default and blog about it when I loaded up WordPress and everything seemed to go wrong. I will have to look into whether this is persistent. The facts though as crystal clear. Opera is fast, feature rich, and nice to look it. I think I’ll go for it.

I love the service that Deep Quote are offering. You highlight some text in a page, and click a button and they generate a URL for you with the text highlighted, and with the start location of the page set right at where your quote text is. Check this link for an example highlighting “this text here” on this page. You can get it in various levels. There is their website where you can manually enter your text, and URL, there is the bookmarklet for which they make the following amusing comment:

And there is an extension which unfortunately doesn’t work in Flock at the moment but I have sent them an email to ask for this. But even without the extension it is useable with the bookmarklet. No word on how they make money out of this. Although they have got step one right, making a useful service.

Update: Email back from Ron of Deep Quote. He will work on the extension

And Again: Flock fans can get the extension here.

And we all move forth. With Flock.

It has just been released as a public beta. It has been kicking around as an alpha for a long while, but this is their first step towards making a disciplined and stable release. And I have downloaded and installed it and I am very impressed. Flickr has never been so accessible. And it adds (or in fact removes) a whole step of the del.icio.us posting model that I use to get things to the links log. This is definately something to check out, I am even blogging direct from Flock for this post.

As everyone knows a preview was released of Internet Explorer Beta 2 a few weeks ago. Since then every man and his dog has been writing what they think. Mostly on blogs, but also in news articles, forums, people talked about what they thought. About the wacky new layout. About the final, overdue introduction of tabs. Most people soon hit on the real question though.

Anyway, in a slightly different approach instead of blogging about it. I make a Flickr Photoset about it. It includes the screenshots from my one session with Internet Explorer 7, and my thoughts in each case. See the set page.

Blogging. What a phenomenon. Not in the way that you think I mean either. Yeah sure it is amazing that suddenly everyone can write anything that anyone else can read instantly. That is cool. But I really for this post want to focus on the hug number of methods there are by which I can blog. It is tricky to chose between them. I can blog from my Flickr account. Which is good for doing images that I am hosting myself, as their is no bandwidth worries with it. I can blog from Digg. Which is good if the story from Digg sparks the post. I can blog direct using the software that powers the blog by logging into my server. It is a nice way of doing it. You get all the options, and can modify the theme while you are there. I do this sometimes. Mainly however, I blog with Performancing.

Performancing is an extension for Firefox that allows any user to easily blog to any blog from any site at all. That is because it is built in to the browser. You simply hit F8, and there you go. Get blogging. It is a good system. And the latest version is much improved so you can post straight to your del.icio.us bookmarks as well as blogging. It is also integrated with technorati. Although I don’t tend to use this service. I notice that it also works well with the categories that come with WordPress blogs like mine. Excellent.

Target Alert is a great extension for Firefox. It lets you know the nature of the content that you are about to click. Is it word doc? normal webpage? pdf? email address? are you leaving a secure area? or entering one? will it be in a new page? or is it an “in page” link? All these questions are beautifully answered by the brilliant extension from Michael Bolin.