I’ve learnt two things today.

First of all, it’s possible to crash IE 6 via a single line of code…

<style>*{position:relative}</style><table><input></table>

It doesn’t crash Firefox, Opera, etc. For whatever reason, it causes a fatal error in mshtml.dll.

If you want you can try it here.

The second thing I’ve learnt today, thanks to a throw-away line in a magazine, is that you can email a Wii console.

The Email address is wxxx@wii.com, where xxx is their friend code. For example, w123456789012@wii.com (no, that’s not mine).

Nice.

When Microsoft Update thinks I’m using a Mac. Yes, last night I went to get some updates from Microsoft Update and I got the message…

Thank you for your interest in obtaining updates from our site.

This website is designed to work with Microsoft Windows operating systems only.
To find updates for Microsoft products that are designed for Macintosh operating
systems, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/mac/.

Nice. I was using Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP MCE SP3.

It knows which system I’m using from the “user agent” but one of many websites which displays your current user agent information, showed that I was happily using Windows. Weird.

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1) ; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC 4.0; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; WTClient2)

Weirder still was that if I used IE Tab in Firefox, the page would appear without a problem. As IE Tab simply uses Internet Explorer but in Firefox, it shouldn’t have been any different. Again, I checked the user agent and that was the same as running it under IE normally.

Double weird.

Anyway, after a reboot even IE Tab stopped working.

Googling the issue found that most people seemed to have Spyware or Virus’. In panic, I did a check but found nothing. However, I also came across a Microsoft blog on how to reset all of IE 7’s settings - I tried that and Microsoft Update is now working again.

Before, I talked about installing the beta of Internet Explorer 8 for website test purposes. Unfortunately, and I covered this also, it doesn’t sit with existing IE installations, unlike Firefox which you simply install into a seperate folder.

Now, and this comes from experience, all may not go well when two Firefox installations try to share a profile - particularly if one of those Firefox installations may break add-ons. So, having installed IE8 I thought it was only right to also try out the current beta of Firefox 3.

So, my workaround for this is to ensure you have seperate profiles and that each version of Firefox definitely uses the one it should do. Here’s what I did…

• Find your existing Firefox installation folder - usually C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox - and open up a command window
• Run firefox.exe -ProfileManager - the profile window will appear
• Ensure your current profile is named something appropriate. I changed it from default to David
• I then created a new profile named Test and closed the profile window down.
• Now change your current Firefox shortcut so that it specifically launches your original profile. In my case, this was "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -P "David"
• I now downloaded the Beta 4 of Firefox 3.
• Run the downloaded program and select Custom installation - ensure it installs into a different folder than your current Firefox application. In this case it defaulted to C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 4
• Once installed, de-select the option to launch the new Firefox installation.
• Find the new shortcut and change this to point to your newly created second profile. In my case this was, "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 4\firefox.exe" -P "Test"

And that’s it. Each version of Firefox will launch with it’s own profile and you can tinker about with your Beta installation all you like without affecting your normal browser profile.

The first Beta of IE8 has been released for developers. And, yes, I have a copy.

First impressions? Well, apart from the first run after the install hanging, and it prompting me during the install for how I’d like it set-up and then not doing what I asked, it’s gone relatively smoothly I’ve not had a chance to look at the new features yet, only to try out my sites. And they break. Not badly, but they break.

The most immediate solution to this is to add the following to your HEAD (which I found in a Whitepaper)…

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7">

This will force IE8 to display the page as it would in IE7. It’s not ideal but when IE8 is doing strange stuff with your web pages that no other browser is, it makes you wonder whether it’s worth changing your code (especially as this is a beta… some of those breakages may not be valid). I’m loath to change my sites based on a beta, but at the same time don’t want IE8 going live and my sites not being ready… the above META tag is the ideal solution.

Never-the-less I’ll keep IE8 installed on my home PC. I found a solution for running IE7 separately (I already do for 5.01, 5.5 and 6) so I can continue to test with that.

The default home page for IE8 has lots of useful links to resources. There are also release notes available, a “readiness toolkit” and lots more available at the IE Developer Center.

Right. It gets technical now.

It seems my problems at work where my laptop takes an age to sign-on is due to it making a copy of your profile onto our LAN. For “roaming” purposes. Therefore the more you have in your profile folder, the longer it takes.

So I set about reducing this down. And in the process, I came across a number of useful workarounds and general tips.

As part of this (because IE puts its temporary files in your profile folder) I’ve created a “Temporary Files” folder on C:\ (both at home and at work) where I’m trying to get as many apps as possible to put their cache, temporary folders and general bog.

So far I’ve found that I can move IE Temp Files, Firefox Cache, OpenOffice Temporary Files and Java Temporary files. All in a single neat folder, out of the way.

Oh, the reason I’m doing this at home as well, is because it reduces the amount I’m regularly backing up, if I can remove the bog to a single folder out of the way.

Anyway, here are a couple of workarounds to problems that I came across too…

Move Firefox Disk Cache

• Type about:config into Firefox’s Address Bar and press Enter.
• Right click on the resultant screen and select the option to create a new string value.
• Name this entry browser.cache.disk.parent_directory
• The content should be the location of where you wish the cache to be located

And that’s it done.

Move a Firefox Profile

• Shut down Firefox
• Move the profile folder to the desired location. For example, on Windows XP, move the profile from C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default to D:\Stuff\MyProfile
• Open up profiles.ini in a text editor. The file is located in the application data folder for Firefox on Windows Vista, XP, 2000: %AppData%\Mozilla\Firefox\
• In profiles.ini, locate the entry for the profile you’ve just moved. Change the Path= line to the new location. If you are using a non-relative pathname, the direction of the slashes may be relevant (this is true for Windows XP)
• Change IsRelative=1 to IsRelative=0
• Save profiles.ini and restart Firefox