I have recently had a client who complained to me that the site was broken in IE8 even though I had already checked it out. It turns out the issue was M$'s great "Compatibility Mode"

I know my way around CSS well enough but it felt wrong making any changes to keep this IE only mode happy when all other browsers were not complaining. Bing! I had an idea and went to Google and found this document on Defining Document Compatibility.

Turns out I can force the users browser to IE8 mode with the following

Hopefully this will help some other developer with their designing woes.

Chris Pederick, the guy behind Firefox's Web Developer Tool Bar has gone and done it again but now for Chrome. So far all looks good though I do prefer Firefox's setup with it as an actual toolbar but I am guessing this is a restriction of Chrome rather than a design choice.

Hat tip to @perezd for letting me know about this one

I was testing a custom 404 page this morning on Chrome when instead of seeing my page I got the following

You can turn it off on YOUR computer but the problem is that you can't do it for your users. This means that if you use your 404 pages to try and re-direct your users to the right link or even revenue via ads then you loose out! It would be nice if you can set a HTTP header or something along these lines to tell Google to not be clever but till now

To turn this off on the Mac go to Chrome > Preferences > Under the Hood and deselect "Show suggestions for navigation errors".

For other OS instructions check out http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=95671&hl=en

Google Chrome has quite quickly become my main browser for everyday use but when it comes to development I still have to slip back to Firefox.

This is starting to change a while back with Firebug releasing a "lite" version via bookmarklets (which is compaitble with IE6+, Opera, Safari and Chrome).
They have now gone a little bit further with this idea and created a Google Chrome Extention that you can now download and install. Its not all roses though as it still does have some missing features like: JavaScript debugger & Net Panel not being available. Hopefully though this is just the start of good things to come for the browser.

A bit more on Firebug Lite:

Firebug Lite is a pure Web based version of Firebug, built on a different code base than the Firefox version. In addition to Pedro's major improvements, he has also been evolving the code to bring it closer to the Firefox version. Eventually we hope to combine the Lite code with a new Firebug frontend for mobile and remote debugging based on a standard web debug protocol.

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/bmagokdooijbeehmkpknfglimnifench

There's quite a few methods out there for killing IE6, a Google search will prove this.

That said I have come across one of the better methods at http://ie6update.com/. This is a small chunk of Javascript which looks like IE’s Information Bar that you see when an ActiveX plugin it required. Instead it offers a browser update, really meaning it takes them to the Microsoft's IE8 site.

You can find a wordpress pluggin at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-ie6update/

Please update your bookmarks and feeds for my site.

I now have a Mango Blog at:

http://www.andyjarrett.com/blog

Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/andyjarrett

I always forget the Safari has a Debug mode for when you are developing web apps which allows the logging of JavaScript errors. To display the debug menu in Mac OS X, open the Terminal and type:

defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

To display the debug menu in Safari 3.0 for Windows, use a text editor to add the following to the Preferences.plist file located at C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Apple Computer\Safari\Preferences.plist :

view plain copy to clipboard print about

  ColdFISH is developed by Jason Delmore. Source code and license information available at coldfish.riaforge.org
<key>IncludeDebugMenu</key>
<true/> 1<key>IncludeDebugMenu</key>
2<true/>

As you probably know already Microsoft "heard you" and have released Internet Explorer 7 with such new and exciting features as tabbing, and RSS support. (Sorry MS bashing is too easy an opportunity to miss)

But for the skeptic out there you can get a standalone version.

The standalone version though is not an official MS release, its actually put out by Tredsoft. There are some limitation as you would expect but for the developer out there it runs fine. What gets me is that this can be done, why don't Microsoft offer some kind of standalone (even if some feature have to be crippled) for developers to test on?

[More]

Just been playing around with the RC2 of Firefox and gotta say its looking kinda nice. One thing I did find when downloading the browser is a complete list of releases from 0.8 right up to RC2 (as of today). Incase you ever need, or want to go back you can.

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/

Needless to say with a little ingenuity you can find that they have the same for their other projects like Thunderbird.

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/

Tredosoft have put together an version of IE 7 that installs in a standalone mode. This means that you can run it side-by-side with IE6 etc.

There is a small price to pay, not monetary though, some of the features just don't work like:

• Openning a new window and IE7's context menu.
• Bookmarks, RSS reader, and the search box. The search box works if you install IE7s using the installer. Alternatively, you can directly add search providers to the windows registry.
• Visiting pages that need HTTP authentication (username/password)

Check it out at http://tredosoft.com/IE7_standalone

[More]