Real World Computing

Note: This isn't my solution, all credit goes to "nickbeee" who posted a couple of lines on the firefox site. I've had to document this for our internal users and figured that other people may benefit from a more detailed explanation. Also: I'm a stickler for long explanations with pictures.... It seems that the new security features in Mozilla Firefox 4 prevent Lotus Notes/Domino Webmail from working. Here's how to get that functionality back. First: The problem that you see looks like this; It states on the webmail screen simply (and cryptically) A problem has occurred which may have caused the current operation to fail. The problem seems to be that firefox has security-blocked your webmail. In order to unblock it, you need the Remote XUL Manager extension. To get it, browse to: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/remote-xul-manager/ and click Add to Firefox. You'll be prompted to install the extension and then you'll be told to restart...

It's been noted all over the place that the browser wars are starting again (well, they've been going strong for the last few years). I've been a long-time Firefox user ever since I forced myself to live with the browser for a month just to try it out. I coudn't go back to IE. I've tried Safari, Opera and Chrome without feeling too tempted. I was impressed by the design of Chrome but the lack of familiar features (add-ons and scripting) failed to win me over. I'll admit though that I've found Opera to be the browser of choice on the Blackberry. Recently, I decided to give IE8 a go. Ok, so it was on the morning of the FIRST day of release but that doesn't mean I'll be lining up for any other MS products. I decided to see how well it worked doing the normal things I do every day. It almost made 45 minutes but then it crashed and I haven't used it much since then. I then switched my attention back to the Chrome 2.0 beta browser I had been testi...

Every vendor makes UI mistakes but usually the guys at Google are pretty spot on. Unfortunately their recent idea, to put tabs down the left hand side of the iGoogle interface backfired pretty badly and the forums at Google are still buzzing over the problem. Funnily enough, I asked nicely and after a little while (a couple of weeks), my iGoogle page reverted to normal. I thought that Google had stopped the "experiment" but apparently it's still continuing for some people. In fact, worse; there rumours that it's about to start up again. If you're one of the people affected, you might want to have a look at this; http://manfre.net/project/819/reverting-google-s-personalized-homepage Someone has gotten so frustrated with the whole thing that they've created a GreaseMonkey script to fix it. If anyone from Google is reading; The fact that people are starting to write their own scripts to fix a UI issue is as good an indication as any that the changes are unwan...

The Importance of Social Bookmarking It's taken me quite a while to get my head around how the whole Web 2.0 and Social Networking thing hangs together but I think I've got it now and at some point, I might even blog about it and try to explain it in lay-terms. Not this post though. What I will say though is that Social Bookmarking is one of the most important parts of the whole thing and that it's not enough to presume that every blog you read will have (hopefully) social bookmarking buttons below the post. Shareaholic You need to be able to social bookmark from anywhere on the web. That's where the Shareaholic Add-In for Firefox comes in. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5457 This add-in sits on your browser, near the stop, refresh and home buttons and instantly gives you the ability to post pages, links and reviews to a variety of sources including; digg, delicious, facebook, foxiewire, friendfeed, google bookmarks, google reader, healthranker, kaboodl...

Introduction Since the release of Google's new "web browser", Chrome yesterday the web has been buzzing with speculation about how Google will be hurting Mozilla. The funny thing is, that if you read the comic about Google chrome, you'll see that it is being positioned more as an operating system than as a browser. Cloud Computing The idea is that the Web browser will become the operating system of choice for cloud computing . The Google Chrome "browser" has certain advantages over the current generation of browsers, particularly in the area of robustness and multithreading. The browser changes are similar, in a way to the fundamental chanages from Windows 3.1 to Windows XP. Under Windows 3.1, all applications shared the same address space and one faulty application would result in the dreaded "General Protection Fault" message and would often pull the entire system down. I see that kind of behaviour all the time in Internet Explorer and slight...

Today I downloaded and installed Google Chrome Beta from; http://www.google.com/chrome Installation The download was fast (it's a fairly small file) and installation is simple... Too simple in fact. It doesn't give you much choice about where you put things. There's also not much available in the way of configuration at the moment. What was nice is that it correctly recognised Mozilla Firefox 3 as my main browser and imported my bookmarks etc. One thing that may annoy is that it modifies the registry to run Google Update on Startup. When it starts, it gives you an option immediately, to change your search engine - or keep google, that's a nice touch. Google is obviously trying to appear as if they're not a monopoly. Disclaimer It's important to remember that this is a beta product and in no way represents the final finished product. General Look and Feel At this point it's very rough around the edges, though I'll admit that the tabs are nice - even i...