After installing an app last weekend I've had Crawler.com hijack my browser to be my default search engine. I didn't tell Crawler.com to do that so I'm pretty pissed off with them and every attempt to uninstall the damned search engine has failed.

The hijack doesn't appear to have had a massive effect on boosting their brand awareness except, in my case, in a very negative way. I know Alexa isn't the perfect guage of site usage, but a quick squint at the traffic details for crawler.com shows that their rank and page views have increased but that their reach has gone down. It should all be going down for their cynical installation strategy.

So how do you remove Crawler.com from Firefox?

Well, after a quick search on the web, using Google.co.uk, I found that in Firefox you need to do the following:

In the address bar enter about:config

Look for the following entries as these were the ones that had been hijacked on my Firefox:

browser.search.defaultenginename
browser.search.order.1

My entries here were Crawler Search so I changed them to Google.co.uk

Bugger! That didn't work. What was I missing? I searched through the settings and figured that all the ones in BOLD were user defined, so I ran through just those one s and found:

keyword.URL

THIS was the last setting to still have Crawler in it, so I right-clicked the entry and selected the last option: RESET.

That cured my Crawler hijack problem. Good riddance.

Labels: browsers, firefox, search, tips

Rumour has it that Google's new open source browser, Chrome, is out today. Infact it's not just speculation, Google made an official announcement on their blog.

Google's Chrome browser is accompanied by a 32-page Scott McCloud comic book detailing Google's thoughts behind the release of the new browser which lands in a market dominated by Microsoft's Internet Explorer and constantly chased but never equalled (in terms of market share anyway) by Firefox, Opera, Safari, Flock and others.

The Google Chrome book is a neat & friendly way to introduce punters to the new browser, making a nice change from the usual stuffy instructions you might expect.

So let's see what happens later today when the Google Chrome beta is released...

Labels: browsers, google, open source

Firefox 3 Beta 5 is out and, although it's a nice bit of kit, I only really wanted to post about it because of the awesome piece of design on the FF3b5 welcome page.

The gorgeous picture accompanying the FF3b5 homepage is of a giant retro robot being built in a utopian setting - very much Sky Captain style but with more colour ;)

Labels: browsers, firefox

This isn't a design post, but more of a tip to stop you being driven insane whilst you have to use IE7.

Does anybody else find the sound that IE7 makes when it loads/reloads pages really annoying? It's that irritating "tick" sound when you open a new tab and load a page. Or when an application you're running in PHP reloads every 10 seconds and you get that constant "tick.......... tick.......... tick.........."

I was working from a Vista laptop this evening (I know, I was in a hurry to buy a cheap laptop for my SEO work and the only one that fitted the bill was a Vista machine *slap*) and the constant noise really got on my t*ts.

To fix it you need to go into CONTROL PANEL > SOUND > SOUNDS and scroll down the list of sounds until you reach WINDOWS EXPLORER. At the foot of this section is the START NAVIGATION.wav sound. Either a) completely kill the sound off by selecting (NONE) from the drop-down list or switch to another, less infuriating noise like WINDOWS BALLOON.wav (It'll sound like you're being scanned by radar but it's far less aggravating than the default irritation)

Et voila - no more annoying IE7 pageload sound.

Labels: browsers, rant, tips

Let's get testing shall we, and help iron out the bumps, even if it is via reporting issues!

:)

Firefox 3 Beta

Labels: browsers

I'm a big fan of Firefox and always have been. I was a big fan of Firebird before that too (remember that one, oldtimers?). IE6 has been the bane of my designers' life and IE7, although much of an improvement over Internet Excruciator 6, is still not as good as I'd expect from a team of talented programmers with a multi-billion dollar sugar daddy.

So why do I think Firefox is crap?

Well I don't, per se, I just feel that the last couple of releases have been pretty shoddy. Firefox has always been a bit of a resource hog, but I mainly put that down to my multi-tab habit, often having two or more Firefox browsers open with 20 tabs in each.

Firefox has just done it again - 2x browsers open, a total of 11x tabs and although only 130k of memory being used, it's sucking 98% CPU!

It's been the Firefox 2.0.0.8 and rapidly followed Firefox 2.0.0.9 releases that have me gnawing things on my desktop. I just checked my Task Manager for the FF and 19 tabs I'm runing and it was using 200,000k + of memory, and it pretty much locked up my machine. Granted, it's my trusty old HP Athlon 900Mhz with I can't remember how much ram, but the point is, memory usage wasn't this bad before.

Even my Dell 1.73Mhz laptop with 2Gb of ram and my Dell 2Ghz+ with 2Gb ram desktop are suffering too.

I googled for answers the other day and was tipped to diable any plugins. Well, they're ALL uninstalled and I'm STILL seeing Firefox slow as hell.

Anybody got any answers? Was there a "bugger up Firefox" fix by M$ in the last security update to Win XP or is this latest version of Firefox really just a pile of crap?

Labels: browsers, rant

Why does Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 have such a scrappy tab bar? On the PLUS side IE7's tab bar does use little screen real estate as they squeeze in a lot of buttons (including the Favourites, Quick Tabs, Home, Feeds, Print, Page and Tools buttons) but on the other hand I'm not happy that if a site has no favicon IE7 insists on displaying the IE7 icon.



Nice try, Microsoft, but increased exposure to the IE7 icon will not make me a more regular user of your browser (I'm only using IE7 as my backup pony whilst my trusty FireFox does some work via Privoxy)

Labels: browsers, rant

A developer friend put me on to the Firebug extension for Firefox a few months back and yesterday it proved invaluable in identifying some troublesome code on a live web page. I specifically used Firebug to track down which classes and IDs in a blogger page template were causing my layout problems and it worked an absolute treat.

Folks, if you haven't already plugged in the Firebug extension/add-on for your Firefox browser then I recommend you give it a go.

Labels: browsers, development, tools

Don't accuse me of jumping on the bandwagon - these are my own personal reasons for hating IE7...

1) The code view or Page > View Source: Why is it all in black text? I love Firefox's syntax colouring, you can't beat it for helping to debug/scan lines of code.

2) Why does my stylesheet work so perfectly with Firefox? I just write it as I would normally and it just works. In IE6 it quirks out and in IE7 it quirks out. I have to write a normal stylesheet and one for each of the dire IE6 and IE7 browsers! If Microsoft had just stuck to writing a browser that renders styles correctly there wouldn't be this waste of time hacking everything.

3) Anti-fishing. Great. Yes, there are people dumb enough to be suckered by phishing but when IE7 questions every single link and stops you going there it just becomes a right royal pain in the arse.

4) CTRL-F, Find on page... why does IE7 have a stupid floating box and not the slick, integrated search that FireFox has?

5) Downloads: No single download manager, just a load of scruffy individual boxes... 10 downloads? 10 windows to close.

Labels: browsers, tools

In the early days, back in '98, I found IE4 to be a better browser than NS Navigator. Personally I found the NSN buttons and tool bars to bloated and gimmicky and the cleaner lines of IE4 allowed just that little bit more screen to show.

But here, 9 years later, I have found that my browsing habits changed and they did so a few years ago. I tried Opera because it was new, it was different. I tried Firefox and fell in love with it. And I know that sometimes Firefox has memory leaks, I know it locks my system up occasionally, but that's because I can often run 20+ tabs at a time and regularly do that in two windows... a work window and a leisure window...

But I'd rather have that Fox logo on my shirt than just a plain old E.

I design clean code and I like my browser to respect that.

Labels: browsers, design, development

Mozilla have released an alpha version of Firefox 3 code-named 'Gran Paradiso'.

Download the 3.0a2pre aka 'Minefield' for the Mac, PC and Linux.

Labels: browsers, software, tools

Get the FireFox 2.0.0.1 update now :)

Labels: browsers, software, tools